ijohnpederson

Wikipedia got on board with their own version of an iPhone app. Add it to your list of must haves for educational iPhone/iTouch computing.

All Wikimedia content can be used for any purpose, as long as proper credit is given and modifications are made available under the same terms. This open access approach to copyright is supported using a license which explicitly grants everyone those freedoms.

CC-BY-SA

Source: Wikimedia Foundation

The Creative Commons Blog today announced that the Wikipedia community is holding a vote to move to using Creative Comments for its primary content license. The license being discussed is CC BY-SA or Attribution-ShareAlike.

Source: ReadWriteWeb.

Read their Wikipedia entry.

Microsoft announced in March 2009 that they will cease to sell Microsoft Student and all editions of Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009, citing changes in the way people seek information and in the traditional encyclopedia and reference material market as the key reasons behind the termination.

Source: Encarta – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Hugh MacLeod

Update: This morning John C. Dvorak was the keynote speaker at a conference of K12 technology folks here in Wisconsin. He spent 90 minutes reviewing technologies and trends in the industry, inserting his own style (which, btw, I absolutely love).

In the Q&A session afterward, I asked a simple question. “You have reviewed a number of trends and tools. Give us three people we should being attention to.”

He was remarkably at a loss for an answer. Eventually, he mentioned Mark Zuckerberg, Ev Williams, and Kevin Rose. After 90 minutes of dissing on Facebook, Twitter, and Digg, the three people he mentions are the founders of these services.

I’m not sure whether to be excited about figuring Dvorak out through this exercise or frustrated that 200 K12 IT folks will go back and use this as evidence to continue shutting down social media in their schools.

(Web 1.0 is about connecting things. Web 2.0 is about connecting people.)

I think I’ve put this out there before.

This 2008/2009 Wikipedia DVD Selection is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. It has about 5500 articles (as much as can be fitted on a DVD with good size images) and is about the size of a twenty volume encyclopaedia (34,000 images and 20 million words).

Preview and download your own copy here.

Via Merlin Mann…

Nobody likes feeling like a noob, especially when you’re getting constant pressure on all sides to never stick out in an unflattering way. And, in this godforsaken just-add-Wikipedia era of make-believe insight and instant expertise, it’s natural to start believing you must never suck at anything or admit to knowing less than everything — even when you’re just starting out. Clarinets should never squawk, sketch lines should never be visible, and dictionaries are just big, dumb books of words for cheaters and fancy people. Right?

I think finding your own comfort with the process (whatever that process ends up being) might just be the whole game here — being willing to put in your time, learn the craft, and never lose the courageousness to be caught in the middle of making something you care about, even when it might be shit and you might look like an idiot fumbling to make it. What’s the worst thing that could happen?

Well, you could quit, because it’s too hard to make stuff you aren’t already great at. You could convert all that pointless effort and practice back into MySpace updates and the production of funny cat pictures. No, it’s not technically the worst thing that could happen, but it’s a damned common pathway for fear to molder back into an emotional impulse to put on jammies and watch Judge Judy.

This is in response to the noise I’m seeing in my reader about trying to figure how various edubloggers “rank” in this whole game.

Via 2008-2009 Wikipedia Selection for schools…

This 2008/9 Wikipedia DVD Selection is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. It has about 5500 articles (as much as can be fitted on a DVD with good size images) and is about the size of a twenty volume encyclopaedia (34,000 images and 20 million words). Articles were chosen from a list ranked by importance and quality generated by project members. This list of articles was then manually sorted for relevance to children, and adult topics were removed.

In January 2006, after just upright quitting my job career in educational technology, I was sitting deep in a forest slashing at bears and lions while skinning their hides. I was about a month into my online gaming foray with World of Warcraft. There was this nice warlock in our guild (We Know) named Kazpah. She was making bags and offering them up to a few of us newbies. It was a strange experience accepting virtual gifts from virtual people for the first time. It really stuck.

