Little Brother

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I picked up Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother for my son this weekend and read it myself on the plane home. I don’t read much fiction but I really enjoyed this one, which I feel is a much better story than Eastern Standard Tribe, the only other book of his I’ve read.

I really couldn’t put the book down. It reminded me of books like Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Snow Crash, and I think that it will resonate with teenagers (I found it in the Teen section of the bookstore) as well as anyone interested in technology, culture and the limits of state-controlled security.

Little Brother is available as a free download (Creative Commons Licensed) so you don’t have to outlay any cash. I personally prefer the paper format for longer reads. Here’s the opening paragraph:

I’m a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco’s sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world. My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced “Winston.”

*Not* pronounced “Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn” — unless you’re a clueless disciplinary officer who’s far enough behind the curve that you still call the Internet “the information superhighway.”

I know just such a clueless person, and his name is Fred Benson, one of three vice-principals at Cesar Chavez. He’s a sucking chest wound of a human being. But if you’re going to have a jailer, better a clueless one than one who’s really on the ball.

“Marcus Yallow,” he said over the PA one Friday morning. The PA isn’t very good to begin with, and when you combine that with Benson’s habitual mumble, you get something that sounds more like someone struggling to digest a bad burrito than a school announcement. But human beings are good at picking their names out of audio confusion — it’s a survival trait.

I grabbed my bag and folded my laptop three-quarters shut — I didn’t want to blow my downloads — and got ready for the inevitable.

“Report to the administration office immediately.”

Open Source & Business

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I’m preparing a workshop for later this month and one of the topics will be the rise of open source and the business models around it. Here are some interesting sites and comments that I’ve come across lately:

Matt Asay: “The benefits of SaaS [software as a service] also point to its greatest flaw: it’s the ultimate lock-in scenario when it comes to your data, even though it “liberates” the user from software. In fact, it’s this very liberation that creates the problem. If you don’t have the software, you really don’t have the data, no matter the vendor’s data policy. My data qua data is only as useful as the software used to open it up and read it.”

The Economic Times: “Clearly, the IPR-based [intellectual property rights] model for innovation is just not working. Strong IP protection is encouraging protectionism and is harming the way science is done. Many more patents are taken out to stop others from working than to protect one’s own research. It is premised on very high costs of development, that are sought to be recovered through high monopoly pricing of products.”

Dave Snowden: “… I think the position deeply confuses the concept of open source with that of not having to pay for things. It also fails to understand that all business models make money somewhere, the issue is where and (to my mind the most important thing) the degree of transparency of said business model. ”

Guillaume Lebleu: “The idea is to not view open source as an all or nothing strategy, but rather as a marketing technique to segment your market and maximize revenue, except that in the open source case, the revenue is mostly intangible.” [follow link for charts]

I’ll be summarizing my workshop and posting here by the end of the month.

Mailserver Down

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If you’ve sent any e-mail messages to the @jarche.com address this past week, i may have missed it, as we’re having some technical issues with the mailserver. My posted e-mail still works though – hjarche AT gmail DOT com.

Update: All is working now :-)

The science of learning

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Teaching may be an art but there is a mountain of science behind human cognition. Unfortunately it is often ignored or misunderstood in educational and training institutions. The local early French immersion debate sparked by our provincial government was a case in point that educational decisions do not seem to require scientific evidence.

Donald Clark has a post on 10 facts about learning that should have everyone in the learning profession nodding their heads:

  1. Spaced Practice [how to develop any skill is through practice and appropriate feedback]
  2. Cognitive overload [reduce the load and improve learning]
  3. Chunking [PDF on chunking techniques used by air traffic controllers]
  4. Order [such as learning a second language]
  5. Episodic and semantic memory
  6. Psychological attention
  7. Context
  8. Learn by doing
  9. Understand peer groups
  10. Murder the myths [e.g. learning styles, Bloom’s taxonomy]

To be considered professionals, we have to hold ourselves accountable for our practices. So why do we still have 50 minute classes; delivery of facts instead of affording time for practice; and a prejudice for text literacy, to name just a few of our common practices. Donald has highlighted only ten science-based factors influencing learning but there are many more hidden in the closet.

Retail Sales Community

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There are a lot of retail stores in this country and most are so small that they don’t have dedicated HR, training or development staff. Professional development is not often part of the life of a retail sales clerk in a small or even medium-sized business.

Enter 3point5.com, with a community that links retail sales professionals with manufacturers of the products that they will be selling. There are specific modules on brand-name products as well as general information on broader activities, such as watersports for outdoor equipment outlets.

Sara at Wanderlust Outfitters here in Sackville tells me that all of her staff use the online campus and there are even prizes and deals to be had for members.

The business model for 3point5 seems simple enough – aggregate a community that cannot afford custom training or job performance support, link this community to those who would benefit from a more informed retail sector (wholesalers & manufacturers) and then make it very easy for these communities to connect. The same model applies to many other markets and I’m working on a couple at this time.

Community is king, IMHO.

School Buses – A symptom of a larger problem

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CBC News reports that:

The P.E.I. government will be taking about a third of its school buses off the road immediately, and pulling the rest on Thursday and Friday after problems were found in some of the vehicles, the province announced …

All of the province’s older buses, 104 of the 320 vehicles, were being pulled off the road Wednesday. Students who had been dropped off at school already would be shuttled back home using newer buses and could expect long delays.

