ijohnpederson

Claire, Lars, and cousin Chloe.

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Classic.

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He has a good huddle stance.

This is where they were talking about what animals they had at home. Lars had a story about how he and his sister have found 5 frogs. 4 baby ones and 1 big one. He told this story a few times, interrupting the other kids as they described their frogs.

I’m trying out ecto on OSX to publish to my blog.

Unnecessary picture of Lars for those watching this test post.

4. You’ve already done “efficient”. We’re living in a post-efficiency world now. We already know how to make things better, cheaper and faster than the previous generation. We already know how to squeeze our suppliers till the pips squeak. We already know how to build systems that maximize profits at every stage of the production and selling process. We’re already outsourcing our stuff to China, and so is everyone else. Been there. Done that. So where does the growth need to come from? What needs to happen, in order to save your job?

THESIS:

5. The growth will come, I believe, not by yet more increased efficiencies, but by humanification. For example, take two well-known airlines. They both perform a useful service. They both deliver value. They both cost about the same to fly to New York or Hong Kong. Both have nice Boeings and Airbuses. Both serve peanuts and drinks. Both serve “airline food”. Both use the same airports. But one airline has friendly people working for them, the other airline has surly people working for them. One airline has a sense of fun and adventure about it, one has a tired, jaded business-commuter vibe about it. Guess which one takes the human dimension of their business more seriously than the other? Guess which one still will be around in twenty years? Guess which one will lose billions of dollars worth of shareholder value over the next twenty years? What parallels do you see in your own industry? In your own company?

gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: cloud bottlenecks & humanification.

Grandma is watching the kids this week.

Lars says when he grows up he isn’t going to have any kids. It will be a mom and a dad and a cat but NO kids. But, first he wants to be just him in a house with no Mom! He thinks that would be good for a while and then get a mom!

Hugh McLeod does the cartoons. His writing also completely rocks.

Expressive Capital

1. First we had Human Capital. You! There! Go to the next village and kill everybody because I’m the Chief of this village and I say so etc.
2. Then came Physical Capital. Land, property, factories etc.
3. Then came Financial Capital. Money, credit, dollars etc.
4. Then came Intellectual Capital. Our widgets are better than your widgets because our engineers are smarter than your engineers etc.
5. Then came Emotional Capital. People love our product more than they love our competitor’s product etc. This is the space “Love Marks” (http://www.lovemarks.com) plays around with so successfully: “A Love Mark is a brand that is loved by its user beyond reason” etc. So naturally, I’m thinking, “What next?” How do you out-Love-Mark the Love Mark?

Perhaps…

6. Expressive Capital. Our products make it easier for the end user to find and/or express meaning, narrative, metaphor, purpose, explanation and relevance in his/her own life than our competitor’s products.

Good ideas continue to be interesting two years later. I found this buried back in the 2005 archive of my blog. Before ISTE added creativity, before A Whole New Mind, before we found Ken Robinson on TED Talks.

No, not that kind of apple.

That’s my little Lars.

Dad & Lars
Originally uploaded by ijohnpederson

I really, really, really like this black and white picture.

I’m struggling. I’m dualing the tail end of one EETT project and thinking ahead on for our consortium’s next project.

What % of 8th grade students are technologically literate?  How do you measure how teacher professional development impacts that number?

Coming late into this current project, I thought maybe we were onto something teaming up with LearningPoint Associates to administer their TechPoints 8th Grade Technology Literacy Assessment.¬† It’s a nationally recognized assessment designed and tested by an organization I have found to be reputable over the years.¬† Except…

1. I watched student gaze at the screens apathetically as they filled out yet another assessment.
2. A 79 question multiple choice assessment can, at best, measure what students know.  It struggles to take into account what students are able to do with technology.
3. A librarian colleague tossed some of the material into a readability instrument.  I addressed LearningPoints with this question.  Their response indicated that they had not formally measured the readability of the exam.

So.¬† We have data.¬† Does it mean anything?¬† I’m not sure.¬† Looking within Wisconsin, everybody is playing with different assessment instruments.¬† These results will be collected at the state level and forwarded upstream to the feds this summer to help, in part, determine whether federal funding for technology in education is effective.¬† What are you doing?¬† I hear one state conducts their state tests online.¬† Completing the online assessment is an assessment in itself.¬† They now have proof that these students are technologically proficient.¬† While their approach seems so very wrong,¬† they haven’t spent multiple years and millions of federal dollars figuring out ways to assess student technology literacy like the rest of us.