The guild grew together. We started learning bits and pieces about each other. Persimmon is a nurse in West Virgina. Dargarian is a construction worker in Australia. Phillipito is the guy when it comes to how online intersects with church. (He’d sneak World of Warcraft guild references into his Sunday sermons and report back later in the afternoon.) Jonkichi, our “Guild Custodian”, schedules his days on UTC, commutes from Toyko to (wherever), and plays on the boards of such outfits as Creative Commons and ICANN. Kazpah, my bag making friend, was finishing up a computer science degree at the University of Toronto. She had just landed a job at a little outfit named Google out in California when we first met. One of Kazpah’s college specialties was circumventing those pesky internet censoring programs. She was working with people that were studying this issue from a human rights perspective in countries like China. Kazpah’s Google bio reads

“…software engineer at Google where she writes and directs internal educational videos, coordinates the massive postering of Google restroom stalls with weekly flyers that promote testing, and interviews potential chefs and masseuses.”

As I was catching up on her blog last night, I learned that her story is being compiled as part of an upcoming O’Reilly book titled “Women in Technology”.

There are a few teasers for this book published on their website, including a background piece on Kazpah. Turns out her experience working in this realm of Internet censorship back in college brought her all around the globe. I’ll share a snippet that struck me very hard last night…

We also visited one of the poorest neighborhoods in Guatemala City, where computers had been donated to set up a lab for children to use. I watched a young boy, growing up in a world so unlike the one I knew, playing videogames as I had. We had kids tell us about their friends they had met online in other countries and how they shared stories about their lives and got to hear about life elsewhere. It was one of the most genuinely beautiful uses of technology that I had ever seen. And no one seemed worried that the computers would be stolen from the lab and sold for money, because it was such a precious part of their community.

Through this work, I obtained a new outlook on the relationship between software developers and their users. Software can do so much more than just provide entertainment or make a manual task easier; it can fundamentally change people’s lives for better, or for worse, in very real and significant ways. It can be the greatest champion for freedom of speech and expression, or the very thing that stifles it. I realized then that I have the potential in my career to make a long-lasting impact on the world, and this is the sort of realization that makes the long, slow nights of debugging completely worthwhile. Though technology isn’t the solution to every problem, it’s an area wherein I feel that I can make a difference. The fact that I have so much fun doing it is just a welcome bonus.

Read the entire piece here.

I’ve been an edublogger for six years now…this educational community is just beginning to come together online with the same intensity that a moderately successful gaming guild does. There’s an entire social/relationship dimension that cannot be understood unless you are a part of it. It’s similar to what is happening in the poor neighborhoods of Guatemala. Kids in countries that many write of as “third world” are slowly getting little green laptops and connecting to the network. Jimmy Wales is focusing his little non-profit on providing the sum of all human knowledge and making available to everybody, free, across the world. Hint: Wikipedia is as much a humanitarian issue as it is an encyclopedia.

All the while, our policies and fear of what may happen cause schools to lock down Twitter. We still question whether Wikipedia can be considered a “trusted source”. I had to specifically request that the network admin in one of our schools “whitelist” a few Gmail addresses so that I could contact a group of teachers regarding a grant project. One project for tomorrow is to find a way for students to have email penpals in England without the ability for them to use these accounts outside of school.

I wonder if the kids in Guatemala could lend us a hand in solving our problems.

(This photo is of an actual building in Antigua, Guatemala, taken by Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin, and made available through Flick Creative Commons. http://flickr.com/photos/xeni/521686181/)

I doubt this will make it into the thread of Utecht -> Warlick -> Stager -> Downes -> Farmer -> et al. It just keeps running through my mind as I catch bits and pieces.

Monty Python FTW.

I made a comment amidst the fog that, upon further review, I’m not all that happy with. At the end of the day we have a bunch of very smart, passionate, articulate people weaving a story that has multiple meanings and contexts, few of which are apparent in the context of pixels…even well structured, Web 2.0 pixels.

