Creating Our Common Ground

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This week I will commence working on the business plan for our Commons. My intention is to start with individual conversations, based on the original premise of three interdependent components of the Commons – cultural, work & environmental. Pragmatically, we can most likely build our Commons so that it offers one important element for each of the three components. The Commons will be a catalyst to our growth as a community, but it cannot be all things to all people.

My hope is that the Commons will become a place from which we can create alternative working models for how we live, work and communicate. Taking some inspiration once again from Robert Paterson, the Commons will show us alternatives to dependence on large corporations for jobs, to the import of fossil fuels and to the mass media for our self-expression:

I am beginning to think that this may be the great work – to build the alternatives rather than to try and reform the existing system.

I have some initial ideas and am putting them here so that the online community can engage in the conversation as well. As I’ve mentioned, the business plan is essential in order to secure the funding (not confirmed) and make these ideas more concrete. It will also elaborate on two themes; the long term vision of a sustainable, knowledge-based community and the creation of the first elements as expressed in the physical infrastructure of the Commons. Thoughts around the physical infrastructure include:

  • Space for teaching and learning that can be used by all of the community (free and/or rented)
  • Free, public access to the Internet (wired & wireless)
  • Member restricted access to workspace (like the Queen Street Commons)
  • Various meeting spaces, some open and some reserved
  • A key element that is not available to individuals or small groups that would make a significant difference to that community:
    • Environmental (e.g. labs, computing power, green building showcase … )
    • Cultural (e.g. a kiln, a bronze casting foundry, exposition space … )
    • Work (e.g. video-conferencing, quality printing … )
    • All (e.g. research chair on-site, community kitchen, renewable energy … )

As we figure out what we want to build we have to determine how all of it will work together and how we will be able to finance the operation once the first Commons building goes up. That’s why I’m not even looking at where we will build until we know what we want to build. I’ve bookmarked resources that may inform the Commons business plan and would appreciate any other recommendations.

Home again

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Our vacation is over and I’m back home.

On checking my e-mail I see that I’ve earned 8 cents, which goes to charity, through advertising on my Squidoo Open Source for Learning lens. I guess that means that I’m still a journeyman and had better keep working. According to Hugh Macleod, “A Journeyman gets paid while he works. A Master gets paid while he sleeps.”

I’m open for business :-)

On Vacation

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Tomorrow morning I will be flying West with our eldest son on vacation; the first in years. We’re flying to Calgary, then travelling through the Rockies, back to my home town of Revelstoke. Therefore, I won’t be posting anything until about mid-May. This will also be my first blog vacation in two years, though I will be checking e-mail from time to time. Hopefully I’ll have some good photos for my Flickr page too.

Anyway – I’m outta here :-)

Kid-powered Learning

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Voices from the New American Schoolhouse explores life outside the usual educational box. Narrated exclusively by students, the film chronicles life and learning at the Fairhaven School in Upper Marlboro, MD which practices an undiluted form of freedom and democracy that turns mainstream education theory on its head. Filmmaker Danny Mydlack enjoyed unrestricted access over a two-year period to produce this candid and unblinking encounter with kid-powered learning.

This video just reinforces John Taylor Gatto, when he wrote on how best to educate our children, “Let them manage themselves”.

U de Moncton receives $2.9M for elearning development

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The Université de Moncton’s technology-based learning group has received $2.9M from the Atlantic Innovation Fund to further develop its Synergic3 technology. Synergic3 is designed to reduce large-scale elearning production and development costs [disclosure: I was involved in the initial business and marketing analysis for this product].

The university has partnered with Desire2Learn and the National Research Council for this project which is estimated to cost $5.5M.

