ReWork Rehashed

Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about the 37signals book Rework. Each of us will write about the three things in the book that we already do, about three things we will do from now on going forward and about three things that we wish our employers would do from now on. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals and Ruby on Rails fame have just written a new book titled: Rework (you can download a free PDF excerpt). Reading it gave me an ambivalent feeling: these authors are obviously very good in what they do and they have managed to build a successful business monetizing different parts of their talents, but the book feels like a monetization effort too and the number of words per Euro are very low. Arjen Vrielink has written a quite damning review on Goodreads.

Nonetheless it has some interesting lessons to offer. It has about 100 pieces of advice for people starting their own business or working in a business. Some of the advice I already practice, some advice I will try to practice from now on and I wish that the company I work for would practice some of the advice going forward.

Three chapters about things I already do:

Build an audience (page 170)
Traditional PR and marketing is about going out and trying to reach people. The ubiquity of the Internet allows you to let people come to you instead of the other way around.

When you build an audience, you don’t have to buy people’s attention – they give it to you. This is huge advantage.
So build an audience. Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos – whatever. Share information that’s valuable and you’ll slowly but surely build a loyal audience. Then when you need to get the word out, the right people will already be listening.

Emulate chefs (page 176)
In this chapter the authors make a case for sharing everything you know, something which is anathema in the business world. They use famous chefs as an analogy. The best chefs share their most valuable recipes in their cookbooks. Why? Because they know that their business as a whole cannot be copied. What better way to show you are an excellent cook, then by sharing your recipes?
I am convinced that there are only benefits to sharing everything I know about educational technology and innovation with anybody who is willing to listen. Doing this is the only way to take part in the incredibly valuable discourse on this topic and taking as much out of it as possible.

Forget about formal education (page 215)
Companies still over-value formal education from. I have personally decided to attend as little formal education as possible from here on further. The key qualities that somebody needs to have are curiosity and the ability to learn. If you combine these two, then there is a whole world out there from which you educate yourself. You don’t have to go and sit in a stuffy classroom and listen to some academic lecturing. Don’t get me wrong: academics are hugely valuable. It is just that you don’t have to join a university to engage with them.

Three chapters about things I will try to do from now on:

Embrace constraints (page 67)
This chapter starts as follows:

“I don’t have enough time/money/people/experience.” Stop whining. Less is a good thing. Constraints are advantages in disguise. Limited resources force you to make do with what you’ve got. There’s no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative.

This is a principle that I am already highly aware of (it is actually embedded in every introduction to any Parallax post on this blog). It is not something I am naturally good in though. I love gadgets and these things often create a lot of extra affordances and thus complexity. I need to tone this down to allow a better focus on things that really matter. First step: “downgrade” my current Ubuntu 10.04 setup which allows me a lot of flexibility (and gives me wobbly windows, that’s not me by the way) to the Ubuntu Netbook edition.

Focus on what won’t change (page 85)
This is probably advice that anybody tasked with working on innovation should heed to. Naturally we like to be focussed on the next big thing. The danger is that you will focus on fashion instead of on substance.

The core of your business should be built around things that won’t change. Things that people are going to want today and ten years from now. Those are the things you should invest.

I will try and use this advice while thinking about the next iteration of our learning landscape. Which aspects are lasting needs and wishes and which are just fads?

Interruption is the enemy of productivity (page 104)
I work in an office with about 10 other colleagues (if everybody is in). During a working day I receive about 50 emails in my work Outlook inbox and have multiple instant messaging conversations. This means that I barely have a couple of minutes without any interruptions. I have to admit that I am probably the cause of many interruptions too, as I constantly share the things I find fascinating or funny with my co-workers.
This is definitely not beneficial for my ability to do work on things that require a bit more concentration and need me to be focussed. It takes a lot of time to write anything which is more than a page of two for example. Usually I can only do it if I work from home and I turn Outlook off. From now on I will try to block a couple of hours every week during which I will sit by myself, turn off my phones, IM and email, refuse to look at Google Reader and just work.
It is as the authors say:

Your day in under siege by interruptions. It’s on you to fight back.

Three chapters about things I wish my employer would do going forward:

Meetings are toxic (page 108, available in the free excerpt)
This one is pretty obvious, but we still have a complete meeting culture. Everybody knows that meetings are not very effective at what their intent is to do and still we have way to many. Some of the reasons the authors give for why meetings are this bad are:

They usually convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute

They require thorough preparation that most people don’t have time for.

They often include at least one moron who inevitably gets his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense

Meetings procreate. One meeting leads to another meeting leads to another…

If you still need to have a meeting I like their simple rules:

Set a timer. When it rings, meeting’s over. Period.

