I always try to take notes as I read through a book that might have some implications for my daily work and thinking. Sometimes, however, my best intentions fall short so I thought this time around I’d post some notes and reflections online chapter by chapter. If you’d like to join me in reading this book, go ahead a order a copy. It will take me a while to work my way through it. You’ve got plenty of time.

Christensen begins the book with a rather detailed description of innovation and failure in the disk drive industry. For the same reason geneticists study fruit flies, Christensen explains that the rapid pace of change in the disk drive industry makes it an ideal test bed for studying how successful organizations can fail in the face of disruptive change. I won’t go into the details of the drive technology or the specific changes that shaped the industry over the last 30 years or so.

There are two types of technological change that matter. Christensen calls them sustaining and disrupting changes.

This study of technological change over the history of the disk drive industry revealed two types of technology change, each with very different effects on the industry’s leaders. Technologies of the first sort sustained the industry’s rate of improvements in the product performance (total capacity and recording density were the two most common measures) and ranged in difficulty from incremental to radical. The industry’s dominant firms always led in developing and adopting these technologies. By contrast, innovations of the second sort disrupted or redefined performance trajectories—and consistently resulted in the failure of the industry’s leading firms.

My first thought is that our current system of K–12 education is clearly engaged in sustaining innovation. Document cameras and PowerPoint instead of overhead projectors, for example, are basically more of the same—better performance and incremental feature enhancements—rather than truly disruptive innovation.

It turns out the disruptive innovations weren’t at all obvious if companies were concerned about what their customers wanted. In fact, the really disruptive stuff usually represents a downgrade for existing customers of the dominant firms.

Generally disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.

So the dominant firms failed not because of inferior technology; they were almost always well-managed, visionary organizations. Their problem was that one of their competitors took a new, nearly always inferior, technology and created a new market.

Rather, the 5.25-inch drive manufacturers seem to have been misled by their customers, notably IBM and its direct competitors and resellers, who themselves seemed as oblivious as Seagate to the potential benefits and possibilities of portable computing and the new disk drive architecture that might facilitate it.

It was obvious to IBM, Seagate, and their desktop computer customers that the 3.5-inch hard drives were inferior in speed, capacity, and cost. What they failed to appreciate was that customers of the emerging portable computer market were willing to sacrifice some performance for the smaller size and increased ruggedness of the new 3.5-inch drives. The disruptive innovations don’t tend to show themselves in existing markets. They enable new products and markets that the dominant firms and their customers can’t see.

But the problem established firms seem unable to confront successfully is that of downward vision and mobility, in terms of the trajectory map.

If we can draw any parallels between the hard disk industry and K–12 education—and that’s a big if—we have to ask whether there are any emerging markets that the dominant firms (our regular school districts) and their customers (students, parents, and communities) are currently undervaluing? Could it be online learning? Most school people I know consider online learning vastly inferior to traditional face-to-face learning. Perhaps the online technologies that are flourishing now and finding little traction in traditional educational institutions will eventually turn out to be the disruptive force that gives traditional schooling a run for its money (literally).

I have a few hundred CDs at home, and I wanted to to make sure I had them available on my home network. Rather than encode them in a lossy format like MP3 or AAC, I decided to use Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) format. Using Apple Lossless produces only modest compression of about 50%, but it retains full audio fidelity. I only have a couple dozen DVDs, but thanks to Handbrake I can make digital copies of those too, and each weighs in at about 1.5 GB. In an era of cheap disk storage it seems like a good compromise.

The iMac disk eventually got full enough that I couldn’t back it up to my 500-GB external drive anymore. After keeping my eye on them for over a year, I decided to upgrade to a Drobo and loaded it up with three 1-TB hard drives. The result is a cool 1.8-TB of redundant storage.

The most attractive aspect of the Drobo is that it’s practically infinitely expandable. As larger drives become available you simply pop out one of your existing drives and replace it with a larger one. The Drobo automatically arranges all of the data and spans to the new drive to maintain the redundancy. I didn’t need all four drives to get started, so I just put the 1-TB drives in three of the bays.

