Monday, November 03, 2003

Why Open Publishing in Science Matters. New Scientist interview with Harold Varmus: Freedom fighter. Open-access publishing requires no subscriptions to use the digital version, allows any... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 6:49:15 AM  comment []  Trackback []     The Innovator's Solution. The Innovator's Solution -- There's been a lot of buzz going on among blogs and various business publications about the new book by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. It's a follow-up to Christensen's insightful look into disruption, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, and provides, according to Ross Mayfield, "frameworks and checklists for deciding where and how to innovate." I've got the book on order for myself right now, but gleaning the reviews and writings about it, a lot of what I'm seeing has a lot in common with the Theory of Constraints view of marketing "at the margins" as a way of growth and of recognizing the value of "low margin" products to a market constrained organization. According to Christensen, in a Business 2.0 interview, the book's core is about... Why sticking to core competencies is a bad idea: "It's dangerously inward looking. Competitiveness is more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you're good at." The TOC model of developing market offerings -- the products and services and terms that wrap around them -- is all about looking at the constraints and core problems faced by your targeted market segments, and finding a way to position your offerings to address them. This is critical because, while you are selling a product or service, what the customer is actually buying is a solution to their problems. And the most valuable problems are associated with constraints and/or deep core problems at found at the root of many symptoms. Value is in the eye of the buyer. Why it's difficult for companies to sustain growth: "There are many explanations -- bad management, aversion to risk, the unpredictability of innovation -- but the way established companies filter new ideas encourages executives to get it wrong. They have to define new markets using available data, but by the time the data is clear, the game is already over." One of the key erroneous filters of ideas, according to the TOC litany, is based in the "data" known as "product margin." Too much attention is paid to this distorted and distorting piece of data. In organizations that are externally constrained, like those post-bubble tech companies that have more capacity than their markets are absorbing, concern about small margins might kill products, when if they have the capacity to produce them with largely existing resources, most of the difference between directly variable raw costs and revenue can really go straight to the bottom line. Misguided attempts to allocate non-variable direct labor and overhead to particular products, through either traditional cost accounting or activity-based management, leads to filters that are misaligned with what should be the company's goal -- increasing company throughput and revenues. Profitable growth starts at the top line, not with the results of funny-money allocations. How to ensure that your company is the disruptor, not the disruptee: "You know that expression, 'If you build a better mousetrap, they'll beat a path to your door'? Well, it's not true. Someone will build a cheaper, not-as-good mousetrap, which you'll dismiss at first but which eventually steals your customers. Historically, established companies have stayed atop their industries by creating separate organizations that can follow completely different business models. The book describes how you know when it's time to take that step." "Separate organizations" is one way to do it. Another way is to use the TOC mantra of "segmenting markets, not resources." It's about designing tweaks of product characteristics "at the margins" of the basic offering and clearly mapping those tweaks to well-understood segments who will be happy to pay a premium because one of your tweaks addresses their constraint or helps to solve a core problem, or simply solves a problem for them. The various combinations of tweaks and new products adds up to a collection of business models that can be managed without organizational disruption and inefficiency of "separate organizations." Another tenet of the TOC approach to marketing and product development is not only to look at your immediate customer, but also to their customers further down the supply chain. Along these lines, a Fast Company article links Cristensen's Innovator's Dilemma to the success of a TOC-savvy company... At Harvard Business School, Professor Christensen is watching his old favorite industry's most recent transformation with considerable interest. "The fundamental elements of The Innovator's Dilemma are always at work within all companies," he says. "It's like the laws of gravity. But in the same way that airplanes can fly, companies can sometimes overcome some of these pressures. If Seagate is figuring out how to sell smaller, cheaper, and simpler drives to a big new class of customers, it has a high probability of success." Smaller, cheaper, and simpler might mean lower margin. And it can also mean higher growth in an industry whose product line is subject to the acceleration of innovation. Once again, the book is The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Check it out. I'll report back once I'm done reading it if my take on the synopses is in line or off base. [Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog] 6:48:50 AM  comment []  Trackback []     Edublogging: getting started and what the future may be.   Edublogging: getting started and what the future may be. Summary: Have been reading and thinking about the ideas of interested participant-players in the edublogging arena. I summarize, link and respond. Topics: the psychological effect of edublogging, getting students started with edublogging, the nature of the set of educational paradigms after edublogging is fully established. Reading two edublogging entries ( one here and the second here) from James Farmer started me off. Initially he cited blog entries of Seb Fiedler and Seb Paquet , [in response to Seb Fiedler] on equipping college and graduate students with weblogs as a major learning and self-development tool. Their entries are well worth your time. To their thoughts I would add two. First, this is not simply a technology you are trying to hand over to these students. You are passing over the deuterolearning (aka meta-learning and learning-to-learn) torch. Think of weblogging as a major self-teaching tool, a learning-to-learn tool. Even if the student learns only to use the weblog as a self-reflexive journal it has the potential of enhancing self-teaching. If we take that capacity and add to it the self-directed research and collaboration opportunities that are increasingly available on the web, we are talking about a major self-uplift machine. That said, it may now be more obvious why I believe that there are intrapersonal as well as technical issues of weblogging that you and the student must deal with in order that the student learn's to use the weblogging technology fruitfully. Ones which they may need help and encouragement with, with which they have had little direct training to this point in their education.