For a long time, I’ve used bookstores as the new library.  They’re everywhere.  There’s all sorts of information available.  Instead of checking out books from our local library and then needing to return them, we got into the habit of just buying them instead.  After all, the bookstore had a better and more up to date selection than any library. The folks there were friendlier and much less proprietary over the books and magazines than the vague sense of  “don’t touch” you get at the library.   We could grab a cup of coffee there if we wanted to.

As a result, my house looks like a specialized version of the Library of Congress.  We have kid books drooling out of the bookshelves.  Even with the purging of books we don’t want to keep forever, and donating them to the local hospital, we still have more books than we can deal with.  My library of books on law, learning, developmental psychology, business, marketing and more could easily keep a graduate researcher busy and occupied.  The hard part is always figuring out what to do with old books and how to get them to someone who would appreciate them.  And there’s the storage issue as well, but I digress.

As a result of the overwhelming number of books in the house, I, too, have started to use bookstores more like libraries.  I browse more.  I figure out what new books are there, so I can buy many of them electronically, to ease the strain on my bookshelves.  I figure out which books I need in print for research purposes, the ones I’ll need to flag and highlight, where electronic versions don’t work nearly as well.

But if bookstores go, because brick & mortar and sales per square foot are important factors, I will lose everything I gain from browsing in the real world.  I will lose the serendipity from discovering something unexpected placed along side what I thought I wanted, but instead found something totally different much more interesting and engaging.  Google and Amazon are great for giving you what you want, but they are awful at helping you figure out what you might want, but would never know unless you had that “Eureka” moment that works so much better in the real world than online.  Bookstores have become the new libraries, but because they depend on sales and not public support, they may be in danger as things shift to a more digital realm.

The Big Idea

What we really need (listen up book industry and librarians everywhere…..) is a way to marry the book store and libraries together.

• Libraries lack the most up to date stuff- but could publishing companies give them books on a consignment basis?
• Could library/bookstores generate money and revenue from essentially affiliate marketing books from publishers?
• Could bookstores become more like showrooms for print books, with a wide variety but less overall numbers, allowing people to them buy the book either as print on demand or digitally on the spot?
• Could the bookstore/library have a permanent collection and a rotating stock of titles?
• Could there be a stand where we see the print copy of a book, but can buy the electronic copy right there as well, feeding the instant gratification need?
• Bookstores have a wide variety of locations, and opening up new libraries takes tons of money, just to buy a starting collection of books, not to speak of the new information technology and governmental jobs that need to be created and paid for before you can open the doors.  Can we somehow make libraries more common, by taking advantage of this marrying of consumer and knowledge culture?
• People need libraries and bookstores both as a place of peace and quiet, and as a way to start to parse all the information we get everyday and consolidate it into knowledge and useful constructs.  How else can we get this in daily life?

Bookstores and libraries are perhaps the most peaceful and quiet places we have in modern life (with the possible exception of museums and high end retailers that look like museums.)  There’s a quiet and reverence being the presence of these books we don’t get at the coffee shop or in the park.  Bookstores are our gathering place and public square, but using it as such isn’t helping the store’s bottom line.

Bookstores and libraries need to transform.  If they disappear, we will all be poorer for it.  But I bet if we can find a great way to combine the two, we’ll all be richer for the experience.

Why don’t more people use this fact in everything they do?  Why is this not the basis of every lecture, every classroom, and even every bar room story around?

Stories help us relate and personalize information.  They act as little packets of self-contained information.  Give someone a list of data, and give someone else the same information contained in a story or narrative, and ask them to read it and memorize it.   Guess which one is easier to remember?  The story connects the dots and both creates linkages between the data points as well as provides a context, making it much easier to store in our brains, where the list does none of this.  (This is why one of the more effective memory strategies is to take a list of , say, vocabulary words, and write a story containing them all-or take a list of objects, and imagine yourself placing them around a room- and you learn them faster and more accurately than you ever would off a regular list.)

Stories are more than entertainment, however.  There’s meaning, examples, and lessons to be learned from these stories as well.  Case studies in business and the Case method in law school all rely on being able to tell a story about what happened, and then look at what’s happened in other, similar cases, to make a decision about what should happen next in the case at hand.  This complicated, graduate school level coursework is, at its essence, sharing stories.  Of course, it also tells us the reasons why we have societal and business rules in place, and to help us make decisions about  the course of action you should take.  The “rules” we make up from the stories are there to help us avoid problems and mistakes others have made, so we can try to ensure success by trying some new way, rather than repeat past mistakes.

