Entries Tagged 'Observations' ↓

I’ve listened to bits and pieces of Clay Shirky before but listening to his entire talk made me think in a practical way about the impact of large numbers of connections and the fact that having more numbers of things increases these connections exponentially.  The thing I think we need to be careful of is that we are using our numbers and our connections for.  I’m starting to think this idea of ‘value’ will become more tangible and measurable than money, maybe our currency will change over time, certainly sites such as BookMooch suggest this might be the case.

Now I don’t care much about money I’m not an economist or anything like that but I do care about what people in my world care about.  And obviously a shift in economics is going to have an impact on our education, social lives and the way we draw meaning from our lives.  In trying to understand this idea I have explored lots of different angles

The Wikinomics playbook talks about the shift towards a paradigm where ‘the goals is a refined idea… not an idea beaten into consensus!’.   I think a focus on the abstract concept of money is part of the problem and that is why we end up with inferior stuff all the time. We all know this that because the deadline, profit, money has to happen we put all the really good ideas on hold and let them go bad, and most of what we do is inefficient and generally bad for long term growth.  Now this seems to effect us both indvidually and in business.

The current world is a world of goals and achievement, they are how we decide if we’re doing the right thing. Goals and achievement seem to be the wrong language for our new world. They suggest that something is over at a point.  But it is never over and usually this prevents us as workers from doing a good job or learners from learning new things.  It makes us fear anything that will take us off the path of achievement and goals.   But if in the world we are moving into they lose value what will they be replaced by?  I think it will be a much stronger sense of true value and the processes that are influential in ensuring this.  Thinking about things in those terms makes articles such as this one, the standard look at your outcomes the create action plans etc.. a bit hard to swallow for me.

So my thoughts on the ‘value’ of work have intesected with a couple of articles I have read recently about the growth mindset and being ‘Open To Growth‘ and that this helps us feel connected to others and at the same time achieve more and feel more valued for our achievements because we’re not competing and always feeling bad that someone is doing better.  Whichever way we look at it these ideas of value, achievement, growth and worth all mean that the way we approach our everyday work needs to change.

It almost needs us to reverse our thinking:

• We need to take value from the things we do now
• We need to thinking long-term as a way to create more value in the things we do now in the future

I know this seems to be a bit of a fuzzy kind of idea but it’s one I hope to develop through my work and study.  For now at a practical level the important thing for me personally is that each day I am doing things that I believe contribute to the whole and that also provide value in and of themselves.

This usually means each day I spend some time working on products that are useful to others (videos, lesson plans, blogs), I spend some time reviewing what other people are doing and I spend some time documenting (through videos or blogs) the process I go through to achieve a product.

Each of these activities leads me in slightly different directions but they all end up contributing to each other.  Slowly I’m begining to get to the point where I can do much more in much less time and I like the things I work on a lot more.

If anyone has any really good resources for planning for constant value rather than achievement I’d love to read them.

I wonder if it happens to everyone this way.  I’ve had two interesting experiences lately:

• Overwhelming sense of not seeing the connections in my RSS and getting fed up with too many similar types of posts or posts that don’t mean alot to me
• Twitter rejection – I tried to follow someone who I thought would have most of the answers but they didn’t want me

So to clarify what I was learning from all these people I’ve reorganised my RSS and in the process revisited a lot of blogs, gone back into the history, checked resources and found out their names.  The names thing was especially important for me as you read a lot of comments and it can be difficult to put the comments in perspective.  I think after doing this exercise I have a much better understanding of who the people are in my network and where to go for different types of information.  Not only does this make me feel more connected to my community as a reader and watcher it helps me understand when I can most usefully participate in the conversation (or something like that).

In the process I created this mind map to help me understand.  It’s a work in progress. You’re welcome to join me.  MindMeister is collaborative so I can share my mind map with you if your interested.  Also I’d be really interested if other people have people they trust and go back to time after time

Other resources for understanding your network:

• Google Touch

Other writings about networks

• Musings about social and g/local cultures
• Rhizomes and blogging – public/private groupwork and the establishment of trusted nodes
• The Techne-mentor
• Forrester’s New Social Technolographics report
• 6 Degrees of Professional Development

I watched this video and the part that really struck me was open communication, freedom to share, decentralisation of authority, market as a conversation. These all have a really big impact on learning. The traditional roles of instructional designer and teacher are being challenged.

It seems like part of all this is learning to be online:

• Teaching different reading skills
• Finding entry points for students
• Introducing systems (from tagging conventions to software to groups of people)
• Telling students when they’ve missed something

The value to learning is real. Engagement. Real life skills. Real life relationships. Articulate students armed with measurable results.

The difficulty is it can be time-consuming and challenging. Perhaps the answers lie within and outside the learning communities. Peer assessment, public feedback, mentoring. These are the types of activities that I think could make for rich, dynamic experiences.

I’m not sure how you can get Rick rolled more than once in your life. It’s basically where you open a link and you’re web browser pops open with Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give you up and you can’t get rid of the noise until you’ve closed about a billion close windows each with a song lyric instead of ‘Are you sure you want to close?’. Anyway getting Rick rolled sucks but… it’s pretty interesting that your computer can make you perform a physical behaviour.

I can’t wait until we get something like ‘Interactive FlashTube’ where you can actually click on Paris Hilton’s clothes to remove them. Or watch a choose your own adventure video. Or put instructional videos online with questions throughout.

I saw this video awhile ago but I remember at the time it made me understand something about Web2.0 and also something about visual communication.

We are in the middle of all this – the web, blogs being online. The temptation at least for me is to say give me the final version. So my first thought as I start the course is to try to remember that things will change. The technology, the blogs, the teaching, the students it’s all going to change. But it is building blocks. Social bookmarking, sharing and tagging the web will give way to better semantic systems etc.