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Tom Woodward

2015 week 7 in review | D'Arcy Norman dot net - 1 views

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    "Audrey Watters: It's gonna take more than a 'genius hour'. I've tried to do something somewhat like this - it's essential for my team to have time to explore, create, play, discover, etc., and they can't do that if they're expected to be "on task" 100% of the time. A big part of our role in the Technology Integration Group is to go deliberately off script, off-piste, and do things that we think are worth trying. Even if (especially if?) it's not an Official Project. But, it's hard to sustain when Real Projects and Deadlines loom and suck up all of the available time. So we have cycles. There are weeks where we're all "on task", and weeks where we're exploring new stuff. "
Tom Woodward

Five years, building a culture, and handing it off. - Laughing Meme - 0 views

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    I/we need to consider this with our team and education more broadly. "Theory 1: Nothing we "know" about software development should be assumed to be true. Most of our tools, our mental models, and our practices are remnants of an era (possibly fictional) where software was written by solo practitioners, but modern software is a team sport. Theory 2: Technology is the product of the culture that builds it. Great technology is the product of a great culture. Culture gives us the ability to act in a loosely coupled way; it allows us to pursue a diversity of tactics. Uncertainty is the mind-killer and culture creates certainty in the face of the yawning shapeless void of possible solutions that is software engineering. Culture is what you do, not what you say. It starts at the top. It affects everything. You have a choice about the culture you promote, not about the culture you have. Theory 3: Software development should be thought of as a cycle of continual learning and improvement rather a progression from start to finish, or a search for correctness. If you aren't shipping, you aren't learning. If it slows down shipping, it probably isn't worth it. Maturity is knowing when to make the trade off and when not to. I had some experience with this at Flickr, and I wanted to see how far you could scale it. My private bet was that we'd make it to 50 engineers before things broke down. Theory 4: You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. Your improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying. Theory 5: If you want to build for the long term, the only guarantee is change. Invest in your people and your ability to ask questions, not your current answers. Your current answers are wrong, or they will be soon. "
Tom Woodward

The New York Times Accidentally Invented a New Country, and the Internet's in Love | Ad... - 0 views

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    "Sometimes a mistake is so embarrassing, it cycles all the away around the shame circle and becomes kind of awesome. Today's case in point: Kyrzbekistan, a country accidentally invented by a New York Times piece that meant to reference the Central Asian nation Kyrgyzstan."
Yin Wah Kreher

Federated Education: New Directions in Digital Collaboration | Hapgood - 2 views

  • And my sense is that this sort of thing happens almost every day — someone somewhere has the information or insight you need but you don’t have access to it. Ten years from now you’ll solve the problem you’re working on and tell me about the solution and I’ll tell you — Geez, I could have told you that 10 years ago. How does this happen? Why does communication break? One answer to that is right in front of us. This is a letter, addressed to one person who might find it interesting. Clarke couldn’t have addressed it to the folks at APL because he didn’t know they would be interested.
  • Carol Goman calls this phenomenon “Unconscious Competence”. You don’t know the value of what you know. It’s not just that Clarke didn’t send his letter to the right people. It’s that Clarke didn’t think there was that much of interest to tell. He sent out that letter, but for the ten years before that that he had had that idea, he didn’t send letters to anyone.
  • There’s a broad feeling that social media has solved this problem. I think it’s solved a lot of it. But as I think we’ll see, there’s a lot left to improve.
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  • The first problem is that social media tends to get only a certain kind of idea down.
  • These platforms are conversational which makes us overly concerned with publishing interesting stuff.
  • But here’s the problem — I’m embedded within a pretty advanced group of people in educational technology. Ideas that we think are common might be revolutionary for others. But we’ll never produce posts or tweets about them because everyone in our clan already knows them.
  • And the stuff that we do produce assumes you share our background, so it’s not always readable outside our clan.
  • But for a nontrivial set of things if information is going to useful to the circles it moves to it is going to need to be recontextualized and reframed.
  • different technologies excel at different stages.
  • federated wiki which allows the sort of communal wiki experience, but also supports those earlier stages of the knowledge life cycle.
  • You’re looking for a system that produces what Polanyi called “spontaneous order”.
  • Minority voices are squelched, flame wars abound. We spend hours at a time as rats hitting the Skinner-esque levers of Twitter and Tumblr, hoping for new treats — and this might be OK if we actually then built off these things, but we don’t. We’re stuck in an attention economy feedback loop that doesn’t allow us silent spaces to reflect on issues without news pegs, and in which many of our areas of collaboration have become toxic, or worse, a toxic bureaucracy. We’re stuck in an attention economy feedback loop where we react to the reactions of reactions (while fearing further reactions), and then we wonder why we’re stuck with groupthink and ideological gridlock.
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