We love stories.  This is why Us, and People and the National Inquirer sell so many copies every month.  We want the next installment about the Kardashians or Paris Hilton or what LiLo has done now.  We want to see where their story is going.  What I think we fail to realize, and perhaps the stars fail to realize as well- is that they are in charge of their own personal story arc.  They can decide what happens next in their story- they don’t have to follow the story arc the media is creating for them.  Are they people or just characters in a never ending societal soap opera?

The magazines know that they have created and casted the over-arching drama and story for our entertainment- Jennifer Aniston get to be the girl next door we can’t wait to see settled down and happy.  LiLo gets to play the rebellious teen and young woman who can’t seem to get her life together.  Will Smith got to go from Playboy to grown up respected business man.  Glen Beck gets to play everybody’s slightly loony neighbor.  Pick out a character in the mainstream media world, and think of what you think you “know” about them, and you’ll see there’s a narrative and character role assigned to them by the media, who is happier to have a cast of characters to write about than to actually report facts, which are not nearly as interesting as the ongoing psychodrama.

Think about story arc as you think about your life.  What are you doing with your script?  How have you cast yourself?  Are you ready for a break out role?  Are you ready to re-write your story and become someone new?  Who would that new character be?  What do you have to do to start to think, act and look like that character?  Just like an actor prepares to “become” someone else and live bits of their lives on screen for our entertainment, you can decide who you want to play in your own life, and then do what you need to do to become the person you want to be.  You just have to be able to write the story, change the script and make it so.

Follow your own story arc.  Make it something exciting to watch.  Make your character something special.  And make your story one we’re all dying to tell each other for years to come.

The book and thinking about how children interact with technology got me to pick up Mindstorms by Seymour Papert again today.  It was originally published back in the 1980’s, but what it has to say about learning and the process of learning is priceless.

Part of the joy of the book is having heard great stories about Dr. Papert from the always fascinating Gary Stager at past Educon conferences.  Before even picking up the book, I knew fascinating facts about Dr. Papert, such as he studied under Piaget; he grew up in South Africa and was good friends with Nelson Mandela; he co-founded MIT’s Artificial Intelligence and Media labs.  He developed the Logo programming language which is behind Lego Mindstorms.  Dr. Papert has also worked with Nicholas Negraponte on the One Laptop per Child Project, making him a little bit like the most famous man in education who no one has really ever heard of.

The idea that struck me from reading through Mindstorms is that computers, as a learning tool, open up the most possibilities when we recognize them for what they are- new language systems.  We’re no longer limited to just human based languages and grammar, but there’s a whole new world kids can explore and control with computers.  Moreover, because of the way programming itself is structured, kids often need to learn how to “debug” programs.  Instead of just repeating the same actions over and over again, hoping for different results, “debugging” requires that we “chunk” a problem out into smaller parts (subroutines) in order to figure out where the larger problem lies, and in order to fix it.  Similarly, in real life, often we need to take the same analytical, step by step view of what’s not working when we mess up a recipe, or keep slicing the golf ball, or annoy our spouse, looking for the smaller part of the equation that leads to the bigger picture failure.  Being able to use all the information at our fingertips to solve problems big and small, and knowing where to start searching for the “bug” in the machine are crucial skills for every kid to have.  Sure, they may not need to program in Logo for the rest of their lives or careers, but they do need to learn the problem-solving framework they learn through getting legos or graphics on a screen to do exactly what they want them to do.

Creativity and Problem Solving is the key.

Here are some great videos that will help introduce you to the magic of Dr. Papert and the way education needs to evolve and change:

Papert talking about thinking, Piaget and more- How do we see ourselves in relation to the world?

A description of Papert’s life and constructivism:

The real issue with the yearly or lifetime business license requirements for those with virtual businesses is a legal one.  Traditionally, municipalities required businesses to have a license to do business within their borders because the individual businesses gained a benefit from doing business within the City- they had access to customers, parking, public transport- things you might not find if you had the same business way out in the rural areas around the City.  The City helped your business through police patrols, parking enforcement, and all sorts of ways, and besides a tax on sales or wage taxes, you helped pay for these services through your business license.  When you do business within an area, you also become subject to their laws and regulations, including those that protect you, and those requiring you to  collect and pay sales tax on sales.  There’s an impact of every business on the City, pro and con, and the Business License is part of that, at least traditionally.