I looked to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills for answers this morning.¬† Our state just joined in a partnership with this group to promote this model.¬† Ken Kay, the president of the organization, has been talking about this project at technology conferences and recently spent time in our state kicking off the partnership.¬† (Chase the link to the Apple Learning Interchange, it’s worth downloading the audio.)¬† For this initiative to be successful, it needs a strong assessment component.¬† A solution to my problem?¬† Well, I’m not sure.¬† The aforementioned TechPoints survey is listed in their database.¬† I chased the trail over to ISTE’s assessment…advertised as a series of 30 minute assessments that go beyond multiple choice and have students apply skills.¬† I jumped to the site to find that the tool is “permanently discontinued” as of June 2007.¬† Back to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.¬† I downloaded and skimmed their report The Assessment of 21st Century Skills: The Current Landscape.¬† The message I got:¬† It’s hard to measure.¬† There are a few options out there.¬† No single measure does it all.¬† We could easily assess our students up the wazoo with 5 or 6 models and spent the rest of our lives making meaning from that data.

I digress.¬† I can’t solve this issue.¬† I looks like even ISTE has a hard time figuring it out.

What sold me on the Partnership for 21st Century Schools was Ken Kay talking about an example “21st Century Assessment”.¬† All 8th grade students will be able to use a GPS device to plan and propose the next location for a park within their community.¬† No doubt, we need more examples like this to bring to our teachers.¬† Chew on that idea for a bit.¬† But does this type of learning really ever translate to answer the quantitatively driven educational landscape?¬† How do I “sell” this type of logical idea in this era of “accountability”?

I’ve talked too long.¬† Any ideas and/or experience?

Lars, my two year old, wanted a turn with his sister’s iPod shuffle.

Claire, Lars and I are home alone this weekend. Sent mommy away.
While all bets are that I will somehow screw all of this up, I think all of the men in the crowd would agree…this weekend is much more difficult on mommy than it is on daddy or the kids. Let’s review the notes. [This will be much funnier 10 years from now.]

Notes for Dada
Do 1 bath on or before Sunday AM.

Claire
1. Be kind, loving, and consistent!
2. Alternate treats with yogurt, peanut butter, veggies, and fruit.
3. To bed by 8:00pm please!
4. Limit TV and puter time.
5. Play with her.
6. Brush teeth 2x per
Lars
1. Love him. Play.
2. To bed by 8:00pm with bone dry diaper on (or he may leak). Include lovies and blue teddy.
3. Give 3 or 4 food choices per meal, balanced diet please.
4. Dress him on floor or he will fall.
5. Cut food small.
6. Watch out for stairs and toilets.
7. He can open the bathroom door.
8. Don’t turn back on him while in tub. Never leave room.
9. Don’t leave Claire either (other than to dress him in her room).

Update…
We managed to make something explode. Every good sleep over party of my childhood involved Jolt, or caffeinated something.. Courtesy of Boing Boing we got a great caffeine recipe. Melt chocolate chips, mix in a little coarsely ground coffee bean. We had some peppermint coffee bean from Christmas. Chocolate chips on parchment paper, in bowl in microwave. Even at 70%, the microwave safe bowl explodes. The physicists in the crowd could probably explain why, I just witnessed a nice splosion. Chocolate covered peppermint coffee grounds are great.

We created bean dip for dinner. (Ok, the kids officially had waffles, but the highlight was bean dip.) Even made a song about it. Think AC/DC “Thunderstruck”, just with “thun – der” replaced with “bean – dip”. We called mom and sang her the song.

David Warlick: “What should todays children reasonably expect from our education system over the next ten years?”

All of this technology stuff aside, the most important driver of my thinking and my attitude about education are Claire (3) and Lars (1). In 10 short years of educational administration I’ve experienced much of the best (and some of the worst) that our system has to offer. One of my fundamental beliefs about the next 10 years of education has to do with coffee.

A short 13 years ago I had some friends open what was the first coffee place here in Duluth, Minnesota. (We were a bit late to the game.) Since then, a number of Starbucks, Caribou, Dunn Brothers, as well as a few independent places have opened and flourished in the area.

Why are these places so popular?

What drives us to pay $2 – $4 for a cup of coffee?

Is there something wrong with Folgers?

Here’s a secret. At the successful shops, coffee isn’t their business. Experience. Conversation. Networking. Quality. Story. Meaning. Design. Play. Service. Wireless. Comfort.

What does this mean for education? What can we learn?

Photo Courtesy Seattle Bon Vivant & Flickr Creative Commons

My digital universe is slowly getting under control again. Inspired by “Teacher as DJ” over at Iterating Towards Openess, and with a little extra time on my hands these days, I vowed to get things under control. This is part personal reflection, part “new year resolution”, part “how daddy mixes his media”. Use as you see fit.

