Thursday, January 09, 2003

Applying IT to IT - no longer shoemaker's children. Applying IT to IT. Marc Andreessen has an interesting article on applying IT to IT.  I think its fascinating that IT professionals are the most vociferous in stating why automation can't possibly be applied to what they do.  The emergence of ubiquitous networks and great software for managing desktops has turned that into an eminently automatable task.  IBM reports that they can deliver superior service with a tech to supported PC ratio as high as 350.  With a ratio of 1 to 175, we figured Utah would save $7 million per year.  Yet many IT professionals are reluctant to embrace these tools and change the way they work.   Why?  Same reason the longshoremen struck the West Coast ports: they're afraid they'll lose their jobs.  What a waste.  [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] I'm more inclined to view IT professionals as the shoemaker's children who go unshod, although Windley does have a point. My experience is that there is a pretty wide distribution of quality in IT Operations settings. Places like Charles Schwab, for example, run IT operations with every tool and bit of professionalism they can muster. Other shops are a bit less world-class. Both Andreessen's and Windley's comments are worth thinking about. [McGee's Musings] 7:48:02 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Learning and Community. Article : Learning is a Community Experience : By .... Article : Learning is a Community Experience : By Adele Goldberg - "Perhaps it is obvious - you do not learn alone, but you do take responsibility for your own education. (14-pages, 206 KB PDF) * Go to Learning is a Community Experience, published in the July/August 2002 edition of the Journal of Object Technology [SynapShots] Adele was one of the creators of the Smalltalk programming language. She worked at Xerox PARC with Alan Kay and later became the CEO of ParcPlace Systems where she worked to commercialize object-oiented technologies. This article contains her reflections on introducing object-oriented technologies and thinking to the technology world. Lots of good material. I was struck by this definition of an educated person: We think that an educated person is one who knows a little about a lot, and a lot about some focused subject area - one who reads broadly so is conversant on many topics, but one who holds his or her tongue when the hard data is not there to back up the inclination of that tongue. Wouldn't the world be a nicer place if more of us took that advice to heart? Some other excerpts: learning on your own is preposterously hard given the quantity of new material regularly generated. Both filtering and selection techniques have to be taught so as to be able to focus without losing sight of the intellectually stimulating neighborhoods that surround any focus of attention. ... Here is a small experiment to try when in a room with a group of 10-30 people. Step 1. First, ask each individual to decide whether the group should consider the individual to be an expert in object technology. If you are an expert, then signal (by standing up) and remaining standing. (Note definition of “expert” vs proficient professional or virtuoso as defined by Peter Denning in the August 2001 issue of the CACM.) Step 2. The non-experts, those who did not stand up, should find an expert to be physically near (they should physically leave their seats and move near the expert so as to be able to converse). Step 3. Each non-experts should think about a question that relates to object technology, one whose answer the non-expert does not know and that is a reason why he or she is not to be considered an expert. Ask this question of the expert near you. Step 4. If the expert was asked a question he or she could not answer, could the expert now designate himself or herself to be a non-expert and look for an expert who has the answer? After finding an answer, the individual can decide whether to stand up again as an expert. An interesting outcome of this experiment is that, ultimately everyone designates him- or herself as a non-expert at some time in the process, with minor exception. And the exception is typically a developer who, although acknowledged to be an expert, can always find an unknown as a learning challenge but who, in the context of the experiment, was not stumped Although, Goldberg's focus is on object-oriented technology, her observations apply to learning and knowledge management issues in other settings as well. Finally, I have to share one other comment from the article for those of us who have been afflicted with the programming bug at some point or other in our careers. my colleague David Leibs likes to joke: programming is a personality disorder that you can test for [McGee's Musings] 7:45:55 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Learning versus schooling. Beyond Couch Potatoes. Beyond "Couch Potatoes": From Consumers to Designers and Active Contributors by Gerhard Fischer The fundamental challenge for computational media is to contribute to the invention and design of cultures in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Cultures are substantially defined by their media and tools for thinking, working, learning, and collaborating. New media change (1) the structure and contents of our interests; (2) the nature of our cognitive and collaborative tools; and, (3) the social environment in which thoughts originate and evolve, and mindsets develop. Unfortunately, a large number of new media are designed from the perspective of seeing and treating humans primarily as consumers. In personally meaningful activities, the possibility for humans to be and to act as designers (in cases in which they desire to do so) should be accessible not only to a small group of "high-tech scribes," but rather to all interested individuals and groups. While the core message of the article applies to cultures, mindsets, media, technologies, and