Bloggers and other people who work primarily on the web may be different than traditional business people.  They can work as digital nomads, and don;t have any one particular workplace.   They can work at a coffee shop, in a co-working space, from their bedroom, from the library- it’s all academic to them.  Physical space is an afterthought after wifi, as are boundaries of municipalities and political districts.  This lack of physical home base makes it much more difficult to identify both what portion of a blogger’s work and income is attributable to any particular political entity, as well as what costs and benefits they confer to the local economy as well.  Certainly, telecommuters spend money at local shops and restaurants and help boost the local economy when they work all over the place, but what burden do they place on the local economy?  What benefit do they reap by being in Philly, say, versus the outlying suburbs, where the business license is not applicable?

From a legal perspective, much of the first year of Civil Procedure involves studying cases that involve the Choice of Law- with 50 states, if you don’t have a case that comes under the  Federal Court’s jurisdiction, which State’s law should govern a business transaction between residents of different States?  If you live in California and you’re doing business with someone in Maine and a deal goes south, should you have to litigate the matter in Maine, or in California?  There’s a whole line of cases people study that involves such chestnuts as “International Shoe v. Washington” and “Burger King v. Rudzewicz” and “Carnival Cruise v. Shute” that involve when it’s fair and when it’s not to be held to the law of another State, and whether your actions allow you to have “sufficient contacts” there, making it fair game to be sued in that State.  (This is why you will often see Forum Selection clauses in contracts.)

Courts, so far, have held that forum selection clauses are enough to confer jurisdiction (CoStar Realty v. Field), but unlike terms of service agreements, or even Ebay Auctions, does a blogger, who writes and posts to a blog from within a City, from outside the City, in multiple States and locales- when does the level of activity become “enough” to require a business license?  Is it a question of income?  Is it a question or apportionment?  Could bloggers that live within a City avoid having to pay for a business license if they submit posts from outside the City limits?  Why should people surfing through coffee shops and wifi hot spots have different licensing requirements than people who take up an office share with other digital nomads in a coworking space within a municipality?  Should the coworking space need a license and all participants are more like gym members rather than business owners renting a stall at a flea market?

The internet poses new challenges to municipalities who need to collect revenue.  Bloggers don’t always see how the business license benefits them, since their work  is often low impact and location is not crucial or even relevant in their work.  The bottom line is it’s going to take some time to sort out these matters, and it’s going to take people willing to litigate these matters.  This in and of itself will be challenging, since most Bloggers are in the  beer money income bracket, and don’t have the time, money or patience to pursue this matter far enough to get a meaningful ruling.  It’s easier to shut a blog than litigate whether a $300 license fee is fair and equitable.

I can’t say that any answer is likely soon.

I’ve been through this myself as well.  I started working in a coworking space in Wilmington, DE, but compliance with City business licenses, let alone determining which license would apply to my work, is onerous.  No one in City Government seems prepared to tell me exactly what I’m supposed to do, and all will readily admit the difference between my working within City Limits and working in a coffee shop outside of City Limits is largely geographic only, and that it’s clearly cheaper for me to stay out of the City.

While it seems to me that everyone loses in this scenario, including the parking fees  the City might collect otherwise, or the businesses I would frequent if I were downtown, it’s immediately clear it’s just easier if I write from the comfort of my own home or local coffee shops that are no where near the City limits.  Besides this, it’s not always clear to the digital nomad when they have entered the “taxation/license zone” and when they are outside the long reach of the law.  This makes the business license requirement for municipalities seem arbitrary and capricious to those bloggers and telecommuters being asked to pay, because what’s inside and outside the zone is not clear.  And let’s face it- no one likes taxes and license fees, but we’ll generally comply when it seems fair, and we generally balk when it seems silly or administrative or simply onerous and unfair.

This means all Cities and municipalities are going to have to start to consider the underlying reason and purpose of the business license or tax is, and how it should apply to digital nomads.  When is this fair?  What can you do to make it easy to comply?  Do we need “wifi” meters like we have parking meters, and Cities can collect fees based on data transfer instead?

There’s no easy answer for any of this, but at least I hope this helps explain why the issue at hand is thorny both for the bloggers and the Cities.  Hopefully this will not lead to mid-day raids of local Starbucks looking for telecommuters just trying to get out of the house for a bit, searching for business licenses and unpaid taxes, but in an era of budget deficits, I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes to that.