Invite as few people as possible.

Always have a clear agenda.

Begin with a specific problem.

Meet at the site of the problem instead of a conference room. Point to real things and suggest real changes.

End with a solution and make someone responsible for implementing it.

I think we are especially guilty of inviting too many people to meetings and I would love to meet at the site of a problem instead of a conference room, but am not sure how this is done with IT related issues.

Don’t write it down (page 164)
We spend an inordinate amount of time capturing everything everybody says, needs and wants. We have hundreds of Excel files containing lists of requirements, feature/enhancements requests, issues, etc. We probably spend more time managing these spreadsheets than working on the issues that these spreadsheets are an abstraction of.

There’s no need for a spreadsheet, database, or filing system. The requests that really matter are the ones you’ll hear over and over. After a while, you won’t be able to forget them. Your customers will be your memory. They’ll keep reminding you. They’ll show you which things you truly need to worry about.

Don’t scar on the first cut (page 260)

The second something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to create a policy. “Someone’s wearing shorts!? We need a dress code!” No, you don’t. You just need to tell John not to wear shorts again.

This is how bureaucracies are born according to the authors. They consider policies “organizational scar tissue”. I work for a company that, like most other I am sure, is very scarred. Let’s all stop scarring it more!

I have to admit that a list of three was severely limiting when it came to wishes for my employer. I would have like to have the opportunity to add: Ignore the real world (page 13), Illusions of agreement (page 97), Hire managers of one (page 220) and They’re not thirteen (page 255).

5 Things I Cannot Live Without

Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about things we cannot live without. The restriction is that the things should have a hierarchical relationship where the lowest level of hierarchy is the microprocessor and the highest level is the Internet. Each thing should be described in 100 words. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.

Please don’t take the title of this post too literally: yes, even I realise that I will be able to live without these things. Instead consider this a tribute to these five things. Also be aware that the title is not “The 5 Things I Cannot Live Without”, there are many other things that I find way more useful and crucial (think bed, dishwasher, etc.).

So here goes, in a loose hierarchy from local to global:

1. The Microprocessor
What do you know about the microprocessor? If it as much as I used to, then it will be very little! Did you know that the first microprocessors appeared in the early seventies and that they were mostly used for calculators? Did you know that their capacity follows Moore’s law? Did you know that microprocessors not only integrated in computers, but also in cars, toasters, TVs, dishwashers (again!) and most other electrical equipment with some advanced functionality? Finally, did you know the Wikipedia article for Microprocessors needs additional citations and references? Why don’t you get to work and fix it?

2. My iPhone
I don’t think I have yet waxed lyrical about my iPhone. First of all I am late to the party: I have only bought one last December. This is because I resisted buying a closed down Apple product for as long as possible. I really really wanted to buy an Android phone, but all the ones that I tried were seriously less capable than the iPhone. So why is it that much better? Because thought has been put into every single element of the software and hardware design. Nothing is accidental, everything is considered. No other company is there yet.

3. Xs4all
My Internet provider is XS4ALL. There are a couple of reasons why this will be the case for the foreseeable future (even though their price/speed ratio is not competitive):

XS4ALL is consistently the best provider in the Netherlands.
Their corporate values and activism are excellent. See this campaign for an example.
They have repeatedly shown they have a backbone. Their support of Karin Spaink in her Scientology case is the best example of this.
Innovation is important to them.
When you call their helpdesk (at a number which has normal rates), you get competent staff.

4. Google Services
Over the last couple of years I have come to rely more and more on Google’s services. So much so that it has become increasingly hard to even list all the Google services that I have an account for or use regularly otherwise. As an excercise I have used this Wikipedia page to list all the products I use regularly (on Ubuntu or iPhone): Chrome, Sketchup, Gears, Calendar, Gmail, Product Search, Reader, Apps, Feedburner, Youtube, OpenSocial, Maps, Aardvark, Alerts, Translate, Groups, Image Search, Scholar, Web search, Analytics, Gapminder, Trends and Zeitgeist. Couldn’t be bothered to link them all: Google them!

5. The Internet
It is a cliché to call the Internet a “game changer”. However, it cannot be denied that it is the most disruptive technology out there. It creates feasibility spaces for social practice (thank you Benkler) and it forces you to rethink traditional ways of doing things. In the field of educational technology for example it has led to, among other things, new course paradigms, an Edupunk movement and deep critiques of the learning function. We cannot fathom what the near future of the Internet will look like as the pace of change is continually accelerating. I cannot wait for it!

P.S. This post was inspired by Techcruch’s Products I Can’t Live Without.