educational systems in general, my examples are mostly drawn from computational media, and more specifically from human computer interaction as a particular domain. [Gerhard Fischer] [via David Carter-Tod] Gerhard Fischer is associate director of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D) at University of Colorado at Boulder. This group is doing very interesting projects. I have been following their publications since 1999. Fischer's focus is on "computational support of self-directed learning". If I remember correctly I came across Frontier and Manila because of a project that was carried out by the group of Gerhard Fischer. I think it was called DynaSites... or something like that. So, if I wanted to create a BlogTree for my Weblogs, I would have to put the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D) right on the top. [Sebastian Fiedler] [Seblogging News] Following the bread crumbs back to L3D, I started poking around. Looks like a great new resource. In one of Fischer's presentations I discovered the following bit of negative feedback from an anonymous student: I will not ever take a course of this nature again in my undergraduate career, and I hope to find a more structured graduate program with an adviser that is more forthcoming. I will reinforce my strengths by continuing to study in the method that I have developed over the past 15 years. I will redirect my weaknesses by avoiding unstructured class environments. First, kudos to Fischer for sharing both positive and negative reactions to his work. More importantly, however, I wanted to react to the assumptions reflected in this bit of anonymous complaint because it's symptomatic of an important distinction between schools and learning that's caused me trouble as I've increasingly focused on the latter. The more I learn about learning the more I discover how little most school and formal teaching/training environments are organized to promote learning. This isn't new news, of course (see John Taylor Gatto's or Roger Schank's work for particularly strong views against formal education environments, for example). On the other hand, this news isn't especially widespread. The "average" citizen may care about good schools, but hasn't thought very much about how schools and learning connect. When and if they do, they seem to end up asking for some idealized vision of what they think school was like when they were in it. DIGRESSION: When I was at Diamond, I helped create the training function there. I worked with Roger Schank and also with Tim Gallwey of Inner Game fame. I had Tim present his work at one of our All Hands meetings and he asked the group of about 300 at the time to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being highest) on how expert they felt they were about learning. The group average was about 7, I gave myself a 4, and Tim rated himself a 3. I try to think in terms of setting up conditions that will contribute to better learning. That often leads to doing things that don't look much like conventional classes or lectures and may not look like I'm doing very much in the mix. In the short term, this leads to reactions like the ones Fischer reports above. If you do it right, however, and can stay with it, you do have people coming back to you later to thank you. On the other hand, it is a very high risk strategy in most environments. Far easier to give the customers what they think they want. I'm not making claims that I have this all figured out yet. Tenure isn't the answer because by the time you've worked the system to that point, you're likely to have forgotten what's wrong with the system. If you're lucky you land in one of the handful of institutions that get it and support it. One of the wonderful things about the blogging world is how it helps connect you to a larger universe of folks who are more interested in learning than schooling. [McGee's Musings] 7:45:06 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Version 0.1 of OutBlog (the application formerly known as ExchangeBlog) released. Let's spread the word: Version 0.1 of my highly anticipated (well, at least by the two people who read this weblog) Outlook and Exchange 2000 powered weblog toolkit OutBlog has been released. More information (and a sample blog & download package including source code) is available at http://OutBlog.IngoRammer.com. [Ingo Rammer's DotNetCentric] 6:16:59 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

DO THIS NOW. Stop what you’re doing. Read this now. (Or run out and buy it.) You’ll thank me later.… [Aaron Swartz: The Weblog] 10:37:51 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Small World in Greece. Okay, Mark asked for a small world story. I can't beat his friend's, but here's the best I got: In 1998 I went for a backpacking trip around Europe. I started in London and after a few weeks of rainy weather, I bought a ticket one day to Greece. Athens is a horrible pit (except, of course, for the Acropolis) but I soon took off for the islands. On the first island I arrived at - a beautiful rock called Santorini out in the middle of the Aegean - I met a group of 8 or so other travellers from all over including South Africa, Canada, U.S., Australia and Sweden. We immediately hit it off and were inseparable from that point on. We all arrived on the island of Paros a week or so later and rented motor scooters and took off for the hills and soon found ourselves completely lost. It's not a big island, but there's lots of little roads to explore and we did. Finally when we were way the hell up on some road that had a great view of the ocean, we all decided to stop and take a group shot. We stop the scooters and it's all quiet and we all give our cameras to one of us to take a shot (being as we were in the middle of nowhere - not a house or person to be seen) and just as we get all that straightened away, we hear the sound of another scooter! We were COMPLETELY lost, way off the beaten path (or so we thought) and up comes a guy and a girl on a scooter and they're about to pass us, see that we're in need of some photo help, so stop and offer to take our picture. Just at the moment we need it! That was pretty funny and coincidental right there, but it just gets wierder. So we all thank the guy and he grabs all of our cameras (and no he doesn't take off, but he jokes about it) and as he's taking the pictures, he's saying funny things to get us to laugh. Finally he's taking the last picture and he says something like, "Everyone say Australia Rules!" and the two Aussies in our group give a big cheer and we all go back to retrieve our cameras. As the Aussies are getting theirs, they strike up a conversation and within 14 seconds, one of the girls says, "Wait a second... I know you! umm..." And the guy says, correctly, "Yeah, I know you. You're Kristie, right?" The rest of us just gape. Kristie says something like "wow!", but can't figure out where she knows him from. He knows her, he says, because they work for the same company and she's in technical support. There's only one of her so it's easy for him to remember, but obviously there's a ton of people she supports so it's harder for her. Finally she remembers who he is (Rob, I think) and they recall chatting months before about their Round-The-World trips they were going to take. Here's the thing: They were going in OPPOSITE directions - Rob going from the U.S. to Europe and South Africa before heading home and Kristie starting with SA and ending in the U.S. - and the great thing is they remember joking about meeting in the middle! Well there you go: They met. I watched it with my own eyes. In the middle of an island in Greece on almost exactly the opposite side of the world from where they worked together back in Sydney. Incredible. As they say in Spain, "el mundo es un pañuelo" (the world is a handkerchief) -Russ P.S. The non exciting end to this story is several weeks after I left Greece and the group, I was roaming around Venice and walked by Rob again. Since I'm not an Aussie that works with him in Sydney and my only interaction with him was 10 minutes on the side of a road in Greece, I didn't bother flagging him down. Pretty amusing... in that moment it seemed like he was everywhere... From that point on I kept looking for him. ;-) [Russell Beattie Notebook] 10:21:06 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Hello Moto?. Check this new phone out. I was reading Gizmodo's coverage looking for some of the new neato things from the CES, and instead followed this link to an article on omblog called Motorola is rocking again :: Moto Rules talking about how Motorola may outsell Nokia and who's fortunes in general are turning around. Very interesting... I was wondering what was up with Motorola, truthfully, and I've never seen a "HelloMoto" advertisement, so I was a bit surprised by this article. The phone above, however, was found at the bottom of the post talking about the launch of some of their new phones. Huh - most are incremental improvements: color screens, polyphonic sound and Bluetooth. But the A835 is quite interesting. Check out the specs: Motorola A835 Powered with 3G technology, sleek looks and enough features to make anyone drool, the Motorola A835 is here to take you to the next dimension of personal communication and mobile fun. Offering the latest in multi-media entertainment, with advanced messaging, video phone, Bluetooth™ wireless technology, full browsing and a large display capable of supporting up to 64,000 colors, the Motorola A835 is small enough to fit in your palm but cool enough to make you the envy of everyone. Quit juggling all of your gadgets. The model A835 combines a phone, PC, still and video cameras, arcade, music and PDA capabilities in one device. Step into the future and experience the ultimate mobile lifestyle with the Motorola A835. Haptics and unique lighting shake and shine a funky light show when your favorite person calls*, or enhance gaming so that you really feel the crash when you wipe out playing Moto GP™ Videophone capabilities allow you to communicate using voice and body language with friends who have compatible phones or PCs* Advanced messaging capabilities and 3G technology let you send extravagant messages with songs, videos, picture, ring tones or applications to your friends' compatible phones or PCs* AGPS helps you find your favorite stores or restaurants at a moment's notice Bluetooth™ wireless technology allows you to connect wirelessly to compatible accessories and devices Integrated MP3 player Vivid color display, capable of supporting up to 64,000 colors 256 MB of memory Polyphonic ring tones for rich, melodic sound Downloadable wallpaper, themes, screensavers and ring tunes Downloadable games and productivity applications WAP browser with GPRS* Fast, "always-on" Internet connection* Wow. 256 Megs of MEMORY? Is that a typo? Holy crap - that blows the rest of the intelliphones available today out of the water. 64k colors? The Nokias only have 4,200. 3G? Video? Neato. This is very interesting from a hardware perspective... But the question is out there - is this a Symbian phone? I mean, it MUST be, look at the specs on that baby. Heeeellooooo Moto! What else is going to run it? Motorola has a stake in Symbian as well as Nokia and all the rest, so it has to be doing something with it. But notice the UI? Motorola hasn't licensed the Series 60, so they've obviously come up with their own... very interesting. Anyways, this is pure speculation based on a screenshot, but if this phone isn't their entry into intelliphones, when the hell is Motorola going to come up with the goods?!?! -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] 10:19:38 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

bookmarklets good.... Jesse's Bookmarklets Page  [via gammatron (phase ii)]  ...plus links to other bookmarklet sites. [jenett.radio] 10:17:56 AM    trackback []     Articulate []