I’m curious to how this trend will shake out in the publishing industry. Fast Company reported that  Barnes and Nobel’s new iphone and ipad apps are a further play to make electronic books device-agnostic.  It won’t matter what device you own, you’ll still be able to buy and read content on whatever you have.  Another bookstore in Canada is experimenting in being able to buy books by the chapter rather than having to buy the whole thing, which would be a boon to college students and knowledge junkies everywhere, but perhaps not so great for novelists, who may find that people really only do read the first four chapters of the book and never finish.

Recently, I was in a bookstore while on vacation, looking at the content and trying to decide whether or not to buy a couple books.   I was concerned about buying too many books, since the weight can be a burden with baggage weight restrictions on planes these days.  So I used my iPhone to take pictures of covers of books I was interested in, and looked at whether or not several of the titles were available on iBooks or Amazon Kindle.  A few were, so instead of buying the hardcover, I opted for the digital book instead.  I simply downloaded them on my iPad  and I was ready to go.

While this works well for novels, I still prefer hardcovers for books I use for business or reference. This just tends to be a better tool to pull off the shelf to refresh my knowledge from time to time, but not every reference book is created equally, either.

There are plenty of things I would like to learn more about, and would be happy to buy chapters of texts on esoteric subjects, if I could just get my hands on them without having to buy a $300 textbook.  For example, I have kids with ADHD, and buying chapters out of text books that my doctors might read would be fantastic, since there may only be three or four chapters in a  book that are of importance to me, and this information may not be readily available through any other source.  I’d love to learn more about coding, about working memory, and all sorts of other topics, filling in the blanks in my own knowledge base, but reluctant to commit the finances to buy full textbooks on a whim.

As text books and other published content becomes available digitally, I wonder when the process will allow disaggregation in the same way iTunes did.  And I wonder if that will lead to people publishing shorter works as a result.  Or, will it push all novelists to construct stories that pull in readers and keep their appetites wedded all the way to the end of the story, in order to get people to buy each chapter?  (Mystery novelists will clearly have to charge double for the last few chapters that reveal all the secrets and clues to the impatient).  And I worry what this will do to our patience and attention span, if all of life continues to become about instant and easy gratification but nothing will make us work very hard or stick to something difficult for very long.

I’m ambivalent about the benefits and burdens of disaggregation of written content- what do you think?  Clearly publishers are becoming all about providing information and content, and are looking past their own devices in favor of delivering content on demand to any device you have.  But does that mean disaggregation of written content is just one step behind?

Vermont is one of the most beautiful places I’ve been.  It’s gorgeous- mountains and skies that are simply breathtaking. Cities, towns and villages are far away from each other, and the population of the whole state- 679,000, is less than that of Delaware, yet its landmass is much larger by far.  There’s not a lot of cell signal in many places, and the roadside rest stops actually provide free wifi to travelers.

While in Vermont,  I spent time trying to geolocate businesses on Foursquare and Gowalla, in part so I remembered them as well as had the ability to share them with other friends.  Some places, like Weston VT, home of the quirky and fun Vermont Country Store, have no signal whatsoever for AT&T down in this valley between mountains.  As far as cool geolocation tools like foursquare are concerned, places like the Vermont Country Store becomes “unplottable”- sort of like Hogwarts… Yet other places, like the Ben & Jerry’s factory, actually have deals available on Foursquare if you check in there.

Small and unique places like those in small town Vermont depend on tourism mixed with locals.  They have to have a locally viable business, because Vermont has a good case of “you can’t get there from here”, meaning it’s a bit of a drive and a haul to get from one town to another, and if you’re off the beaten path, you have to really work to get people to come to your establishment.  We accidentally happened upon the Brandon Inn, a turn of the century Inn/Bed & Breakfast, featuring the oldest elevator in the State of Vermont (No Joking), mostly because the more natural places to choose to stay, such as a chain hotel, were booked for the evening.  We had an awesome time at the Brandon Inn, but I never would have chosen that naturally, just being on the road and looking for accommodations for the night.  And I would have missed out on a great experience as a result.

Part of the charm of places like the Adirondacks, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and other places is the remoteness itself.  While there’s probably money to be made by encouraging tourists to come, there’s many more logistical hoops to go through to get to places like Stowe, VT than there are getting to Boston or even Cape Cod.  People are lazy and like convenience and instant gratification.  We like predictable and comfortable.  But we’re missing out on some really amazing experiences by not hopping in the car and exploring places that aren’t easy to get to and convenient.