I was driving Bernajean Porter back to her hotel today after a great two day “assessing digital storytelling” workshop we threw here in SW Wisconsin.  We got on the topic of school change.  She quoted Dr. W. Edward Demming.

“When asked ‘How long will it take for schools to change?’, Demming replied ‘No time at all.  It will, however, take a long time for them to decide.’”

Bonus.  Here are Demming’s “14 Points” for managers to transform their businesses.  This is mid 1900’s stuff sportsracers. Do the old “substitute education for business” and let yourself think so that I don’t have to.

1. Create constancy of purpose for the improvement of products and
   services, with the aim to become competitive, stay in business, and
   provide jobs.
2. Adopt a new philosophy of cooperation (win-win) in which everybody
   wins and put it into practice by teaching it to employees, customers
   and suppliers.
3. Cease dependence on mass inspection to achieve quality. Instead,
   improve the process and build quality into the product in the first
   place.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag
   alone. Instead, minimize total cost in the long run. Move toward a
   single supplier for any one item, based on a long-term relationship of
   loyalty and trust.
5. Improve constantly, and forever, the system of production, service,
   and planning of any activity. This will improve quality and
   productivity and thus constantly decrease costs.
6. Institute training for skills.
7. Adopt and institute leadership for the management of people,
   recognizing their different abilities, capabilities, and aspirations.
   The aim of leadership should be to help people, machines, and gadgets
   do a better job. Leadership of management is in need of overhaul, as
   well as leadership of production workers.
8. Drive out fear and build trust so that everyone can work more effectively.
9. Break down barriers between departments. Abolish competition and
   build a win-win system of cooperation within the organization. People
   in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team to
   foresee problems of production and use that might be encountered with
   the product or service.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets asking for zero
    defects or new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create
    adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and
    low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of
    the work force.
11. Eliminate numerical goals, numerical quotas, and management by objectives. Substitute leadership.
12. Remove barriers that rob people of joy in their work. This will
    mean abolishing the annual rating or merit system that ranks people and
    creates competition and conflict.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.

Edit #1:  I posted this late at night and
woke up to 10 comments that have me thinking even harder about this
issue.  I’ll get absolutely nothing done today if I continue to think
about it…so give me a chance to make it home and construct a
thoughtful response.

Edit #2:  "I don’t want them to believe me, I just want them to think."  – Marshall McLuhan

My rant has had a chance to marinate a bit.  A few "next day" thoughts.

I truly believe that everybody…from the executive editor of Scholastic Administrator magazine through the teachers/administrators in the story and all the commentors on this post…everybody is trying their best. 

We all have different agendas and see things through our own lens.  I honestly wouldn’t know what to do with 150 students a day in a school that banned cell phones, iPods, laptops, etc.  None of you would want me as your principal, trying to keep the lid on the place.  I sure as heck don’t know anything about selling magazines or writing a balanced article.

My job is precisely the same as Scholastic’s.  "I just wan them to think."  Push the edges a bit.  See what we learn as a result.

To Scholastic’s credit…

1)  They do incredible work for teachers and kids.
2)  Read 180 is on my really short list of educational technology things that matter.
3)  The executive editor of Scholastic Administrator magazine was inside my inbox this afternoon, inviting me to construct a response for publication in their October/November magazine.

This is a great lesson for everybody involved in information and media literacy.

Markets are conversations.  I’m going to continue pushing the edge on this "fear sells" thread.

Doug Johnson…I see the smile on your face.  "He’s pure.  Mostly."

Original Rant

There’s a running joke at my mailbox at work. It’s been nearly one year and I’ve received exactly 1 piece of mail that had even somewhat important meaning.  Today was no different. CDW. Symantec. MacWorld. HP. Scholastic Administrator Magazine.

Seriously. That cover says "When Tech Attacks". Let that sink in just a bit further.

Ok. You have my attention. Go.

