Word.

You need to read this article by Woz.

I instantly realized that you couldn’t do something nice in your garage as a normal person and I gave up the idea.

Source: Steve Wozniak to the FCC: Keep the Internet Free – Steve Wozniak – Technology – The Atlantic



According to Wikipedia, the story of Clarus is much more interesting than even I could have imagined.

Excerpts from Technote 31

Apple Technote 31 includes a description of the dogcow.[2]
There is a life-size picture of a dogcow conveniently located in the Finder. Look under “Page Setup…” Now look under “Options.” Voila, there is the dogcow in all its raging glory. Like any talented dog, it can do flips. Like any talented cow, it can do precision bitmap alignment.
Somewhere along the line I baptized the dogcow “Clarus.” Of course she’s a female, as are all cows; males would be referred to as dogbulls, but none exist because there are already bulldogs, and God doesn’t like to have naming problems. (from History of the Dogcow, part II)

Source: Dogcow – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



The essential thing measured by school is whether or not you are good at school.

Source: Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

I’ve figured myself out.

At TEDxNYED, Jeff Jarvis, a well known guy in the world of online journalism, spoke on the parallel worlds of journalists and educators.  He advocates the role of teacher be one focused on being a curator rather than a creator of knowledge.  High school social studies teachers don’t create new knowledge about the Vietnam War.  Furthermore, in the age of Google, they are no longer necessary in order to make information about the Vietnam War available to students.  Valuable teachers play the role of curator of what is known and available.

In Twitter parlance, “Do what you do best and link to the rest.”

I’ve been involved in this Web 2.0 world longer than most.  We all started by reading Will Richardson.  I quickly wanted more.  I focused on where he was drawing the information from that he was curating on http://weblogg-ed.com.  Back in the day, I could look at Will’s Bloglines account and see what he was subscribed to.  With a few simple clicks I could import his entire reading list.

While this seems simple, few services have figured out how to capitalize on connecting attention streams like Bloglines.  The only other company to do this well was Twitter.  Sadly, they killed off these features after a year when the service was growing faster than they could support.

If Web 1.0 was about connecting people to things, Web 2.0 is about connecting people to people.  If you are going to do Web 2.0 well, you need to spend a bit of time curating people.  If I’m following you, it’s likely that I’m also interested in the people you are following.  Even more interesting are the differences in the lists of people we are following.  Curating people is a black-belt 21st Century Skill™ that you won’t see listed in any formal lists.

I’ve been obsessed with this very question for the past five years.  I’m very librarian-like [#respect] in how I curate my feeds in Google Reader. They all get named FirstName LastName, thus changing them from “things” to “people”.  My Twitter client is always set to show full name instead of username.  If you are still anonymous or use a pseudonym with that information there’s likely an exceptional situation.

With that context (read:  more than you ever wanted to know about @ijohnpederson), here’s something important I’ve realized in the past year.

I’m far more interested, and better, in my role of curating and connecting people than I am about content.  In fact, I’ve come to tune most of it completely out of my attention stream.  I’m tired of arguing semantics of literacy and 21st century skills.  There are enough folks talking school reform that have opinions on education policy.  I’m done talking about blogging, handhelds, and how to use Twitter.  This past year I tried my hand at advancing online learning by recontextualizing the way I saw things big picture.  I  also got involved in leading online learning communities with a few people that do it better than anybody.  While I gained a bit of traction and valuable experience, I found it personally frustrating.

“Do what you do best and link to the rest.”

I’ve come full circle.  The majority of my time is immersed in informal, online, asynchronous learning.  It’s working from outside the system inwards.  It’s chipping away at the barriers that I spent most of my years behind.  The last piece of this puzzle is just setting in.  There are plenty of folks out there carrying the water of advancing policy, leadership, reform, projects, storytelling, cyberbullying, filtering, research, etc.  I’m letting go of curating the content and instead focusing on curating the people.

Reminds me of back in the day when I would simply import Will Richardson’s RSS feeds via Bloglines into my reader and become instantly smarter. #sharing

Source: R.I.P. Delicious: You Were So Beautiful to Me



It’s safe to say that #kitten posts vastly outweigh anything of real value on this site. As it should be.

The fact is, I really do have a job during the day. It’s been 2 1/2 years now here at this place called WiscNet in Madison, Wisconsin. Despite the fact that I’m a “communications” and “people” person, it still continues to nearly cripple me when somebody asks, “So, what do you do?”

My job is that damn cool.

Honestly.

We recently spent a good chunk of time rewriting our organization’s strategic plan. You should now be thinking, “He’s not going to ask us to read his organization’s strategic plan, is he?”

Yep. It’s pretty awesome.

WiscNet Strategic Plan 2016

Ning is to online communities what campus housing is to college.

Source: Julia Fallon this past summer as we walked across the University of Wisconsin – Madison campus.