As I think about how connected we all are on the ‘net, it’s a wonderful thing.  It’s even better when we can meet up with folks who we’ve met on line, and really get to know them as friends.  This becomes more challenging as people live in more rural and isolated communities, and finding out where the online and offline can merge takes greater dedication and effort than around here, where our biggest challenge to holding a tweetup is to find an establishment willing to have 150 people come in for a night.

I think it means more to people who don’t have the same ease and geographic closeness when they do get together.  I think there’s a greater appreciation for the meeting, and that everyone is there by intention and not by default.  I’m just hoping I can figure out how to bring this intentionality to “regular” events without requiring people to do advanced gymnastics to get there, so that they appreciate the experience more.

The more effort you have to expend- whether its time, money or convenience- to do something or go somewhere, the more you heighten the experience, both good and bad.  If it’s awful, it will become magnified as the worst experience ever, but if things are good, the effort will enhance  your perception and you will remember the whole experience more fondly than you would have otherwise.  We appreciate things more when we have to work for them, and I’m not sure that’s ever going to change.

So for me, despite the time, the long drive and the inconvenience, I’ll continue to make these efforts, because in the end, the heightened sense of value on the end experience is almost always worth while.

Google Adwords often work on a quantity based approach.  Google will serve up your ad in a slightly targeted way, but the return on serve v. actual click through or conversion is incredibly small in the vast majority of cases.  It is a great way to generate traffic for special events, promotions and the like, but very few of those folks seem to stick around long term as clients or audience.

A quality approach requires more effort.  It means talking when you have something to say.  It means thinking of when and where you place messages, and who you are trying to reach.  It means narrowing the scope of your messages and audience.  It requires more time and thought, but the quality of your interactions, conversations and conversions will likely improve.

While quantity gives you an initial buzz and a feeling you are doing “something”, the quality and staying power is smaller than the more thoughtful, quality approach.  Online, we’re deluged with information, but it’s much more difficult to get knowledge.  Information needs to be processed and needs to be relevant to the audience to make an impact, which is the whole reason anyone picks up a book or newspaper- we don’t need more unprocessed information- we need knowledge, and hopefully, wisdom.

You’re always going to get much farther with any message you want other people to receive- a marketing message, teaching a child to tie their shoes or motivate them to clean their room, learn about american history, convince someone to do business with you, talking to your spouse, tweeting or putting an update on facebook- it doesn’t matter where, what or when- if you keep your audience in mind and focus on quality over quantity.

That’s the way to build relationships and a receptive audience for the long term- give people what they want, when they want it.  You’re not always going to hit it perfectly, but if you focus on quality over quantity, the return in the end will be higher.  I promise.

You can read the part of my original post , where I just couldn’t recommend the Microcell because of the headaches I was experiencing getting the thing set up.  The root of the problem(s) I experienced turned out to be largely a web activation problem.(!)

After hours of unsuccessful phone based customer service, I started to whine on Twitter and got a rep to respond there.  (Yet another Twitter is my Hero story coming, I’m afraid!)  I got a hold of an AT& T customer service rep. (@ATT Chris) and he put me directly in touch with the Microcell service team. (Why the phone staff couldn’t do this, I have no idea.)

A wonderful guy, Gerard Morales (hope I spelled that correctly), walked me through the process.  The documentation for setting up the Microcell has two options, one that uses a wifi router and one that uses the direct modem that connects to your ISP.

Basically, Microcell needs to be working in parallel, not serial, with your ISP connection.  When it was set up in serial, it was hogging bandwidth from the modem directly, and blocking our internet connection altogether.  Once we had the Microcell instead plugged into the wifi router (Apple Time Capsule), and did a deactivation and reactivation on the AT&T website, we were up and going in minutes.

In essence, all the time I spent on the phone with customer service was based on a bit of a red herring- a backend, server side activation issue.  It caused people to assume it was an “idiot customer failed to plug stuff in right” problem, not that the website activation portion could possibly be at fault.

The rejiggering the cables, plugs, connections and everything else on my end (per instructions from phone-based customer service) was not the problem at all.   Once we handled an activation/deactivation sequence and reconnected everything correctly, we were fine.

So for anyone else wasting a weekend day with microcell activation issues, here are the steps.

