Friday, December 29, 2006

Beginning with the end in mind

I was thinking about the post at http://appalachianinfosphere.blogspot.com/2006/12/seven-and-half-habits-mightve-been-full.html and decided to follow up. What is the end in mind for this 23 things learning opportunity? Learning the technologies is great (and I have a head start on some), but the end I see is becoming familiar enough with these technologies to either
1) Deliver improved public service
2) Add power to an internal process (and therefore deliver improved public service).

That's the end I have in mind. How about you all?

(I know you just want more parrot jokes).

Thursday, December 28, 2006

A browse thru

A browse thru other blogs suggests I perhaps was coughing during the part about "play". So here's a joke:

Once there was a magician on a cruise ship. He had a regular spot on the ship's cabaret evening entertainment. He was quite a good magician, but everytime he did a trick, his parrot would ruin it but squawking out the secret. For example, he'd do a card trick and the parrot would say:

"IT'S UP HIS SLEEVE, IT'S UP HIS SLEEVE!"

or he'd pretend to saw Julie the Cruise Director in half and the parrot would say
"THERE'S A FALSE BOTTOM IN THE BOX, THERE'S A FALSE BOTTOM IN THE BOX,"
and so on.

Finally the magician told the parrot, "Look here parrot, you are ruining the act! If you don't shut your mouth I'm going to have to wring your parrot neck."

By coincedence, that very evening, right at the climax of his act, just as he was about to disappear in a puff of smoke (and the parrot was about to say "THERE'S A TRAP DOOR, THERE'S A TRAP DOOR"), just at that very moment, disaster struck. The ship hit an iceberg and sank in seconds.

Amazingly, the magician and the parrot were the only two survivors. The magician was lying on a piece of driftwood in a daze. As he opened his eyes he could see the parrot staring at him out of its beady little eye.

The parrot sat there for hours just staring at him and eventually said, "OK, I GIVE UP, I GIVE UP! WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THE SHIP?"

And this is why my blog has only so much room for play...

Tags!

Bummer, I left out the tags on the last post. My apologies to the folksonomy types out there. Next time, definately.

Seven and half habits. Might've been a full 8, but...

I do understand that "podcast" is identified as a critical emerging technology, and therefore there's an inherent value in pushing users to experience the format. So yes, it was worthwhile listening to the 7 1/2 habits podcast -- but certainly less time effiecient than just reading it as a powerpoint or plain text file. It's true that William Crossman, founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures, http://www.compspeak2050.org/Pages/IntroPage.html, makes a serious case that within 50 years, text will no longer be a meaningful medium for information transfer, that all will be audio and video. We shall see... but that's not the case now. And the irony is that a discussion of how persons have different learning styles is presented in only one medium, when multiple media would be possible. Anyway...

The hardest of the 7.5 things for me: Beginning with the end in mind. It's really philosophical, I suppose. I'd suggest that being open to the changability of tools, missions, and goals is critical, because change is constant, and faster than the best lesson planners. Also, that whatever goals you have for your lifelong learning project, it may well turn out that the benefits you derive may be to meet needs you had not anticipated -- as new needs emerge all the time. It's akin to Clayton Christensen's point in the book Innovator's Dilemma (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000); if you focus on the problems you're facing now, you can miss tomorrow's opportunities; which is why the leading horse and buggy manufacturer didn't end up leading the auto industry, and why Microsoft ground DEC, IBM, and Wang into the silicon dust.

Habit 2: Accepting responsiblity for your own learning. This is great and "easy" for me, but in an organization like LCPL it's also important to accept responsibility for the learning of those around you. The 23 things program is an good example of keeping an eye out for the learning of others as well. I'm glad to have the opportunity to work with others as I learn.

A side note: for a google product, the signup interface of blogger is really weak. Comprise could probably do better

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Appalachian Infosphere -- the tail of the Long Tail

The Appalachian Infosphere blog is part of Loudoun County Public Library's 23 Things program. Library staff including me are experiencing and assessing Web 2.0 tools for their interest and potential application in public services to library users.

This post is logically an introduction -- but of course as blogs fall, it will usually be seen at the end of more recent posts, if at all. This is actually a fair example of how a small change can make us rethink long-evolved literary and information-transmission formats. After all, blogs are often described as online diaries. Has any one ever read, or published, a diary in most recent first format? Before blogs, that is. How does that affect the processing of information? And usuability?

In truth blogs fall into most recent first organization not because they are diaries, but because they following a media object model, like newspaper stories on the web, magazine articles in an infotrac search, and like people's "What's New" page from the web of 1994 or so. I'm sure this and other blogging tools have options for flipping the order -- but it's premature to use them. I think though that the case can be made the organization of information prcinples suggest that recent-first, as an order, is far more demanding than oldest-first, both for the writer(s) and the reader. Let's see how much sense this blog makes in the native ordering of the technology.