Liz Strauss offers up another of her provocative challenges; to craft 25 words of advice on social media.
Here’s my 25 words:
Social media wisdom, like all wisdom, comes from experience. Engaged, mindful, reflective experience. Deliberate and intentional practice will yield wisdom. Other experience need not apply.
The picture is of my coxswain son and his crew just after winning a 1500 meter race after months of work and practice to get to that point.
I have got to meet danah boyd in real life one of these days. Her work, as revealed through her blogging, shows what can happen when you drop a well-trained, smart, and articulate observer into new environments. We all learn from her sharp attention to what is really going on. So much better than listening to what others think is going on.
She’s just posted an illuminating perspective on her recent experience at an academic conference in Italy that brought together a combination of young Turks and old farts. It’s a reflection on the slow emergence of new habits and behaviors in shared public settings; a look at how and why blackberries, twitter, backchannels, laptops, and iphones might actually be making meetings better for all concerned. Here are just a couple of quick excerpts. Go read the whole thing.
…
There’s no doubt that I barely understood what the speaker was talking about. But during the talk, I had looked up six different concepts he had introduced (thank you Wikipedia), scanned two of the speakers’ papers to try to grok what on earth he was talking about, and used Babelfish to translate the Italian conversations taking place on Twitter and FriendFeed in attempt to understand what was being said. Of course, I had also looked up half the people in the room (including the condescending man next to me) and posted a tweet of my own.
…
Blackberries and laptops are often frowned upon as distraction devices. As a result, few of my colleagues are in the habit of creating backchannels in business meetings. This drives me absolutely bonkers, especially when we’re talking about conference calls. I desperately, desperately want my colleagues to be on IM or IRC or some channel of real-time conversation during meetings. While I will fully admit that there are times when the only thing I have to contribute to such dialogue is snark, there are many more times when I really want clarifications, a quick question answered, or the ability to ask someone in the room to put the mic closer to the speaker without interrupting the speaker in the process.
…
My colleagues aren’t that much older than me but they come from a different set of traditions. They aren’t used to speaking to a room full of blue-glow faces. And they think it’s utterly fascinating that I poll my twitterverse about constructs of fairness while hearing a speaker talk about game theory. Am I learning what the speaker wants me to learn? Perhaps not. But I am learning and thinking and engaging.
…
What will it take for us to see technology as a tool for information enhancement? At the very least, how can we embrace those who learn best when they have an outlet for their questions and thoughts? How I long for being connected to be an acceptable part of engagement.
I want my cyborg life
zephoria
Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:16:26 GMT
Here’s a fascinating animation reconstructing the flight of US Airways 1549 and overlaying the conversations between air traffic controllers and the flight crew. it really brings home the extraordinary job the crew did. A testament to the value of experience and training in responding to a crisis.
(h/t to Chris Carfi at the Social Customer Manifesto for the pointer]
[cross posted at FAST Forward blog]
How often do you run across organizations that claim they intend to be “fast followers” when it comes to some dimension of strategy and innovation? Maybe I’m simply cranky because it’s Monday, but is there any way to make sense of such an approach in operational terms? The image of “fast follower” is intended to evoke a NASCAR driver drafting behind the leader, carefully waiting for the right moment to streak past and across the finish line. It’s deeply rooted in a notion that strategic success is a function of execution.
Any fast following strategy assumes learning from the leaders as a necessary first step. If you actually believe that the strategy can work, you need to be operating with something along the lines of the following as a theory of learning over time:
In this model, watching a first mover and waiting allows you to start your learning at a higher level and sometime later pass the first mover as their learning process peaks and levels off or slows down. I have two problems with this model. First, it assumes that the lessons learned by our first mover are easily observable and quickly transferable. Second, it still denigrates learning as an ongoing requirement. In this model, learning only needs to happen long enough to figure out the new strategic game and we get back to execution as the only relevant differentiator. It encourages you to undervalue and under invest in learning as a strategic competence.
I suspect that strategic learning is much more likely to follow a logistics curve of some sort. Early learning is relatively slow, followed by a period a very rapid learning, and ultimately a leveling off. If you accept that model of learning, then a fast follower strategy becomes even more suspect. In that environment, first mover advantages are likely to be more pronounced, with something like the following representing that situation:
At this point, being early in my own learning process, I mostly have more questions, not answers. Among them, in no particular order, are:
Someday I
One of the many lovely things about blogging is the way that people redirect your attention to things you
Doing science is fundamentally a state of mind more than any particular set of tools or any particular domain of knowledge.