[I thought I might mention this because those already deep into a) weblogging / journaling, or b)research and development, as two examples, are already deep into self-directed growth and may take their own skill for granted. This taking-for-granted sets up a certain blindness to the total set of attitudes and skills that go into high levels of active and self-directed learning. And this blindness, in turn, can render the teacher/developer incapable of isolating and teaching the subskills and attitudes that are involved.] [Spike Hall] Spike is right on the spot with his comment. I have argued for quite a while that careful interface design and a step by step introduction to functionalities and particularities of Webpublishing systems ensures that students quickly master the "technical issues" of weblogging. This is rather manageable task in comparison to "handing over the meta-learning torch". Though I certainly see the potential of personal Webpublishing to be turned into "a major self-uplift machine" (actually a good part of my paper for BlogTalk 2003 was trying to examine the possibility to conceptualize personal Webpublshing as a powerful tool for self-organized learning), I keep bumping into missing "subskills and attitudes" of adult learners whenever I try to integrate personal Webpublishing practices into formal course settings. I don't think I necessarily suffer from a "blindness to the total set of attitudes and skills that go into high levels of active and self-directed learning." Instead, I am searching for learning environment designs and intervention strategies that support a transition away from an authority and curriculum centered approach to learning. Changing the habits and attitudes of adult learners is an incredible hard job to do and always raises a variety of ethical questions. Humans are rather conservative systems not only in a biological sense. To understand why some folks just cannot make sense out of personal Webpublishing practices in the context of learning, it is useful to look at Gregory Bateson's writings. We suggest that what is learned in Learning II [meaning: learning-to-learn or meta-learning] is a way of punctuating events. But a way of punctuating is not true or false. There is nothing contained in the propositions of this learning that can be tested against reality. It is like a picture seen in an inkblot; it has neither correctness nor incorrectness. It is only a way of seeing the inkblot. [Gregory Bateson in "The logical Categories of Learning and Communication"] Now, let's say our inkblot is a certain learning environment design within a formal instructional context (like a grad course at a university). The adult learners all carry an extensive history of formal learning and immediately punctuate the stream of events into familiar contexts of learning: "This is the instructor, she will deliver content and tell me what to do... these are my peers,... they do not know much more than I do, ... what exactly do I have to do to get a good grade here?... what are the resources that I am supposed to work through? ... " Who would want to claim that this is an incorrect way of punctuating (and thereby making sense out of) the average formal instructional arrangement? So, here we are coming along with these Webpublishing tools and practices and tell these good folks: "Oh, forget about anything you have learned about formal instructional contexts. What you really want to do is putting half-digested thoughts, unpolished products, stories of your struggles and mistakes, and your personal questions, worries and the occasional insight on the World Wide Web, for anyone to see. " This is a major perturbation (to use a term from Piaget) for quite a few people. And being a rather robust mature human organism, adult learners surely hold a bunch of coping strategies to fight such perturbation off and to keep there current system running. What can we really do to promote more self-teaching and self-organized learning? Can personal Webpublishing practices support a development into this direction? Or do we need to treat some "attitudes and sub-skills" as explicit pre-requisites for turning personal Webpublishing into a tool for personally meaningul learning? [Sebastian Fiedler] [Seblogging News] [Handheld Instructional Technology] 6:48:21 AM  comment []  Trackback []     Haiku Error Messages.   I found these Windows error messages very funny. In Japan, they have replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft error messages with Haiku poetry messages. They're used to communicate a timeless message, often achieving a wistful, yearning and powerful insight through extreme brevity. Here are 16 examples The Web site you seek Cannot be located, but Countless more exist. Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent, and reboot. Order shall return. Program aborting: Close all that you have worked on. You ask far too much. Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death. No one hears your screams. Yesterday it worked. Today it is not working. Windows is like that. Your file was so big. It might be very useful. But now it is gone. Stay the patient course. Of little worth is your ire. The network is down. A crash reduces Your expensive computer To a simple stone. Three things are certain: Death, taxes and lost data. Guess which has occurred. You step in the stream, But the water has moved on. This page is not here. Out of memory. We wish to hold the whole sky, But we never will. Having been erased, The document you're seeking Must now be retyped. Serious error. All shortcuts have disappeared. Screen. Mind. Both are blank. Found on Zagula. [Craig Burton: logs, links, life, and lexicon] [Handheld Instructional Technology] 6:47:51 AM  comment []  Trackback []     A very nice collection of resources for science students (both high school and....   A very nice collection of resources for science students (both high school and college) from WolframResearch and Eric Weisstein (includes:  Math,  Physics,  Chemistry,  Astronomy,  Scientist Biographies).   A list of 37,000+ mathematical functions.  Nice tools for creating MathML (mark-up language) from expresions and the ability to convert from MathML to a GIF/JPEG.   An online integrator.  Mathematical graphics gallery.  Very nice. [John Robb's Weblog] [Handheld Instructional Technology] 6:47:14 AM  comment []  Trackback []

© Copyright 2004 Gail Marsella. Last update: 6/27/2004; 7:18:08 PM.

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