Summary of and Reflections on “Learning in 3D”, Chapter 1

The first chapter of Learning in 3D titled “Here Comes the Immersive Internet” consists of three parts. The first part gives an overview of the three “Webvolution Waves”, the second part focuses on four convergence points that all lead to a next-generation Immersive Internet architecture and the chapter closes with a short analysis of what this might mean for the enterprise.

Three Webvolution Waves
The web browser arrived in 1993 and was used to connect “to” the information that was available on the web. The web grew fast and businesses helping people with getting on the web (Internet Service Providers like AOL) or finding the information on the web (e.g. Yahoo and Google) where the clear winners of the first wave.

In the early noughties companies like Google and Amazon truly started to leverage “the aggregated behaviour of many users to differentiate their [..] offerings”. This insight combined with the increased ability of people to participate in the web by uploading their own content became the core of “Web 2.0“, characterised by the authors as connecting “through“.

Allegedly the next phase of the web will be about connecting “within” and immersive 3D experiences will be a fundamental part of that. Kapp and O’Driscoll give a couple of examples, mainly from MMORPGs. In games like World of Warcraft people come together in a (semi-) three-dimensional worlds and collaborate as teams to battle other team. There is real economic value in these games as the practice of gold farming clearly shows.

The description of this third phase obviously has much less clarity than the first two phases: we are now in this “webvolution” and we are not sure which of these points are the most salient aspects. I don’t think that “immersiveness” is the only candidate to be at the heart of the next generation of web technology. It could still be that the semantic web will have more impact on social practice. Or alternatively it could the social graph which will be the all pervasive aspect of the new web. In that latter case Facebook seems to be in prime position to be the next Google with their recently announced Graph API. I am sure these trends reinforce each other, but I am not sure that 3-dimensionality will be as important as this book seems to think it will be.

Four Convergence Points
The authors think there are four current technologies that are integrating with each other, creating four convergence points in the process. All these points converge to the immersive Internet. I don’t want to steal their diagram (you can find it on page 18 of the book), so I’ll describe it here.

2D synchronous learning and knowledge sharing spaces are combining to create immediate networked virtual spaces.
Knowledge sharing spaces and web 2.0 technologies are integrating into intuitive dynamic knowledge discovery.
Web 2.0 technologies and virtual world technologies are coming together in interactive 3D social networking.
Virtual world technologies and 2D synchronous learning together can create immersive 3D learning experiences.

I really like this model as it provides four clear spaces in which you could look at technology. The problem for me is that in my job I do indeed see immediate networked virtual space and am starting to see intuitive dynamic knowledge discovery, but I do not see the two 3D convergence points yet. This could be my lack of knowledge and experience of what is out there, in which case I would gladly see some examples and demonstrations!

What does this mean for business?
The web has had a profound impact on the way we do business and organise ourselves. I want to address the points that I thought most interesting by quoting three passages from the book. The first quote is about information abundance and the subversion of hierarchy by networks:

As the Internet continues to pervade society, the scarcity paradigm that undergirds most modern economic theory is being challenged. Unlike currency, information is non-appropriable, which essentially means that it can be shared without being given away. Today, information no longer moves in one direction, from the top to the bottom or from teacher to student. Instead, it has a social life all its own.

The second quote is about how the web allows people to come together without needing formal organisations to do it:

As communication costs have decreased and the quality of web-based interactivity has increased, communities of co-creators no longer need to rely on a formal organization to become organized. Rather than employing an enterprise infrastructure to plan ahead of time, they leverage the pervasive and immersive affordances of the web to coordinate their activities in real time.

The above is one of the most important points (and actually the subtitle) of Clay Shirky’s wonderful Here Comes Everybody and I think this reading group is an example of how this can work.

And finally a quote about how companies have to innovate faster and how this affects the role of the learning function in the enterprise:

For change to occur it is a precondition that learning take place. [..] In the case of the centralize hierarchies, [organizations] must unlearn all that brought it success in the pre-webvolution era and quickly learn how to leverage the Immersive Internet to reconfigure its resources and capabilities to achieve sustainable competitive advantage in a world gone web. […] The perennial challenge of the learning function within the enterprise is to ensure that human capital investment yields a workforce capable of innovating faster than the competition and work processes that allow the organization to adapt to changes with minimal disruption. This suggests that the learning function should become increasingly strategic to the enterprise.

The last sentence is the step-up to the rest of the book. I am looking forward to it!

Questions for discussion
Please participate in these two polls:

[polldaddy poll=3107820]

[polldaddy poll=3107841]

In the teleconference I would like to discuss the following questions:

In what way has your company or organisation changed because of the webvolution? How has this affected the learning function?
What are your thoughts about the convergence to an immersive web? Do you have examples of how 2D synchronous learning and web 2.0 combine with 3D virtual worlds?
What will change when we make the shift from a scarcity paradigm to an abundance paradigm for information.