Going the Distance to Calgary

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I’m in Calgary doing some client work where I also met with Camille Jensen, a fellow Informl Unworkshop participant and Editor of the Alberta Distance Education & Training Asssociation’s newsletter, The Distance. Camille gave me a quick tour of downtown Calgary, including these supposedly wind-reducing statues:

calgary.jpg

As free-agents in the same field, we discussed all kinds of topics, ranging from schooling to instructional design to what is the best descriptor for our chosen professions; all in the warm Alberta sun :-)
CamilleJensen.jpg

Camille has put together an excellent newsletter at ADETA (not just because I have an article in it) including a description of Connectivism by George Siemens. Camille’s overview of web 2.0 technologies for learning is perfect for anyone who needs a primer on this changing field. The other Informl Unworkshop participants who wrote articles for this edition include Dave Ferguson (Job Aids), Dave Lee (Pitfalls of web 2.0 apps) and Jay Cross (on the semantics of all this *2.0 stuff).

The newsletter (PDF) is available on the ADETA website.

Constellation W

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Via Jon Husband, one of the creators, is a new website called Constellation W. This bilingual, interactive information site looks at three threads of development – Technology, Economy, Society – that are currently entering new eras. The site lets you follow deeper explanatory links to examine the data, understand the past thirty years, and see what to watch for today. One of the aims of the site is to provide, “A space for citizens to reflect on our collective future.”

The site includes many diagrams and pictures and allows you to add comments in certain areas. This got me to thinking about the wiki textbook project at Education Bridges, and the desire to create useful educational resources where others can add to a knowledge base and let it grow organically. Constellation W is not all that interactive but I don’t think that it would take a lot of additional programming to open it up. I also find that the layout and navigation of Constellation W is more appealing than your average wiki. I’d encourage anyone in the Education Bridges community to check this out (that’s you, Dave).

Anyway, it looks very interesting and I intend to explore it some more. Constellation W could be an excellent web exploration site for students as well.

Permalink Woes

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As all bloggers know, permalinks are the permanent universal resource identifiers used as addresses for blog posts. One post, one permalink. The permalink doesn’t change so that people can link and refer to it over time and it can easily be found.

Well, I guess I’ve commited permalink sacrilege because I changed the settings of my permalinks from the default in WordPress to one with the name of the post attached to the domain name (e.g. jarche.com/permalink-woes/). Unfortunately that created a whole bunch of routing errors, on top of the redirects from previous Drupal (my last content management system) permalinks such as – jarche.com/node/123. I am now back to the default permalink style for WordPress (jarche.com/?p=123) and will not change it again.

I also discovered that all older links were renamed as well, so that what should be jarche.com/?p=123 was for a short period renamed jarche.com/OLD123 , and that style of naming no longer works.

My apologies to anyone who has unsuccessfully tried to follow an old permalink. My stats show that there are many of these each day. All that I can suggest is that you search, in the search box on the top right, for the title or some keyword. Sorry :-(

A Lesson in Receivership

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Life is different from school in one significant way – in real life you get the test first and the lesson follows. I often say that we learn best from our mistakes, so I’ve definitely learned something this week.

One of my clients recently went into receivership. This is different from bankruptcy, as the Receiver informed me today, because as an unsecured creditor I’m not entitled to any compensation for my completed work. The only secured creditor is the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), “a financial institution wholly owned by the government of Canada” (kind of makes me a minor shareholder). The bank gets 100% of what’s left, which equates to about one third of its investment, so the bank suffers a significant loss but the rest of us get nothing.

What have I learned from this?

  • It’s better to be a secured creditor than an unsecured one.
  • Receivership is different than bankruptcy.
  • As one of 30 other unsecured creditors, I see what kind of an impact receivership/bankruptcy has on the local business community.
  • Always, always negotiate some up-front payment, even if you have done work with the client before, so that you’re not out 100% in case of a disaster.
  • The project isn’t over until the cheque clears the bank.

For additional learning, here are some definitions from the Canadian Bankruptcy Dictionary [link removed by request of BankruptcyCanada.com – see below for text of request]:

Debenture:
Security instrument evidencing a debt due from one party to another, payable on demand or otherwise, which can be a fixed and/or floating charge on assets and which can grant the lender broad powers to recover the amount due upon default, including the appointment of a receiver or receiver-manager.