"Schools across the country are waging a war against technology tools gone bad. Read how some districts defend their classrooms against the new school thuggery—from iPod cheats to cell phone punks and sneaky Web surfers."

We are at war?  Let me check my scorecard.  Drugs. Poverty. Afganistan. Terror. Iraq. Cell phones?  I really need to start watching TV again to catch this late breaking news.

"According to Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, we have seen the enemy, and it is us. Adults simply don’t know how to model appropriate digital behavior, he believes, so kids are making up the rules on their own."

Spend more that 5 minutes either reading or talking with Will and one thing is clear.  None of this stuff is simple.  Especially when a journalist leads with "According to…"

"Is it a case of bad technology leading to bad behavior or good technology with not enough role models? These horror stories should act as a primer."

Boys and girls, that’s called the "hook" of the article.  It makes you want to read further.  Let’s explore the horror!

"…(a female teacher’s) suspended student blindsided her with a vicious punch while his buddy recorded the scene (on a cell phone). The teacher ended up with 25 stitches in her head. Murphy High has a cell phone policy, but little good that did when students wanted to cause serious harm."

Nobody likes to hear a story like that. The students in this case faced some pretty stiff penalties and a trip to jail.  No word on whether the phone did time, but that’s not important right now.  Principal Doug Estle is taking steps to calm fears.

“We’ll also do professional development in the fall about spotting potentially violent kids, and we’ll set up tip lines for students who might know something about a potential attack.”

A tip line.  We’ll protect kids from the dangers of technology by having them call a tip line on their dangerous cell phones banana phones.

Another example of technology attacking…

"In October 2004, a substitute teacher in Norwich (CT) Public Schools exposed some of the middle school students in her care to pornographic pop-up ads. Julie Amero was tried and convicted and faced the possibility of 40 years in jail."

Wow.  That must have been some seriously harmful technology to be convicted and  face a possible 40 year jail sentence.  Surely school districts, especially the ones involved in this court case, are learning from this situation.

"Despite the incident, the district hasn’t made any radical changes in what it does to keep kids porn-free, according to Bob Hartz, manager of Information Services. “There are so many porn sites,” he says. “You’ve just got to assume it’s going to happen, pay attention, and take the right steps when it does.”"

I’m neither a lawyer nor an expert on this case.  Would somebody please get this district a PR person to advise keeping these sorts of quotes quiet?  Even if it’s simply for Julie’s sake?  Damn. That stings.

Technology that attacks isn’t limited to knocking out teachers or throwing them in jail.  Take the MP3 player.

"Everybody loves an open-book exam, especially those who forgot to study. Used to be such exams were at the teacher’s discretion, but technology is changing all that. Which is what a teacher at Mountain View High School, in Meridian, Idaho, discovered upon overhearing students discussing how iPods could help them cheat.  The idea is this: Kids record material that will be on an exam and then download it to bring to school on an MP3 player."

How will kids know what will be on the exam prior to the exam?  That’s right…they review.  These kids got clever about it though.  They taught their iPods what would likely be on the exam.  Like the article says though, teachers have discretion whether to allow students to use their notes, books, and resources on an exam.  All is well.  Or is it?

"So why let the MP3 players in the exam room? ‘We wanted to be the cool guys and allow kids to relax a little while taking tests by listening to their iPods,’ Principal Aaron Maybon explains. ‘We’re an SPED and ELL magnet school, and listening to quiet music while taking an exam is a good way for our students to stay focused.’"

What? This isn’t a case of "When Tech Attacks?" These things actually have good uses?

"But even if MP3 players are banned outright, Maybon says, the kids can tell you exactly how to hide the tiny players, cords, and earbuds under bulky clothes and underneath their hair."

Ahh, so it’s not the technology that we are at war with, but rather the bulky clothes and hair.

"Still, Maybon points out that there has never been an incident of iPod cheating at Mountain View. He also has no intention of banning MP3 players and punishing kids for behavior they haven’t exhibited…"

Whew. This story didn’t end up in a trip through the criminal justice system.  It’s just kids practicing study skills.