Aggregator

NetNewsWire (Mac) is my best friend. Over the past month I found myself tracking (skimming) 281 feeds. Something had to give. I found that I wasn’t reading what I should. I culled things back to a more manageable 159. I also unchecked two months worth of “Flagged Items” that I was saving to read for later.

Del.icio.us

I don’t have many resolutions for 2006. One important thing is to use http://del.icio.us more. I’ve added the Firefox extension, use Cocoalicios (Mac), pull certain tagged feeds into my sidebar, and let del.icio.us send my daily bookmarks to my blog at 11:00am each day (see “daily blog posting” under the experimental section of your del.ico.us account).

iTunes

I’m keeping one playlist called “Listen To” that I’ll drag the next few things I particularly want to listen to. With so much audio content these days, I have a difficult time when I get to my iPod deciding what’s important. This manages a simple list.

Documentation

I will document all the tweaks I make to http://pedersondesigns.com. For you and me. I will also save all the plugins and hacks I use.

TV

I will watch less. Actually, since getting TiVo in 2003, I’d estimate that I’m only watching about 20% of the amount of television I did back in the day. I more than make up for it in G4 PowerBook screen time.

Email

Easier for me than you these days, but I’ve unsubscribed from all but www-edu. Even that’s getting filtered into another folder and not my inbox. Trackback and blog comments are also getting filtered out of email these days. I’ll be them up in the aggregator.

Quicksilver

The most important piece of software on my Mac. I’m crippled without it, and all I use it for right now is a program launcher. It cooks eggs. I must learn more. Textpander comes in a close 2nd of “most powerful, underused”. If you use a Mac, just try them.

Getting Things Done

I’m a few months overdue in re-reading Getting Things Done. I’m over a year into “mind like water”. If time is an issue, pick up this book and read it. It’s the single most important lifehack I have performed.

Outside

My best writing this past spring and summer came from walking the 60 miles of trails (not all at once) that surround our house.

I’m looking for more suggestions. If you have any cool “lifehacks” to help manage your stuff, let it rip in the comments.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, gtd, quicksilver, textpander

I’ll spare the “Top 10 Technologies of 2005″ and “Top 10 Predictions for 2006″. Enough Wikipedia, MySpace, The World Is Flat. I thought it would be fun to open the lens on John Pederson and let folks know a little more about me…through what I collected for Christmas.

1. Avalanche beacon. Seriously. While there aren’t any slides here in Minnesota, I do spend 7 days each February just southeast of Yellowstone National Park snowmobiling. It’s a unique kind of riding. The kind where you are concerned about avalanches. Very concerned. Trails are for transport. “Let’s see what happens if we go up and over that!”

2. World of Warcraft. Level 13 Night Elf Rogue. Posternutbag. Looking for a guild. Much more on this in the upcoming weeks. While I’m not a “gamer”, I do feel compelled to understand the social networking aspects of mmorpgs. There’s something behind all of this. Anybody that has good “gaming and learning” links? Throw them in the comments.

3. A whole bunch of Carhartt clothing. Nothing is more comfortable. I love clothes shopping at the local hardware store.

4. Comic Life. Don’t tell Jessica that I bought it.

5. Sox. Mmmm.

6. Lars started walking. First steps. [Note: None of these are in order of any importance.]

7. A roasting pan and a big 5 qt. nonstick Calphalon pan. I love cooking stuff for Christmas. January – March are my “Chef John” months of the year.

8. Cabellas slip on shoes. Along with the Carhartts, these are the most comfortable.

9. Moleskine.

10. “All Marketers Are Liars : The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World” (Seth Godin).

11. Netflix. (This was for Jessica.)

12. TiVo does podcasts. (We are going on 2 years with TiVo. 90% of it is stuff for Claire these days.)

Technorati Tags: carhartt, comic life, molskine, netflix, Seth Godin, tivo, world of warcraft

My TiVo just got a bit smarter. Rocketboom (see below) is now available for my TiVo. I’ve been a big fan of “time shifted” television for two years now. This is a huge step in that they (TiVo) are now crossing over into “content shifting”, i.e. mixing internet with television. Indie media infiltrating the traditional corporate media space. On the other hand, traditional corporate media is stepping onto the internet with deals like iTunes video and podcasting the evening news.

Funny how this creates dissonance in our worlds, yet my daughter will never remember the days when these forms of media were separate. She’s already obsessed with my trial account at http://unitedstreaming.com where we can search for leveled, streaming video content on-demand. I may just have to pick up a subscription for home schoolers.

Flat world.

