Harold Jarche

Social Bookmarking with Ma.gnolia

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You may have noticed in the right column of this site under External Links that my bookmarks are now with Ma.gnolia. I switched from del.icio.us two days ago, after a recent switch from Furl, for reasons that I explained last December.

I saw Ma.gnolia and instantly liked it. The interface is pleasing; there is a cached copy of your page (which Furl had but del.icio.us lacked) ; and the RSS feed is exceptionally nice, with a colour thumbnail and the comments included in the feed. Transferring my data was easy and Ma.gnolia even provides you with the direct link to your del.icio.us OPML file. All 600+ of my bookmarks were uploaded and put into Ma.gnolia, which seems to be much more social and human.

Update: I have switched back to del.icio.us as I had some export and OpenID authentification difficulties with Ma.gnolia.

Homework is the result of poor time management

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Dan Meyer is a mathematics teacher who doesn’t believe in the value of homework for homework’s sake. His argument is quite clear. If the teacher is organised, then instruction and practice can be completed in class. He also found in his research that few students actually benefit from mathematics homework. The “A” students don’t need it and the “D” students don’t do it.

From Dan:

The issue for most math teachers, I believe, is one of time management. If your class is slow to start the period and quick to finish, if your transitions are labored, or if you waste time disciplining your class, then you won’t have the time to get through forty problems. The only year I assigned homework with any regularity was during my student-teaching, when my class management plainly sucked, failing by every one of those metrics and more.

It was such a criminal arrangement.

By assigning whatever practice we didn’t finish to homework (I’d like you guys to finish this for homework) or by using homework to compensate for underplanning (tell you what, I’ll let you guys start your homework early) I was transferring the cost of my poor teaching onto my students.

Yikes.

One more time: my time management was a bust so I helped myself to whatever time I wanted from my students’ personal store, whenever I wanted.

I’m not a teacher, but I see an interesting connection between the industrial classroom and the corporate workplace. When I started working on my own I suddenly had much more time to get my real, client-related, work done.

In my previous, traditional job, much of my day was spent in meetings that were not related to my official work. I would have to spend time on internal functions that added no value for my clients. I would then have to work early or late or on weekends in order to get my billable work done. Even my time in the military was filled with ‘secondary duties’ that did not relate to my operational role. On my own, I can accomplish as much in one day as I would in almost a week in my old office. The only meetings I now attend are the ones that I decide to attend, and those are few.

Perhaps teachers and managers have too much control over the discretionary time of those whom they direct. Perhaps teachers can’t or won’t optimize instruction and practice in the classroom. Perhaps managers can’t or won’t optimize their workers’ time. Where is the problem? Not with students and workers.

Global Civics 101

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The Web is making the spread of ideas a lot easier. Videos, online & offline, are also a great way to get ideas across. I’ve seen a few good documentaries lately and I think that it would be rather simple to set up an “uncurriculum” for global civics. This is my term for developing an understanding about our interconnected economies and societies and the forces at play, both human and natural.

First, I would recommend An Inconvenient Truth, just to set the stage that we humans are messing things up on a global scale, but that we have the capacity, though not yet the will, to start correcting things. You can rent or purchase the movie. There is also an education guide available on the website.

I would also suggest Who Killed the Electric Car?, to show how corporatism stifles progress and innovation. You can rent this video too.

Speaking of corporatism, you have to include The Corporation, in this uncurriculum. I’ve reviewed this film before, and would recommend it to anyone.

Finally, I would recommend Why We Fight, which is available as a free Google video. This movie shows the power of the military-industrial complex, and may have you questioning why we are involved in current conflicts.

All of these movies can help to start some good conversations and they’re better than almost anyone’s lecture could be. With this suite, you can start your Global Civics 101 informal learning program.

Any other recommendations would be appreciated, as this will be part of our unschooling for next year.

Work opportunities in the learning field

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When one door closes, many others open.

I never knew that there were so many work opportunities for instructional designers and others until Vitesse/Provinent closed its doors in Fredericton. The former employees quickly put up a wiki and started sharing information to support each other in this stressful time of job loss and uncertainty.

Paul Lyon’s wiki includes a job opportunities page that has dozens of postings in several professional areas. It’s great to see this entrepreneurial spirit and online collaboration amongst the former Vitesse gang. It also shows how the DIY Web is empowering the grassroots in all fields.

Learn About Value Networks

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Fatsia

Photo by Crissxross

As previously announced (follow link for details), there will be a free workshop on Value Networks, on Tuesday, March 20th in Saint John.

The morning session (coffee at 8:30 AM, start at 9:00 AM) is a general overview and open to anyone. The afternoon session is a hands-on workshop focused on small and medium-sized businessses in the ICT sector. Come out and learn something practical to improve your business. In itself, this will be an opportunity to meet some interesting people in an intimate and comfortable environment.

Further reading:

What Is Value Network Analysis Verna Allee (PDF)

KM and the Social Network Patti Anklam (PDF)

Linux for schools

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Novell is apparently becoming the leader in Linux installations for the education market:

Do these numbers make sense to you – $2,500 versus $100,000? This is the price difference felt between migrating over to Linux or instead, upgrading to the next version of Windows. What’s interesting is that I’m noticing that more often than not Novell is the company making this possible for schools.

