Hey classmates - we're not the only ones!

I know several of us shared concerns about "getting sucked down the rabbit hole." We aren't the only ones.

"Why technology is so addictive" 

Just do it!

Not to steal what was, at least once, a slogan from Nike, but a post I just read at Lifehacker just made me think of it. To summarize, the post says that we are often so afraid of failure that we just don't even TRY.

Trying to make ice cream
using snow at 20 below.
Why not?  - Photo by me

The post was interesting to me in that I'm currently in this Emerging Technologies class, learning about blogs, wikis and whatnot, and Robin is pushing us to do exactly that. We are being urged to TRY things, to figure them out, to put ourselves out there. To do so is to learn. It is also to invite failure, but so often we forget that failure is also a learning experience and can lead us to bigger and better things. (Anyone seen Meet the Robinsons?)

The post also struck me because of some of the ideas it presented in the first paragraph. "You've got a web site idea, a mobile app concept, or just a loose video concept." Do I detect some mildly prosumer language here?

Copyright and Creativity?

Just watched Larry Lessig’s TED presentation on the new generation, copyright law and the creative culture.  Wow! He hit the nail on the head for how I feel about copyright Nazis. Why demonize something so creative and so (relatively) harmless as grabbing a piece of copyrighted material and making something cool with it for not-for-profit entertainment? Why make kids, and not just kids, live “against the law” as Lessig so accurately describes at the end of his presentation? Why not let common sense into the discussion? For hundreds, thousands of years, songs have been passed down from generation to generation, changed, altered. Even the Star-Spangled Banner “stole” a melody from a popular drinking song of the time!

When we make laws so restrictive that a massive number of people, a whole generation, find their natural tendency to buck the law, there is definitely something wrong there.

I’m reminded of one of my husband’s favorite web finds, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog. This mini-series, featuring Neil Patrick Harris, was produced for a song during the Hollywood writers’ strike. The producers distributed it on the web for free for a short period of time to generate interest and to show that good, really creative material can be produced inexpensively at a time when people were demanding more money, spending more money, and creating mediocre, if not awful, material. After a set period of time, the video was taken down from the web, but not before a huge following was created, a following that was encouraged to produce their own music video applications to the Evil League of Evil. The best were featured on the DVD in the special features, and anyone who sent in a video was listed in the credits. How cool is that?

My husband, both because he loved the movie and because he loved the fact that the producers were bucking the trend, decided he HAD to buy the DVD to support them.

Chapter 5: Prosumers

My husband and I have an idea for a baby bottle. We have contemplated altering an existing bottle, “hacking it” and seeing if it works as well as we hope.

Our daughter’s been off bottles for 4 months now, but the idea is still there, and the desire to create, to create something useful and better, is still there. But even if we were to figure out a better way, knowing how to get it on the market so others could use it, or convincing a major manufacturer to share in the spoils – something us Net Gen folks believe, the “I should share in the wealth I create” – is not exactly an easy road to travel.

Enter Chapter 5 of Wikinomics, an exploration of how consumers don’t want to just use a product as-is, but want to change it, make it better, make it more useful. It really is amazing how much creativity is out there to be tapped, but how difficult it is for some brick-and-mortar business models to adapt.

I’m already familiar with the struggles of the music industry, and with digg.com. My husband is a huge fan of digg. But I hadn’t really thought about the “lead users” before, the farmers who tear the backs off cars to make pickup trucks, although I have tapped into and tried to tap into that creativity. I’m a “power user” of a database scheduling software, and I participate in the discussion about the product with other users, and we often ask for (and occasionally receiveJ) product improvements. The maker of the software hasn’t opened the code up for improvements, though they have opened pieces up for integration and for innovation. They are always open to ideas.

How to use this in a classroom? A learning environment? Perhaps recognizing the creative potential among your learners is a start. Encouraging their innovation, their input. People learn by doing, and this is all about letting people DO things to make things better. It goes back to getting people actively creating.