We will discuss these questions in our weekly teleconference on Monday April 26th at 15:30 CET. Please contact me if you want to call in and don’t have the dial in details.

Learning in 3D: Please Join My Reading Group

My company is piloting serious gaming in the learning domain using an immersive 3D environment based on the Unreal engine. We are on the cusp of developing a game around hazard recognition scenarios that are based on real life experiences. Because of this I am reading up on serious gaming and game design in general. After finishing the brilliant The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell (more about that book in a later post), I now want to tackle Learning in 3D, Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration by Kapp and O’Driscoll.

I have decided to start a reading group which will read the ten chapters of the book in ten weeks (there is a preview of the chapters here). We will use blogs, Twitter, Delicious and a weekly teleconference to communicate around the book.

So how will this work?

Goal
The book provides principles for architecting 3D learning experiences (including a maturity model for immersive technologies) and has lessons on and examples of implementations in enterprise situations. The goal of the reading group is to actively internalise these lessons and see how they can be applied in our own organisation(s).

Participants
As I want this reading group to impact the learning function in my own organisation I intend for about 50% of the participants to work for Shell and for the rest to come from my network outside of Shell. The minimum number of participants is 5 (doing two chapters each) and the maximum is 40 (four people per chapter and incidentally the limit of our teleconferencing solution). Everybody will have to acquire their own copy of the book. (I used the Book Depository to buy this book, as they have free shipping, note that I will earn a small referral fee if you click this link and then buy the book).

Process
The reading group will have a weekly rhythm with a particular chapter of the book as the focus of attention. The following activities will happen every week:

One or more people will be assigned to write a summary of the chapter on their blog (if they don’t have a blog, they email me the summary and I will publish it on this blog). The summary ends with at least one multiple choice poll and a discussion question/proposition, both used as input for the teleconference.
All reading group participants will be tweeting questions and comments about the book (using a designated hashtag, see below).
Each participant will try to add at least one interesting link to Delicious (again with a hashtag) that relates to the chapter of that week.
At the end of the week (actually on a Monday), there is a teleconference where the summarisers for that week lead a discussion about the chapter, using the poll and the discussion question/proposition as input.

Hashtag and aggregation
All Delicious URLs, blogposts and Tweets should be tagged with the #Lin3DRG hash tag (stands for: Learning in 3D Reading Group). This will allow me to try some smart ways of aggregating and displaying the data using things like Yahoo Pipes or Downes’ gRSShopper. I promise to write another post on my aggregation strategies.

When and where?
It is going to be a virtual affair, co-creating on the web. We will start reading on April 19th, will have our first weekly 30 minute teleconference on Monday April 26th at 15:30 Amsterdam time and will close out on June 28th (so we will have 10 telcons on ten consecutive Mondays at the same time, it is not a problem if you miss one, we will record them).

Do you want to join the reading group? Then please fill out a comment with your name, email address, blog URL (not required) and any comments or questions you might have at the bottom of this post. I will get back to you with your assigned chapter(s), some more information on the process and the call in details for the teleconference. You can put your name down until Monday April 19th.

I am really looking forward to it!

DrupalJam in 7 tweets (Awesöme?!)

Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about DrupalJam 6 by commenting on 7 tweets that have a #drupaljam hashtag. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.

DrupalJam 6 was held in Amsterdam on March 19th 2010. I have never really used Drupal, but as a project it has many similarities to Moodle and that makes it interesting to me. Just like Moodle it was started by a single very sociable person with a vision, just like Moodle it is a PHP application and just like Moodle it is the de facto mindshare (if not market) leader in its field. All the similarities make looking at the differences even more interesting. Moodle has commercialised through a decentralised network of Moodle partners, whereas Drupal has chosen a venture capital backed route with Acquia.Martin Dougiamas has decided to commercialise the Moodle trademark through a decentralised network of Moodle partners, whereas Dries Buytaert has chosen a venture capital backed route by creating a company specialising in Drupal services: Acquia, allowing other companies to (often freely) license the Drupal trademark too. (Text deleted and added after a comment by Bert Boerland, thanks!) The DrupalJam was more product focused (in the sense of software focused) than your standard Moodlemoot. This makes sense: DrupalJam visitors only share the fact that they use Drupal (the contents of their site can be about anything) whereas Moodlemoot visitors usually also share a passion for education.