What’s next? 

"He (note: not Will Richardson, but referring to Will) says technology is getting smaller and smaller—and easier to carry as well as to hide. Plus, we’re about to enter an age of ubiquitous computing, where kids will be able to snag a Wi-Fi signal from the surrounding community and simply get around whatever blocks or bans school administrators have made. Can you imagine the insanity that will ensue when kids can search the Internet unchecked on a school computer—linked to an unfiltered Wi-Fi connection?"

Insanity?  You should see me after I check into a hotel without free wifi these days.

"The good news is that of all the people in the world, educators are best able to solve these problems."

Like CIPA and DOPA.  I’m sure that stuff came out in your research on this topic.

"To Richardson’s eye, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and stop thinking about policies that limit technology, and instead focus on what we do best."

Hallelujah.

"’It has to be a K–12 curriculum in which we model good behavior,’ Richardson argues. ‘We have to be consistent in our own behavior, and hand out real consequences for abuses to the procedures.’"

Be firm.  Set the expectations.  Model proper behaviors.

It’s time for Scholastic Administrator to finish with something profound.

"In other words, be ready to do battle."

That’s how it ends?  You are advising your 240,000+ audience of school administrators "be ready to do battle?"

Full disclosure.  My personal media critic filter is smart enough to separate Scholastic Administrator Magazine from a peer reviewed journal article or a Wikipedia entry.  I also fully admit playing a bit of "Jon Stewart" with the story. I insist that you go read this article in its entirety. 

http://content.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3746915

Before the comments fly, let me list the deeper, more important reasons why I’m stirred.

1.  This article in Scholastic Magazine makes us all look stupid.  It is a complete insult to the entire K12 education profession.  Is there anybody that really believes a cell phone caused a student to punch out a teacher, a porn pop-up is an "attack" on students, and that an MP3 player is a cause for war?

2.  Scholastic Magazine went to Will Richardson for his take and to add a splash of credibility to the article, all the while mangling it.  Will (and others) have quit their "day jobs" to chase their passions of school reform and educational technology.  I’ve known Will for a number of years.  We’ve lived the same highs and lows together. No doubt he’s on some small propeller plane tonight, headed to another hotel room, wondering if it’s possible to hit 4 consecutive "rooms that open to the left" in a single week.  I’m sure he’ll come across his copy of "When Tech Attacks" in the near future and question, yet again, whether the time away from his wife and kids is worth it.

3.  I can’t help but worry when I think about this article.  I’m unsure of how many hours of research go into something like this  I’m sure it was plotted out on a storyboard, edited, re-edited, fact checked, and passed through a few hands before going into a publication that reaches 240,000 educators.  Right?  Somebody had to decide that this article was worth of the cover story.  Even scarier, if I approach the article objectively, the fact that is was deemed "cover story quality" means that Scholastic truly believes that the majority of readers will appreciate this story.

Would somebody please let me know if I’m being punked?

Banana Phone Courtesy Flickr CC @ http://flickr.com/photos/nitz/543734402/

I <heart> Wikispaces. Hands down the my useful tool during a crazy summer of educational technology workshops. Visit http://itasc.wikispaces.com to see how I’ve been using Wikispaces to drive my workshops.

I want to share a few tricks with the social bookmarking service del.icio.us that provide wicked “small pieces loosely joined” functionality to any Wikispace.

I assume you have accounts with del.icio.us and Wikispaces. If not, please wait no longer. Let’s slice and dice.

Pull Feeds of Your Stuff

(Substitute your del.icio.us username for ijohnpederson in these examples.)

http://del.icio.us/rss/ijohnpederson – Feed address of my bookmarks.

http://del.icio.us/rss/ijohnpederson/wikipedia – Feed address of my bookmarks tagged wikipedia.

http://del.icio.us/rss/ijohnpederson/library+wikipedia – Feed address of my bookmarks tagged wikipedia and library.