How do you know when you’re doing science wrong?
Easy:
Read the comments on this post…
More in the same vein from xkcd.
Fostering these attitudes is increasingly relevant in organizational settings. We’re awash in data and in advocates of data mining, information analytics, super crunching, and other forms of extracting insight from the data. Too often, however, the emphasis elevates a new set of experts with a new set of mysterious tools saying “trust me.” Trusting them is no better than trusting your gut or someone else’s gut.
Fundamentally, the scientific method is no more than a method for how to be productively skeptical in the face of pressures and dispositions to believe and the multiple ways to be mistaken.
I’m sure this will be making the rounds. It’s a good reminder about the value of failure. I found this courtesy of Brad Feld. Thanks for sharing.
Great, inspiring video on failure.
(thanks Scott).
Courtesy of Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools blog. Someday, I’d love to get time to go back and learn the physics and math that I once knew.
Motion Mountain
Inspiring physics textbook
This is not your father’s physics textbook. It is the self-published 1,500-page (!!), still-unfinished physics textbook written and designed by your polymath genius uncle who dwells on a mountain with the spirits of departed philosophers (whom he quotes, in German). It’s what a physics textbook would be like if a poet wrote it and made no mistakes. The book is massively visual. There is minimal math. It’s a textbook with soul.
The guiding metaphor of Motion Mountain, and thus its name, is to frame physics as varieties of motion and change. When it gets to quantum mechanics it considers this in almost Taoist terms, as the “smallest change.”
This textbook is a work of art. Unlike standard texts, it is an enthusiastically personal masterpiece, yet still has exercise problems for students to practice. It sprawls across topics you won’t find in any other physics textbook: semantics, lying, color theory, the physics of pleasure. In many ways it reminds me of Godel, Escher, Bach in its witty brilliance, stupendous range, and self-designed idiosyncrasies. Motion Mountain is an amazing portrait of the physical world as flux. It has the power to equip you with the intellectual tools to work with, and love, this flux. Studying it is an adventure in understanding.
Best of all, it is a free PDF book. A PDF means that it is hyperlinked to footnotes and intensely cross-referenced. And it is easily searchable. Every student — anywhere — can download a copy.
— KK
Motion Mountain: An Adventure in Physics
By Christoph Schiller
2007, 1498 pages
Free
Available at Motion Mountain
Greg Lloyd at Traction Software also picks up on the same JP Rangaswami post that I did yesterday. He offers several additional examples of the value of making knowledge work visible as a simple tool for supporting on the job learning. Here’s one of his many useful insights. Go read the rest.
Learn by watching – Then do
Blog446: August 14, 2007 7:22:00 PM EST, Posted by Greg Lloyd…
Each project’s serial file was nothing fancy. Usually it was a few file drawers with incoming and outgoing correspondence, briefing slides, q&a memos, contract actions and meeting notes, all top bound in chronological order – full contracts, formal specs and other deliverables were filed separately. In pre-email days, the project serial file was a pretty accurate snapshot of our interactions with the outside world interleaved with internal notes and memos. We all kept our own date stamped lab notebooks for private jottings.A day or so of close reading and the chance to ask a few pointed questions to the original project engineer (“You said WHAT to Captain K??”) usually got us up to speed on the pulse of each project – not just the formal status and deliverables. We learned to use the project file to refresh our memory on details before and important meeting or decision – or just to reflect and review the bidding. We learned to use each other’s project files to keep track of dependencies and learn how to handle problems. ……I know that an electronic form of serial file can replace the old paper trail, since that’s what I use every day. The TeamPage blog + wiki tool lets everyone look over my shoulder – and vice versa – as we tear off in different directions and do our work as individuals or teams.I rarely need to read any one project in real time, but I know that I can come up to speed quickly, search across all projects, and dive in if I need to. If someone asks for help or sees an opportunity, they can post it if it’s not urgent; add a tag to anything that needs quick action; or IM a permalink if they need me to look at something now. What I can do, all of Traction’s employees can do – only the “Board of Directors” project is private. Board pages or posts – including monthly financials – are cross-tagged to make them visible to all hands when the dust settles.