Chapter 4: Ideagoras

This chapter felt a lot like the previous one to me, and I didn’t experience any huge sort of “aha” moments. Tapping into external “genuinely qualified minds” feels, to me, only slightly different than tapping into the masses. Marketing your unused ideas, asking for help solving your problems feel similar to open-sourcing, but with a commercial spin. It is an open market for ideas, rather than a shelf marked “free” to any taker.

Chapter 3: Self-organization and Peer-to-Peer

When I read this chapter, I thought of three things: I think of Pink’s Drive and how the intrinsic motivation  of people can be so powerful and create great ideas of value, how the various listserves proffered by the database company allow users from around the nation to discuss best practices, and how most groups of people will automatically form some sort of organization for themselves even in the most informal of circumstances, with each person most likely gravitating to their own strengths and interests.

I learn best when I’m interested in what it is I’m learning about. I will choose, of my own free will, to invest my time and effort in what I’m learning because I see the value in it either for myself or for others, or both. I’ve never edited Wikipedia (or maybe I did, once.) but I have offered my expertise on the database listserve myriad times in hopes that, when the time comes, the people of the listserve will help me in my time of need. When I do contribute, I almost always contribute to the group at large so more than the initial requestor of information can learn from my information, and so others can verify or chime in and modify my response.

I don’t see, at least easily, how my organization can benefit from this kind of peer organization. I think there are policies and data-sharing that could definitely benefit if more people could chime in, even among the organization itself – communication is always a challenge. But to open certain things up beyond the organization, to the masses, is a difficult concept for me. How would it work in higher education? The idea of an open-source textbook is intriguing.

I also struggle with how one could use this sort of mass-collaboration in a teaching/learning/training environment.  

RSS Readers & Bringing the Web to You

While we have talked about TONS of exciting new technologies that I'm eager to try and experiment with and learn about, I am very excited about the RSS reader we just talked about.  I've struggled for years to bring together some of my favorite web content, and how to manage all of that cool content coming at me. My husband, an IT guy, has tried to explain RSS to me and my boss and how it works, but I still had trouble seeing the usefulness.

The RSS reader is going to make monitoring my family's photo pages, the blogs of the class, and The Perfect Pantry (my current pet project at home, creating a pantry) so much easier. While it will be a huge time suck, it will also be a huge time saver. Very excited.

First taste

Mirror, Mirror: Reflections on Chapter 2

It is always a bit of an odd phenomenon when someone puts into words the ideas you’ve been thinking to yourself in an amorphous sort of way and never bothered to try to explain. It feels a bit like someone has read your mind.

The next generation.
What will Creation mean
to it?

Chapter 2 in Wikinomics was that for me, particularly when the authors started describing the “Net Generation” as they term it. I fall on the early end of the spectrum of the generation they define as having been born between 1977 and 1996. I got my first email address in 1997. I’ve been playing on the web in different ways for years now, and in the past 5 years I’ve been BookCrossing, flickring, LiveJournaling and now (much to my chagrin) I’m on Facebook.

It was the philosophy of the Net Gen that I really related to. I don’t sit in front of the TV; I sit in front of the computer. I’m skeptical of information I get from many mass-produced sources and I prefer word of mouth and peer reviews. (I chose my daughter’s car seat based on the reviews on several websites.) I value my privacy, and my individual rights, and always, ALWAYS want to be treated fairly and believe in treating others fairly. (Paraphrased from pages 46-47).

I also relate to the ideas about intellectual property, and how the entertainment industry in particular seems to be missing the boat. While I understand and respect their desire and need to make money off the products they create, they are fighting a rising tide of resistance. I’m completely guilty of “piracy” and of creatively producing my own content. I edited video of my daughter’s first steps to a popular rock song and posted it to YouTube for my family and friends. Part of me can’t help but think that it is great publicity for the song and the artist. If I started making money off the video, that’s one thing, but I was just trying to make those wobbly steps more fun than they already were.