This is one symptom of our industrial school system. We are addicted to cheap transportation. Eighty years ago we closed down local schools and created factory schools that required a bus system to transport students back and forth each day, using large quantities of fossil fuels. Gas prices will continue to go up and therefore the cost of our aging infrastructure maintenance will increase. Industrial schools were premised on cheap transportation and centralised control. It’s time to consider decentralisation, especially since we have the information and communications technologies to support a wider variety of schools and administrative options. As with learning, one size no longer fits all.

The same can be said for the way that we structure our workplaces and our cities. We need to look at long-term options that let us live in a more environmentally sustainable manner. More people have to understand the scope of the problem and we have to keep pushing the issue, especially with politicians, planners and anyone in charge of publicly-funded organisations.

Marketing Yourself as a Free-agent on the Internet

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This is a follow-up post from my presentation on Marketing Yourself as a Free-agent on the Internet which I gave this afternoon at the Atlantic Internet Marketing Conference.

Some links for further information:

Small Business Blogs

Commoncraft Explanatory Videos on Blogs, RSS, etc.

Business Blog Consulting

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Book: Naked Conversations

Web Tools Diagram

My perspective on the Benefits of Blogs in 2005

Independent-mindedness

Cognitive Surplus

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This is a connecting-the-dots post. Jim McGee discusses Clay Shirky’s recommendation to start looking at how we can leverage “cognitive surplus”:

The first order of business for business is to immediately appropriate Shirky’s term. Organizations that care about innovation and adaptive capacity should begin talking about “cognitive surplus”. Look for ways to measure it, if only crudely, and increase it.

Dave Pollard also talks about the need to spend time making sense of data and that by 2020 this will become a full-time vocation for some people:

The main complaint from businesspeople and the public about information in 2020? This hasn’t changed since 2008 — it’s still information overload. But at least in 2020 the value of information intermediaries has been rediscovered — people who are skilled at (and have time to) ‘make sense’ of the raw information coming at us in unmanageable amounts. And as a result a little more attention is paid to the meaning, implications and possible actions that stem from all this information.

More people are working in creative fields today, because if your work is not creative then it will likely be outsourced to a cheaper labour market or done by a computer. That makes creativity a more valuable skill, but being creative isn’t something you can just turn on and off. Just ask any artist.

The notion of cognitive surplus now becomes a critical business attribute. How do I stay creative and therefore competitive? Some companies give you time to pursue other activities but the norm is to look busy while “at work”.

The notion that moving from consuming broadcast media to creating interactive media is now engaging a new generation is quite fascinating. Just think of all the hours spent watching TV that can now be used to generate ideas – some good and many bad – but they’re being generated on an enormous scale. Now take this idea one step further and think of all the time wasted in the workplace just consuming – listening at meetings; reading directives, waiting for someone else to make a decision; commuting; etc. Imagine what could happen when an entire organisation can use all of its cognitive surplus.

Walled Gardens

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Following up on Boring is Good, I think that the major barrier to use of these systems, whether collaboration or learning-oriented, is the “walled garden” framework. If I have “to go” somewhere, then that’s a barrier to use. E-mail comes to me, so it’s easy. Personally, I prefer using my feed aggregator to follow people and news. I use my blog and then perhaps Facebook to write once and publish to many. I find these tools EASIER than e-mail, but I’ve been using them for a long time.

For small groups, e-mail still works well, even though many of us have seen its limitations in terms of finding something buried in the pile. What will work are small applications or widgets that let the learner/user add what is needed at the time. The problem with most organisations (schools, businesses, universities) is that they force the learner to adopt to their system. And what makes it worse for the learner is that they cannot transport any artifacts from one garden to another. This begs the question, how can walled gardens enable cross-pollination?

A simple method for online collaboration for an educational institution would be to ask each student and staff member to have a blog. it doesn’t matter which blog platform is chosen and not everyone has to use the same one. For course work that requires posting of information or conversation around it, just decide upon a common Tag for that course, lesson or theme. Add in social bookmarks, wiki spaces for collaborative work and maybe a social network and let everyone use whatever plug-ins they need. All the institution needs to do is provide some aggregation, cataloguing and external indexing and there you have a real “Learning management System”. The testing function can be kept separate from the learning (as it should be), so there’s no need for all those tracking features.

That is how how your walled garden can become a resilient and growing ecosystem.

Photo by recursion_see_recursion

Boring is good

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I thought that enterprise top-down software was a thing of the past and that small pieces loosely joined was the new model, but I’ve been in learning hell with a community of practice platform that uses the walled garden metaphor to the extreme.

Christopher Sessums refers to Clay Shirky’s comment in Here Comes Everybody, that “Communication tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring” . Christopher adds:

In other words, it’s not the invention of the tool that holds value; it’s the tool’s ubiquitousness that contains the value which ultimately leads to profound social changes.

Similarly, the tools that support virtual communities probably won’t be very interesting until they become invisible, everyday components in our lives. For some, this is already the case and as such we are beginning to see new and powerful means to share, commune, and identify with one another.

Message to tool builders – you cannot be ubiquitous inside a walled garden.

I have spent a few days trying to figure out my client’s system. This will be a larger problem when a casual computer user has to make sense of all of the functions as well as the underlying model of the platform.  Having created several online communities and participated as a member and a moderator of many more, I can’t see how a community can grow if there is any difficulty in using the technology. The only case where a complicated system will work is when the option of not using it is unacceptable. The litmus test for any community software should be, “is it easier than e-mail?”, because that is what most users will compare it to.