I plugged the Drobo into the iMac using the Firewire 800 port for maximum copy speed. Even with the fast interface it took several hours to move a few hundred gigs of data to the Drobo.

The final step was moving the Drobo to my hall closet and plugging it in to the USB port on my Airport Extreme Basestation. This makes the Drobo available on my network so that any machine in the house can access the media or backup files to it. So far so good, but I have to admit that that the backup speed is only mediocre even over a Gig ethernet wired network. I suspect the so-so performance has a lot to do with the relatively slow USB 2.0 interface. It’s plenty fast to stream media for Boxee on the iMac though, and since I run the backups over night, the speed doesn’t really matter.

Stay tuned for a description of how I’m using my old MyBook external drive to store encrypted data off-site.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

The NASA of today is probably at least 100× larger than the agile agency that launched those Apollo missions back in the 60’s, and, according to an article published by NPR, their bureaucracy is employing a lot of “innovation-blocking behaviors.” Not satisfied with the status quo, a veteran astronaut created a satirical video intended to call out the problems he’d been seeing at the agency. Watch this video and see if any of it rings true for you.

OK, so no one’s going to win an Oscar for their performance in this video. Here are the innovation-blocking behaviors I noted while watching the video:

• Blind adherence to existing procedures or specifications
• Compartmentalization
• Emphasis on employee roles in the organization rather than the quality of their ideas
• Fear of challenging the status quo (and those who maintain it)
• Too much reliance on the chain of command
• Tendency to “shoot the messenger”
• Premature acceptance of resource constraints
• Overly complex processes
• Too comfortable in “the comfort zone”
• Valuing process over results
• Too much emphasis on past experience

It’s easy to criticize without suggesting solutions, so I was impressed to see Part II posted 10 days ago.

I think you can summarize Part II pretty easily. Build innovation into your organization’s processes intentionally. When the innovation is “baked in” to the structure of an organization it sends a message to all employees that the organization is keenly interesting in what they have to say. And that is an crucial step in building an innovative culture.

• Always be bad at something that you are passionate about.
• You can be everything in your life—just not all at once.
• When you get good at one skill, drop another in which you have achieved competence in order to make room for a new passion at which you are—yet again—bad.
• Life is too short to waste on bad teachers and inefficient learning.
• Remember: You can learn from anyone.

I may be a mild-mannered technologist by day and, unfortunately for my family, many nights too, but an artist lurks beneath my geeky exterior. I own a few art pieces, and I’d love to have more. But what I’d really like to do is take a welding class and do some sculpture of my own. I have some pictures in my head, but I don’t have the skills to put them into physical form.

It’s a lot more comfortable to stick with what you know. Are we encouraging students to take academic risks, or has GPA pressure squeezed out some of their passion? How about teachers? Have we designed our appraisal systems to encourage teachers to try new techniques or learn new skills?

For all of the irrational exuberance that has come out of Silicon Valley over the years, I’ve always admired the way that the entrepreneurs there overcame the stigma of failure. I think that’s a big reason that the U.S. tech industry is so innovative. Of course, none of those entrepreneurs are accountable to local tax payers either. Finding a way to take the risks necessary to really innovate in the context of a public school system seems like a big challenge to me.

My first blog post was on September 4th, 2003, which simply blows my mind. At that time I was fresh out of the classroom and only weeks into a new job in a new school district. My blog was originally conceived as a place to post tech integration ideas for the teachers in my new school district. The very next day I had a comment from someone I’d never met, and I was hooked. Like everyone else I went through periods of frequent postings and relative droughts, but the next three years were definitely my most productive as a blog author.

As my career has transitioned to a couple different administrative roles, my blogging has slowed to a trickle. I realize now that my blog never changed with me. I’ve been trying to write the same stuff as I did when I was coaching teachers to integrate technology, and it’s just not working. Time to reboot.