About Rocketboom

We differ from a regular TV program in many important ways. Instead of costing millions of dollars to produce, Rocketboom is created with a consumer-level video camera, a laptop, two lights and a map with no additional overhead or costs. Also, Rocketboom is distributed online, all around the world and on demand, and thus has a much larger potential audience than any TV broadcast. However, we spend $0 on promotion, relying entirely on word-of-mouth, and close to $0 on distribution because bandwidth costs and space are so inexpensive. While TV programs have traditionally been uni-directional, Rocketboom engages its international audience in a wide range of topical discussions.

It’s my birthday, but that’s not important right now.

Lars said “dada” for the first time today.

The Hughtrain has gone open source. Hugh McLeod continues to blow my mind. If you are a follower of my blog, you know how I like to mix Cluetrain stuff with our world of education. Here’s my first bit of “eduhughtrain”.

Hugh has a section titled “Expressive Capital”.

1. First we had Human Capital. You There! Go to the next village and kill everybody because I’m the Chief of this village and I say so etc.
2. Then came Physical Capital. Land, property, factories etc.
3. Then came Financial Capital. Money, credit, dollars etc.
4. Then came Intellectual Capital. Our widgets are better than your widgets because our engineers are smarter than your engineers etc.
5. Then came Emotional Capital. People love our product more than they love our competitor’s product etc. This is the space “Love Marks” (http://www.lovemarks.com) plays around with so successfully: “A Love Mark is a brand that is loved by its user beyond reason” etc. So naturally, I’m thinking, “What next?” How do you out-Love-Mark the Love Mark?

6. Expressive Capital. Our products make it easier for the end user to find and/or express meaning, narrative, metaphor, purpose, explanation and relevance in his/her own life than our competitor’s products.

Question: With No Child Left Behind and our obsession about “ranking and sorting”, have we ever made it past #4? (I’m speaking from the huge, “meta analysis” sense…)
Realization: Blogging is expression. So are art and music. This is what our art and music educators have been talking about all this time.
Challenge: Get educators from “this is technology” to “this is a form of expression”.
Allies: Art, music, fine arts.
Enemies: Ourselves. Our policies. What happens when our children start “expressing” themselves?

Now we are back to where we started with Cluetrain.

Dave Winer has a great podcast about how he was recently treated by Audible.com.
“DRM-be-damned, if you won’t provide the content the users want, the way we want it, then the users will create it for themselves.”

Reminds me of one of my favorite Hugh McLeod drawings.

I’m starting to download DRM’d audiobooks. I’ve been worried about it. I’m more worried about how Audible talked to Dave Winer about the whole situation. I’m interested to see Audible’s side of the story. Listen to Dave’s podcast and listen for Audible to step up.

Back to Hugh McLeod. Here’s Hugh’s story for the above graphic.

I call it ‘The Kryptonite Factor’. Here’s how the drama unfolded.

Day One
Kryptonite: Our bike locks are the best.
The Market: Yes, your bike locks are the best.

Day Two
Kryptonite: Our bike locks are the best.
The Market: Yes, your bike locks are the best.
Day Three
Kryptonite: Our bike locks are the best.
The Market: Ummmm…yeah I’m sure they are, but what’s all this about some recent video on the net that’s supposed to show how you can crack your locks in 10 seconds using a simple Bic ballpoint pen?

Day Four
Kryptonite: Our bike locks are the best.
The Market: Hey, I just saw that video on a friend’s website. And I’m kinda ticked off because I just paid $60 for one of your new locks 3 weeks ago, and I’m wondering if a Bic pen can crack my lock or not…does the pen crack all Kryptonite locks or just one or two models?

Day Five
Kryptonite: Our bike locks are the best.
The Market: Hey, I just visited your website and saw no mention of the Bic pens. What the hell are you doing about it? Are you going to fix the locks? Are you going to give me a refund?

Day Six
Kryptonite: Our bike locks are the best.
The Market: No, they’re not. You guys are assholes.

So what was the final outcome? How did Kryptonite address the problem? Did they fix the lock in the end? I have no idea. I’m just assuming their locks continue to suck. I suppose I could go visit the company website for more info, but…eh. I can’t be bothered. I’m just assuming it’ll have the usual bullshit PR when I get there. Life is short.

One decent, smart, young, credible part-time blogger on $500 a month, writing from the front lines on their behalf could have saved Kryptonite millions of dollars. Not to mention decades of slowly-and-painfully built brand equity.

Without warning, Kyptonite’s market got smarter and faster than they did. And it only took a couple of days to unleash the full wrath. Boom!

You have been warned.

Technorati Tags: drm, gapingvoid, podcasting, dave winer