I’ve recommended open source for our schools before, and even sent a letter to the Ministers of Finance and Education at the time, but to no avail. These cost savings are significant, but what is more important is that our education community can now own the primary means of production (operating system & applications) of knowledge artifacts, and not some multinational corporation. Students would be able to freely mirror their school computers and even play with new programs. Instead of just being consumers and users of software, students can become co-creators of software and the underlying knowledge.

With corporations like Novell behind Linux, it is difficult for education IT departments to continue to play the FUD [fear, uncertainty, doubt] card against open source. However, as Matt Asay reminds us, MS is not out of the game yet, “Importantly, the price comparison above may not be representative of reality, as Microsoft will likely discount to zero to keep a strong foothold in the Education market. ”

The bottom line though, is that open source in our government-funded institutions is one way to develop a sustainable Province, something that our Self-Sufficiency Task Force should know.

Intangibles

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Jay Cross just created a short video discussing the importance of intangible assets. When examining value networks, which we will discussing in our free Value Networks Workshop on March 20th, one looks at tangible and intangible types of value, the latter described by Verna Allee as:

Intangible knowledge exchanges include strategic information, planning knowledge, process knowledge, technical know-how, collaborative design, policy development, etc., which flow around and support the core product and service value chain.

Intangible benefits are advantages or favors that can be offered from one person to another. Examples might be offering to provide political support to someone. Or a research organization might ask someone to volunteer their time and expertise to a project in exchange for an intangible benefit of prestige by affiliation. These are intangible “products” that can be exchanged, as indeed people can and do “trade favors” to build relationships.

The relationship between intangibles and tangibles reminds me of the informal/formal learning continuum. In each case, it seems that the formal/tangible component is easier to measure, so that is where our industrial management methods have concentrated their efforts. As our organisations become inter-networked, and relationships create more of our value, we realise that we have to pay attention to the silent majority that is intangible/informal.

For further reading on value networks, check out Patti Anklam’s blog at Networks, Complexity and Relatedness.

Building Resilience – The Upside of Down

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I’ve just finished reading The Upside of Down, which is very disturbing, but at the same confirms some of my own directions in life. A good part of this book reads like An Inconvenient Truth, but Homer-Dixon adds more detail about how we got into this mess. Much of the book is dedicated to an explanation of the five tectonic stresses that we face as a civilization — population; energy; environmental; climate and economic. About 80% of this book is depressing to any thoughtful or caring person.

However, there is a positive note — in times of crisis and destruction come opportunities for regeneration. This requires a ‘prospective mind’ that can anticipate crises and prepare for them. For instance, Homer-Dixon encourages building resilience into our communities and economies, so that we are not dependent on tightly coupled global supply chains. Resilience implies redundancy and is evident everywhere in nature.

Homer-Dixon suggests two related tools for helping us to build more resilient communities – the Internet and open source collaborative problem-solving. He sees much untapped potential in using one billion interconnected volunteers to bypass elite special interests and tackle our urgent global problems. Connecting with a worldwide community of interest while creating resilient local communities is the general recommendation from Homer-Dixon.

Advance planning means we need to develop a wide range of scenarios and experiment with technologies, organizations, and ideas. We’ll do better at these tasks, and we’ll also do better in the confusing aftermath of breakdown, if we use a decentralized approach to solving our problems, because traditional centralized and top-down approaches are not nimble enough, and they stifle creativity.

Homer-Dixon’s argument and suggestion to address “catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization” is a solid argument for many of the activities that I now find myself engaged in. These range from the creation of our community work Commons; our local organic food purchasing cooperative; and implementing open source organisational models. There is also the search for meaning, beyond that which was developed two millennia ago by the great faiths, during what is described in the book as the Axial Age, when “… people came to understand that they could use reason and reflection to see beyond their immediate reality …”. What we usually experience is more like this:

When we get in the door of our nearest church, mosque or synagogue, we find there’s no real opportunity for discussion. Instead, we’re handed a creed of some kind. We’re told what to think about values, not how to think about them.

The first step in our renewal as a civilization is admitting that we face a global crisis and talking about what we can do.

Everything is Political

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This blog is not supposed to be about politics; well at least I didn’t set out to discuss politics three years ago. However, Jon Husband recently quoted Dante Alighieri, who said that, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

Then along comes Jon (again) referring to a piece by Joe Bageant that ends with this line – “Divisive politics once again beats the snot out of reason.”

All of this reminds me of my current read, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s, The Upside of Down. From the Chapter “Cycles Within Cycles”:

For the vast majority of us who sell our labor in the marketplace, our economic insecurity and relative powerlessness impel us to play by the rules. And in capitalist democracy, playing by the rules means not starting fights over big issues like our society’s highly skewed distribution of wealth and power. Instead it means focusing on achieving short-term material gains – such as bettering our contracts with our employers. Put simply, our economic elites have learned, largely through their struggles with workers in the first half of the twentieth century, to protect their status by creating a system of incentives, and a dynamic of economic growth, that diverts political conflict into manageable, largely non-political channels. As long as the system delivers the goods – defined by capitalist democracy itself as a rising material standard of living and enough new jobs to absorb displaced labor – no one is really motivated to challenge its foundations.

I’ve previously written about Corporatism Run Amok, but I may take more forays into the political realm, particularly as politics continues to affect my own intersection of interest – learning (state-run education), work (support of corporations) & technology (digital copyright & IP) .