1. If you are having activation problems, go to the AT&T website and sign into your account.

2. Go to Manage AT&T 3G Microcell settings on the left hand side of the screen.

3.  Deactivate the Microcell.  (The website will walk you through this.)

Now, the hardware.

4. Use the yellow ethernet cable and plug it into the Microcell, and then plug the other end of the cable into an open port on your wifi router.

5. Connect the power cord to the Microcell.

6. See what happens.  In a short period of time, the microcell got up and functioning, and we were in business.  I didn’t even have to go and “reactivate” the account on the AT&T website.

I have to say, all the customer service people were fantastic, but most of the front line reps just don’t understand the Microcell setup.  Before you know it, people are worried about router port settings and you are off to making a simple problem really complicated, when it can be as simple as a website activation problem.

Let’s here it for people making a simple problem more complicated than it needs to be, and assuming that the software is infallible.  Guess what?  It’s not always the customer’s problem, folks.  It surely can be, but not always.  And Occam’s Razor of “try the simple stuff first” ended up being the answer.

And I swear, if I ever am in Seattle, I will buy your awesome customer service rep, Theresa, a coffee.  She was great.  ATT Chris and Gerard Morales, you are on my Christmas card list, for sure.

Thanks again for solving the problem and I am sure I will love the Microcell once the emotional scars scab over.

Initial Post and Complaint:

I am a geek.  I am tech savvy.  I can set up wireless networks in the house, I can set up all sorts of gear- so plugging stuff in in series and getting it up and going isn’t a big problem for me.

We also are iPhone addicts, but we live in an area where the cell reception is erratic at best.  So when AT&T announced its Microcell to improve connectivity, I was psyched and called right away to get on the wait list for it.  In this area, we even have problems getting consistent 3G coverage- often it keeps dropping down to Edge, so the microcell, even at a cost, was a welcomed piece of news.   While I understand folks who complain about AT & T’s poor coverage, I also know I live in a semi-suburban area outside Wilmington DE, and all carriers have dodge-y connections here.  I also understand that the iPhone and iPads have turned normal cell phone users into data hogs, and the influx of folks now using mobile data at a drop of a hat would overwhelm any company’s network.  I’ve tried to be patient and understanding, knowing that putting up cell towers is not instantaneous.  It’s a time-intensive process, even after all the legal hassles and property rights have been resolved.  So they have all my deepest sympathies going into this.

I got even more excited when we received a coupon that let us go pick up a microcell for free at a local AT&T store.   It made me feel less whiny for all the times I logged on to my “service problems” app and repeatedly complained about our poor reception at home.  AT &T was going to fix it for us, and I was thrilled.

My husband picked up the unit and tried setting it up, but he’s rather impatient.  So when I got home from our recent trip, I sat down to give activation a try.

The first hurdle is that after you try to activate the microcell online, you have to wait 90 minutes to see whether or not the activation worked.  After an hour and a half, I am naturally off doing other things, so I tried to get it set up one afternoon, and waited until the next morning to check- but the activation had a problem.  I went through all the troubleshooting steps, set and rest everything, and still- activation problem.

When I called customer service, they informed me it was a server side error on their part.  So they allegedly fixed that and we tried again.  Nope- now they claimed it was a cable problem, so we got the router out of the way, and did everything directly through our cable modem to the microcell.  We know the cable modem and router work fine, but the microcell won’t “talk” to my computer and prevents any signal from the cable modem from reaching my computer once it’s inserted into the circuit.

Several more phone calls, waiting periods, guesses and the like later, and I have spent close to ten hours on this set up, much of it on the phone with AT&T representatives, only one of which hung up on me.  Theresa was particularly lovely and helpful, but we still are at an impasse and the thing is still not working properly.

Part of me is incredibly stubborn, and just wants to get the thing working, because I assume that once it is up, I will be so much happier with my service.  (Because our home 3G service is so poor, I opted against a 3G ipad and went for wifi only-for this reason alone).  The microcell possibility even had me second guessing that decision.

Yet, as of this writing, the Microcell is stubbornly resistant to any intervention tried by me or the AT&T customer service folks.

While I wait to get the situation resolved, I have to say I am not sure the Microcell, a brilliant solution to connectivity issues using broadband service most customers already have in their home, is ready for prime time.  Maybe a slower roll out would have helped.  But maybe you don’t know what’s going to happen until you start rolling the gear out to customers and field test it, for good or for ill.