Pull Feeds of Your Friends

http://del.icio.us/rss/djakes – Feed address of David Jakes.

http://del.icio.us/djakes/bestpractice – Feed address of David Jakes tagged bestpractice.

Pull Feeds of Any Tag

http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/k12 – Feed address of all things tagged k12.

http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/hockey – Feed address of all things tagged hockey.

You get the picture. If you are unsure, visit your del.icio.us account, find the tag you are interested in, right click on the RSS feed for this page icon at the bottom, and select “Copy Link Location”.

Now it’s time to pull them into Wikispaces.

Take a close look at the syntax below.

[[rss url="http://del.icio.us/rss/ijohnpederson" title="Insert Title Here" number="20"]]

Here’s how it all deconstructs.

[[ ]] at each end

rss url=”x” (x = rss feed address from above)

title=”x” (x = name this feed whatever you want for wikispaces)

number=”x” (x = the number of bookmarks you want displayed)

The results?

Here are my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged flickr inside a digital photography course.

Now it’s just a matter of getting creative.

Put your del.icio.us bookmarks tagged podcast + hardware in the hardware section of your podcasting course.

Put your del.icio.us bookmarks tagged civil + war in the Civil War section of your social studies course.

Another trick I’m trying in my professional development workshops.

1. Register a dummy del.icio.us account.

2. Install the del.icio.us toolbar on each of the machines the participants are using. Log in as the dummy account on all machines.

3. Encourage participants to simply hit the “Tag” button when they come across something to share.

4. Integrate the RSS feed of all dummy account bookmarks in your Wikispaces site.

Go play. I’m sure there are some other ninja moves I haven’t thought of yet. Leave your tips, tricks, and questions in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, howto, wikispaces

The amount of collaboration (read: different than coordination or cooperation) I experienced in my [2880 hours, o'rly? ya'rly] of World of Warcraft is my most important take away. While I wouldn’t trade the “Edubloggercon 07 experience” and the subsequent spinoffs for anything, contrast it with gathering 40 people around the world, dedicating 6 hours every Friday and Saturday evening over the span of 8 months, all with the goal of getting to see this guy get knocked over.

My only criticism of Warlick’s point is reading the word “cheat” inside the post. I realize it’s not intentional…it’s a bit weighted to help non-gamers understand. Check out WoW Wiki to see just how involved the collaboration is among WoW’s fans. While reading it, take a moment and understand that this site is all “user generated” and is just one example of online collaborative communities that emerge in gaming. Check out the addon software built to enhance the game at Curse Gaming. There are many other related sites.

I do, however, love the educational “here’s another way to think about wikis” that Warlick spins from his experience.

While I was watching Deborah’s presentation, it occurred to me that study guides for tests are a lot like strategy guides for video games. So, if I might take this to what some might say is an absurd conclusion, might my students gain something useful, if I allowed them to collaboratively create an online study guide for their test, and then allow them to use that web site as they take the test ‚ and open-web test, so to speak.

I still remember defining terms for Mr. Moe in 10th grade American History. We’d write them in notebooks and turn them in as part of our assignments. While we had word processors, we didn’t quite have the means of cheating sharing coordinating cooperating collaborating.

Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Cleavland, Harison, Cleavland….why is this mantra still consuming cycles in my brain? That old style of learning was so George Herbert Walker Bush.

Related: A link for the kids.

In recognition, I stopped to snap a photo this morning.

Bonus Link: Et cetera

Technorati Tags: everythingismiscellaneous, weinberger

I also got crabs.
I learned a bit of math.
Math teachers are pretty cool.