Receiver:
A person or corporation appointed by a person who holds a debenture or other security agreement, giving that person authority to take possession of and sell the asset(s) specified in the debenture. A Receiver cannot manage or operate a company for more than 14 days.

Receiving Order (Bankruptcy Order):
An Order handed down by the Court following the successful petition to have a person or company placed into bankruptcy. In an amendment dated December 15, 2004 this term was changed to Bankruptcy Order.

email received 2 Jan 2014:

Hi. My name is Gordon Sands. I am a principal of BankruptcyCanada.com.

We are contacting you to respectively request that you remove or mark as “NoFollow” the link(s) you have to BankruptcyCanada.com from http://jarche.com/  because the links are not in the same niche as our site.

Kindly advise us when you have either removed or marked the links “NoFollow” so we do not send you a follow-up email.

Regretfully we will be forced to submit, websites not complying with our request, to Google using their Link Disavow procedure. This may have an adverse effect on your site.

Yours truly,

Gordon Sands

Gordon@BankruptcyCanada.com

Update: More information on how the golden era of spam comments has ended, and what likely prompted the email “request” above.

A few good books

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One of my first posts when I started this blog was a number of Book Reviews. Later that year, I listed some Books I would like to read, but I never got around to reading a single one of these. I did read several others, and wrote about this as Worthwhile Reading at the end of that year.

Bookshelf

Here is an updated list of books I’ve read and would recommend:

Seeing What’s Next by Christensen et al – if you haven’t read the innovator’s Dilemma or The Innovators Solution, you can jump right in to this book. It’s an excellent strategic perspective for start-up businesses.

The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. This is the bible if you are starting any kind of new enterprise, for profit or not.

Nine Shift by William Draves & Julie Coates. A look at the parallels between the beginning of the last century and this one. A fascinating read on what could happen as we transition to the Internet Age.

Solving Tough Problems by Adam Kahane. Short but powerful book on working with complex issues.
The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford. Economics for average folks. A fun read with plenty of insights on “why the rich are rich, the poor are poor – and why you can never buy a decent used care”.

A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink. Definitely one to read if you haven’t picked this one up yet. Pink’s book shows the importance of creativity and empathy as critical skills for future success in life. It may have you reconsider your child’s higher education options.

I’m currently reading Ideas, based on the CBC radio program and have just ordered read The Wealth of Networks [The most comprehensive analysis on our change to a networked digital economy. This is not light reading, but is a required resource for anyone seriously considering the implications of the internet age on our economy, our governance and our society.]

Update 2007

The Upside of Down by Thomas Homer-Dixon. 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. The main message of the book is that in times of crisis and destruction come opportunities for regeneration. This requires a “prospective mind” that can anticipate crises and prepare for them. Homer-Dixon encourages building resilience into our communities and economies, so that we are not dependent on tightly coupled global supply chains.

Informal Learning by Jay Cross. Even though I read several of the manuscripts, the book is much better. It’s synthesized, flows and has great graphics. I am a huge proponent of the importance of informal learning for our society and Jay covers a lot of ground in his book. This is a book that you can use as an introduction to the subject or as a reference. Highly recommended.

Getting to Maybe by Westley, Zimmerman & Patton. This is a book about social innovation in complex environments (our world). It covers the stories of many social innovators and discusses the various parts of a common path that many take. This is a path with no map and no destination. Getting to maybe, or “if only …”, starts with the first step of realising that here and now is the best and only place to start. A chapter is dedicated to each identified step, but these are more like checkpoints than actual steps in a process. There are no answers in this book but I think that it may be an inspiration for many who are on the journey of social innovation and need to know that they are not alone.

How Computer Games Help Children Learn by David Williamson Shaffer. This is an excellent book for anyone interested in learning and education, but the title is a bit misleading. It’s more about the theory and practice of authentic learning experiences than specific computer games. Many of games mentioned in the book, like the debating game, are not computer-based, but could be computer enhanced. Shaffer’s book is really about epistemic games, or games that are fundamentally about learning to think in innovative ways.