The co-creation of content and the openness of intellectual property comes down to a concept that I mentioned in the last reflection, the concept of building trust, fostering trust, and just plain trusting that the masses will, for the most part, not try to lead one astray. I love the idea presented in this chapter about putting things out there for people to create upon, and working out the commercial licensing rights later so everybody wins.  It is value added with little or no cost added.

In the ALOP classes I’ve taken, there has been a strong emphasis that people are generally self-driven and need to work and to learn to be fulfilled. These new collaborative tools are changing the way people work and learn. I’ve already heard about teachers that are letting students create their own videos for projects, and students doing a fabulous job. Students getting to define together what it is they want to learn, like in this class is an example of the collaboration and creation spilling into “traditional” education.

It makes me wonder about harnessing this power where I work. In the scheduling office of a college, we struggle with how to create and set policies for scheduling spaces and scheduling events that conflict with one another or during high-pressure weeks like final exams. What if we allowed the masses of students and faculty access to the current scheduling policy, or problems with it, and a wiki/discussion board on how to make it better? Are we asking for trouble? I’d be more worried about whether or not anyone would look at it!

Reflections on Wikinomics Chapter 1

Open source. Open space. Sharing. “Peering.” Peering into what? The future of business, economics, social circles? Opportunity knocking! Opportunity slipping past so quickly that few can harness it.

Reading the first chapter of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams while sitting quietly on my sofa on a Friday evening seems ironic: the outline of an online, technological knowledge revolution in the palm of my hands in the form of a hardcover book (with a dust jacket – why, oh why haven’t dust jackets gone the way of the breadbox?) and I’m reading it solo.

At first I’m struck by how amazing, and real-time it seems. Having just finished both Leadership Essentials and Methods and Technologies of Facilitation, the concepts are fresh in my mind. In LE, I read Daniel Pink’s Drive where he discussed Wikipedia and the volunteer-driven movement, people who create for a purpose, and sometimes a purpose with a profit. In Methods and Tech, the concepts of Open Space collaborations and World Café conversations open up the possibilities in a facilitation setting and environments both business and educational.

Sharing ideas and “intellectual property” can foster an incredibly flexible, fluid and creative environment where ideas flourish, breakthroughs are made, and people –multiple people and maybe even the company - can benefit. The trust that happens in that kind of situation. I think of the conversations about copyright, and how the Creative Commons can blow it out of the water.

And then I think of chaos. And environmental and ecosystem fragility. Tapscott and Williams liken the world prior to Web 2.0 as the Galapagos Islands, unique ecosystems separated by time and space (pg. 28). But what happens when you introduce species to foreign lands? Sometimes nothing. But often, a foreign species will either die off or propagate profusely to the detriment and sometimes extermination of natives.

Businesses with the old model of hierarchy will need to adapt to survive. And I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing. I think of my organization and the current lack of trust due to a lack of transparency, and I can see how blowing things wide open could immensely improve morale. But ideas mean nothing without action, and that trust would be lost if the hierarchy decided to keep its control in spite of requesting the ideas of the masses. Only when the masses choose to take action against an inert leader will action occur if the leader isn’t open to the ideas it presents. With mass collaboration, it is definitely more possible than ever before.

What about those who can’t keep up? Who don’t have the technology? The world is changing so rapidly that we’ve already determined people must continually learn to survive. At what point does the learning become overwhelming? Or is that where you outsource?! When you can’t keep up, you open it up to the masses to have them help you do your job.


I see the benefits, the amazing things that can happen with this type of collaboration. I also see challenges of trying to keep up, of trying to turn a profit when so much is open, of trying to retain good people while still open-sourcing some information. How do you keep your employees feeling valued?

We learn a great deal online now. Trying to find reliable sources can be a challenge. Do we end up tailoring our online experiences too much to ourselves so we don’t see the other side? Is this a detriment to real news? How can educators harness this collaborative effort for learning? Right now, I’ve got more questions than answers.