Photo: Flickr Creative Commons, Courtesy of Alykat

technorati tags:crabs

Technorati Tags: crabs

I’m being summoned north to design, teach, and facilitate a four day “Web 2.0 in Education” workshop in Hayward, Wisconsin. June 19th – 22nd. “Hey, that’s right before NECC in Atlanta!” Yes, it is. I’m going to be one hurtin’ puppy in June.
Around twenty educators spanning every conceivable grade level and subject area. As I begin to design this experience I continue to giggle at this four day time timeframe. I’m now used to the conference/workshop circuit where you get an hour. Sometimes two or three. But four days!

I’m trying something very different. I’m leading with a half-day of del.icio.us play before even explaining what “this stuff” is all about. They’ll be searching and tagging searches on web 2.0 + education + teaching + learning. I’ll cleverly aggregate this stuff on the back end and use the experience during the afternoon of day one to talk about RSS, “the social”, and how all of this stuff comes together.

Giggle. And then we have three more days.

Related: I’m completely in love with Wikispaces as a tool to design this course. See it as it develops.
Picture: Hayward is known for the muskie museum.

Early 30s is a great time to be alive – you’re still young, but you have experience. A powerful combo. The downside is all that weird rockstar shit you believe about yourself is well past its sell-by date, and if you haven’t outgrown it by then, it starts to fuck up your life.

You have been warned. To heck with it…I’m crowdsourcing this entire post.

Exhibit A: This is my business card. From Hugh.

Exhibit B: Again…Hugh MacLeod’s “How to Be Creative“. The entire thing. I know, it’s like 31 different things and the meme only calls for 5-10 secrets.

Exhibit C: I’m totally recycling. “Make mistakes. Publicly. With lots of witnesses. Apologize. And learn.” Danah Boyd.

Its easy to hide from mistakes and its natural to try to keep them under wraps. I think that theres a lot of value to making mistakes publicly. First, that means that youre willing to try new things out. Second, it means that youre going to be forced to learn from those mistakes fast…I get super frustrated when people are not willing to put things out there until they are just perfect. The fact is that once something is in public, it will be critiqued and challenged no matter how fully baked you think it is. This is true for software and its true for ideas. The bugs are found through interaction. I understand why academics love to control and perfect things before they go out there, but often, its too late…Its better to fumble in public than to stay in your house any day. The trick is to pick yourself up, try to correct any misunderstandings, and use it to learn.

Exhibit D: “Assume good faith.”

Exhibit E: Believe something. Work your ass off to convince yourself of the opposite. Almost to the point where you contradict your original belief. Then figure out why you were right in the first place. “Does educational technology matter?”

I’m tagging the folks that left the last 5 comments on my blog.

Kelly Christopherson
Andrew Torris
Mark Berthelemy
Sylvia Martinez
Bud Hunt

Joi is in San Francisco this week. He’s bending the ear of gaming executives at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Take a close look at these two quotes…

“…while there are certain companies and individuals who are bridging the gap between the gaming industry and the Internet, the gaming industry is making the same mistakes that the content guys have been making since the beginning of networked computers. They ALWAYS over-estimate the importance of the content and vastly underestimate the desire of users/people to communicate with each other and share.”

“One way to think about this evolution is that as we empower the user through better computers and better networks, we are going from content to context. We used to listen to records and later CD’s to wallow in our loneliness with self-pity laced teenage tunes. Later karaoke and video games came out which allowed us to interact with the content and feel a bit more involved and less lonely. Now we have MySpace, texting, blogging, Wikipedia and an explosion of online community generating content models. It is becoming less and less about content and more and more about context – less about professional content and more and more about us. The professional content is important and will never go away, but it is becoming more of a platform or substrate on which the users build their own communities, interaction and play.”

Having a foot in the blogging world and another in the gaming world, this hits me close. I keep coming back because I see an educational story inside what Joi is saying. Technology has enabled access to vast amounts of content for teaching and learning. A quality education has more to do with providing the context…the “communities, interaction, and play”.

Full article.

Early 1990’s jam bands that allowed us to rip, mix, and burn are a huge part of why I’m where I’m at today.

I’m jumping back to the college days and taking in a bit of God Street Wine as I catch up on office stuff today

.