I’m trying to find the silver lining here and find a way to understand why this process is so difficult and burdensome.  But I am at a loss.  And I would love it if we could just finally get this problem resolved, without spending another day arguing with this thing.  I am frustrated and the ever changing story about cables vs. Server side vs. modem settings debate is getting silly.

Please see next post for Updates and Solutions if you are having problems.

In the medical profession, folks graduate from medical school, but they are not yet ready to go out and practice medicine- they need to do some more formal training- a residency- usually in some sort of specialty.  (Even family practice is a specialty.)  Yet in residency, the training and additional education young doctors need before they can practice on their own comes in two forms.  One is specialized reading- sometimes the reading is assigned, but most of the time, it is assumed you will use your “educational money” and buy the specialty text books you’ll need, not only as a resident but in practice, when you come up against something you might not have seen before.  The second is on the job practice, where you see patients but are supervised by another “attending” physician, who is supposed to help you learn and guide you, like a mentor.  Not all doctors teaching residents are good at imparting the art of their practice to others, as well as the base knowledge required to do the job.  Practicing medicine and teaching it are two different things, and not everyone is good at both.

Similarly, many teachers went into teaching because they love learning.  They loved being in school themselves.  They loved having a guiding path through all the cool stuff there is to know, and somewhere along the way, decided they wanted to do this themselves.  They mastered the whole school process, start to finish. They almost have a nostalgia for school- it is a precious place to them.   But the problem is often that the best students don’t always make the best teachers.

Teaching is a different skill set from learning.  While teaching and learning are clearly complimentary, they are not the same thing.  My dad, for example, was a brilliant engineer, and fantastic at math.  Yet when he tried to help me with calculus homework, I often ended up frustrated and in tears.  For me, the conflict arose because he largely couldn’t remember what it was like not to know all this math, and couldn’t explain it in a way a neophyte would understand- what the Heath Brothers call “The Curse of Knowledge” in their great book, Made to Stick. I think many teachers suffer from this problem as well-they love their subject matter and understand it so well that they have a hard time remembering what it was like not to know.

The skill of being able to be a guide through complicated material, all while making it an exciting and engaging process is a rare skill.  While I think there are methods and checklists and other tools people can use to help make what they know accessible to others, great teaching is an art form.  It requires not only understanding the subject area, but understanding it well enough and liking it enough that you can make it exciting for almost anyone.  It requires a bit of stage presence, improv skills, and being able to communicate with the students so you know what they understand and what they don’t.  Teaching at its best, is an interactive experience between teacher and student. (This is also why going to high school or college just by watching a bunch of DVD’s is not equivalent to being enrolled in a real school with real classrooms, but I digress.)

Sometimes the best teachers are people who are less interested in the one true path, but recognize there are many individual ways to get to the same goal.  They are good mentors, guides and parents.  They are interested in someone else’s success, and they get joy in seeing others succeed, and don’t worry that someone else may be smarter than they are- in fact, the best teachers are often looking for those smarter than themselves, so they can continue learning and growing themselves.

The essence of a great teacher involves being passionate about your subject area, and being a fantastic communicator, who can turn that love of knowledge into a spark of inspiration and curiosity in others.  It’s the reason why I think all teachers should learn a bit about marketing and the way people turn commercial ideas into what Seth Godin would call “an idea virus” that spreads on its own.  Using the tools the Heath Brothers talk about in Made to Stick, for example, can help anybody make their ideas and communications more effective and more memorable, by essentially hacking what our brain natively finds most interesting.  This can help business people end “death by powerpoint” presentations, but it can just as easily make you a better writer, a better teacher, and a better communicator across the board.

In the end, good teaching requires that people are personally invested in the process and look on it as mentoring as well as a delivery of knowledge vehicle.  The teacher might be driving the bus, but the bus can be an old school bus, a greyhound, a tricked out  tour bus, a local or express.  The bus comes in many sizes, varieties and with different amenities.  But unless the bus is responsive to the needs of the passengers, and can get them to where they need to be, it’s not very useful.  The driver, like a good teacher, needs to be aware of the road, the path, and the needs of the passengers in order to do the best job possible.

We need to make sure all of our teachers- at every level, from elementary through graduate school, training and beyond- understand not only how to make lesson plans, but how to meet the needs of kids in their classrooms.  And sometimes, it’s going to require “marketing” that science lesson, history or math to a group of reluctant learners, to get them on the right road in the long run.

Are you a good teacher?  What makes a good teacher to you?  Is it a skill or an art or a mixture of both?