I’ve been thinking a lot about innovation and creativity lately, and I feel like blogging about that for a while. Maybe someone else will find it interesting too. I’ll probably mix in some personal technology stuff too. Stay tuned.

There are a couple others that I’ve used at various times. The first is a sort of attribution theory I read about some time ago whose reference I’ve misplaced. The basic message was that when adult learners encounter a technological obstacle such as a button that doesn’t do what they expected it would, they often respond by attributing their failure to their own lack of technology savvy. Kids, on the other hand, usually assume that the technology is poorly designed and try to identify a workaround. Ewan hinted at this when he talked about how kids will just press buttons to see what happens. I don’t see adults do that very often.

The other comparison I like is one that became clear to me when I was in the classroom teaching physics. We were talking about Newtonian mechanics, and the story of Isaac Newton and the falling apple came up in our class discussion. The classic story of the apple falling on Newton’s head is a myth; the actual story involved Newton observing the moon rise in the distance as an apple fell from a tree across the yard. When Newton witnessed those events he realized that the same force that caused the apple to fall must also be affecting the moon. He surmised that the moon is actually falling just like the apple. Of all the people who had ever witnessed a similar scene, what was different about Newton? Oh, I don’t know… how ’bout genius?

Geniuses see connections that regular people miss entirely. I think the same difference applies to experts and novices. How long does it take you to learn a new word processor? Not very long I’d guess because you’ve probably used a bunch of different word processors in the past, and you realize that all word processors work pretty much the same. Technology novices tend to get hung up on the small differences.

I don’t know if either of those are as immediately useful as the immigrant/native comparison. I’d sure like to know if anyone has any proven techniques to accelerate the move along the novice-expert continuum.

The 23 Things… program is a largely self-paced set of tutorials intended for teachers and library folks in Minnesota who want to learn more about Web 2.0 tools. The “Things” include RSS, photosharing, collaboration, social media, online productivity, online gaming, podcasts, video, and social networking. Each participant is required to maintain a blog for the duration of the project to foster reflection and interaction with other participants.

I’d like to see someone turn the 23 Things program into a Moodle course that can be distributed to any school that is using Moodle for professional development. (”23 Things On a Stick” is made available under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons license.) Any takers?

http://twitterator.org/?url=http://mytwitternames.com/lsdf28sdf

will take you to Twitterator and pre-populate the URL field. This should make it even easier to help a group of people get subscribed to a bunch of other Twitterers. Have fun with it.

Conditions were perfect today. It was just under 50°F at the start and almost 60°F by the end. It was just cold enough at the start that everyone kept their outer layers on until the last minute. Since the race goes point-to-point, I appreciated the fact that they transported our warmups to the finish for us. The course ran along Lake Minnetonka (go figure from the name of the race) and was hillier than I’d expected. Nothing too steep or long, but lots of them.

My plan was to do the first couple miles at 9:00 pace, 8:45 pace until 10k, 8:30 pace until 10 miles, and then empty the tank in the final 5k.

From the looks of the graph, I’d say my game plan went quite well. The two slower miles at 6 and 11 were due to a combination of slowing for water stops and some hills. I’m definitely happy with the trend line. I’ve never been able to do negative splits before.

The official results haven’t been posted yet, but the time on my watch was 1:53:40. I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t broken two hours, and I was hoping to go under 1:55. According to the Running Times Race Time Equivalent calculator, that puts my projected marathon time at 4:01:34. I’d really like to break four hours at Grandma’s Marathon on June 21, so I guess I’m going to need to get my lazy butt out of bed a little earlier and log some more miles.

Update: The results are in. I finished officially in 1:53:42 placing 472 out of 1449 overall and 103/192 in my age group. (One nice thing about turning 40 later this year is that I get to start competing against guys who are older than I am.) My knees are a bit sore tonight, but it’s a good kind of sore.

One of my first tasks will be merging the existing Technology Management and Instructional Media & Technology departments into a new Technology Division. It’s going to be a wild ride!