Let’s cut to the chase: During the DrupalJam I kept monitoring the #drupaljam hashtag using Tweetie 2. I then favourited every tweet that I thought was interesting and could be used for this post. Out of the twenty or so favourites I selected these 7 to share with you.

1. tkeppens: Het zou fantastisch zijn de #drupaljam sessies na de conf als screencast te kunnen zien. Drukke agenda laat niet toe er te zijn. : – ( #drupal
A quick translation: “It would be fantastic if #drupaljam sessions would be viewable as a screencast after the conf. Busy agenda doesn’t permit me to attend”. Technology is now at a stage where even for a non-commercial event, this should be feasible. Presentation capturing is something that I have been exploring in my role as Innovation Manager for Learning Technologies recently and it is a market with fast maturing products. I have looked at Presentations 2Go and am also very interested in Echo 360‘s offering (see here for a more complete list of options I explored). I believe it is good practice to separate the video of the speaker from the video of the speaker’s laptop. Does anybody know what is the easiest way of organising this on the cheap for conferences like the DrupalJam or a Moodlemoot?

2. ellishettinga: 2 werelden komen samen, #drupaljam in de Microsoft-/Sogetizaal, Microsoft als hoofdsponsor? Gezellig.
Translation: “2 worlds come together, #drupaljam in de Microsoft-/Sogetihall, Microsoft as the main sponsor? Convivial.” I have a distaste for giving rooms names of sponsors and have tweeted about that before:

However the fact that it is Microsoft sponsoring an open source event is pretty new to me and apparently something we should be getting used to.

3. ijansch: #drupaljam dangerous question in opening. ‘how many women are here’ is so eighties… Make them feel normal, not special.
Women in technology is a pretty contentious topic. Ada Lovelace day has just passed and could be seen as a symptom of more ground needing to be covered. DrupalJam did not have a lot of women attending. As nooble wrote: Op #drupaljam met 2^8 mannen en 2^2 vrouwen (“At #drupaljam with 2^8 men and 2^2 women”). I agree with ijansch that the organiser did a terrible job in the way that they brought this to the attention of the complete audience. Instead they should have asked themselves why this is the case and how it can be changed for the next event. I’ve recently listened to two podcasts that discuss women in technology as a (sub)topic: FreeBDSgirl and Fernanda Weiden both on Floss Weekly. Another interesting project to stay in touch with is Women & Mozilla. Open source projects should never forget that there are also many other diversity and inclusiveness lenses to take into account outside of gender.

4. ijansch: Would be nice if #drupaljam was on http://joind.in for talk ratings
It is always nice to learn about a new web service through a tweet. I checked out Joind.in and have decided to register for an account and try and use it at the next conference I am organising (Moodlemoot on May 26th). Joind.in allows you to add tracks and talks to your event and then provide an easy link to a summary, slides on Slideshare and a way to score and comment on the talk. They have an iPhone app and an open API (so other apps should be on their way). The only thing that might be a problem is that it doesn’t seem to allow for localisation: the whole site is in English, making Dutch summaries stand out a bit.

5. ekes: apache solr stats #drupal understand what people look for on your site. Genius. @robertDouglass #drupaljam
The first tweet that has any relation to Drupal. Apache Solr is an interesting Apache project that sits on top of the Lucene search engine library. It is a very fully featured and fast search platform with things like faceted search out of the box. There is a Drupal project that integrates Solr with Drupal, bringing very rich search functionality to any Drupal website. Good stuff!

6. askibinski: Just learned about the ‘Levensthein distance’. A way to compare similarities between strings. #drupaljam
This tweet had me whipping out my phone to do a Wikipedia search (I use the excellent and free Wikipanion app for that) on Levensthein distance. It is a way to see how similar two strings of text are measured by their edit distance: how many steps do you need to transform one string into another. I have no idea why this concept came up during DrupalJam (I wasn’t at the talk), but I do now have another trivia under my belt.

7. bramveen: Maybe the speaker should remove his chewing gum #drupaljam
Every open source project seems to have a least one “rock star” and Morten Heide self-named “King of Denmark” was the rock star of the day. Morten loves umlauts, the name of his company is “geek Röyale“, and his two favourite words are “awesöme” and “shit”.

Morten is a web designer and was giving the final talk of the day, speaking about the new way of doing themes in the as yet unreleased Drupal 7. The only problem with the talk was that Morten was chewing gum while talking. That and the rest of his behaviour turned the talk into more of a show about Morten then a talk about Drupal theming. Afterwards Mortendk showed some remorse on Twitter: #drupaljam next time im gonna drop The gum it was an #epicfail hope ppl got The awesome shit in drupal 7 anyways. I would say: Keep the gum, the world needs more completely self-involved rock stars…