Why do we do what we do? Some might respond that asking such questions is a typical first-world problem, that it’s the modern equivalent to trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head because with so many people going hungry in the world and in our own country, how dare we waste time entertaining such things as “motivation.” It should be pretty damn clear that we do what we do so that we can feed ourselves and our families and keep out the dangers of the outer world. It’s all about higher and higher levels of survival. Once you have enough bread for the day, then you need to make sure that you have enough bread for the week and then once you have that you need to make sure that you never go without having enough bread. But can one ever have enough bread?

During 1980s and early 1990s I worked for a local telco as a well-paid technician. We worked in a union-shop so whenever we worked overtime we got time-and-a-half and if we worked enough over-time early in the week we could reach double-time. With construction booming in Southern California there was a lot of over-time to be had. I noticed that the technicians who were the best at what they did liked getting the over-time pay but were motivated to do the quality job that they did because they liked fixing problems and liked being good at it. The technicians who were just about getting the over-time pay rarely were the ones one could count on to get the job done right the first time. In fact, for all of the time they put in, they could be guaranteed as spending most of their time avoiding work. And neither group like having management breathing down their necks, telling them what to do at every turn. Even the self-motivated ones would let things slip through the cracks because micro-managing stole their incentive to do better. Just like the video said, getting properly compensated helped, but it was no guarantee that the job would get done. When I left the phone company to go teach we were working so much overtime that it was almost a 50% cut in pay for me to leave. And even much later when I left California to come to Florida I took another huge cut in pay. One has to make a living and should be able to do so without resorting to endless part-time gigs, but it’s not about the pay. It’s unfortunate that it’s generally only highly funded companies like Google, where they have a 20% time policy where employees can work on personal projects for 20% of their on-job time, where they explore such things as “motivation.” Too bad.

Very funny video, but did you notice he said that his district dropped a macbook on him so that he could support a school-site that runs macs only and he didn’t know what to do with the thing. It’s all meant to be fun and games, but his “tech answer looking for problems” set-up brought up a whole host of memories from my thirteen-years as a public school teacher who at times was the site tech coordinator and sat on endless tech committees. I mean, who drops a foreign OS on a support technician and then says, okay you’re in charge of supporting this school site (plus all of the other sites he’s already supporting)? It’s been my observation that unless you begin with adequate tech support (as in training the tech support to handle the machines and potential volume of support requests), then you’re wasting your money in the initial technology investment. Not too many businesses could get away with that for very long.

The old t-cxr switch room

Hell, in a prior life as a Communications Technician for the long gone Pacific Bell phone company, the first step to rolling out new equipment was to send us techs to “school” to learn the ins and outs of the new equipment (“red light ‘broke,’ green light ‘not broke”). Actually, if there was a fault with the old phone company it was that they hired too many of us techs (in 1979) because they were used to having to have an army of technicians to keep the Machine going, whereas in the newer electronic era the fewer hands in the Machine was the better method of tech support. Of course by the time I left in 1995 they’d over-learned the lesson and when I left I was only night-shift t-carrier technician covering all of Orange County (CA) from the 91 freeway in the North to San Clemente in the South, troubleshooting everything from ATM alarms to fiber-optic alarms. Like I said not too many businesses can survive if they fail to take into account support costs (beginning with training the technicians) when they roll out new systems.

TCO (total cost of operation) is a black art, but a frightful percentage of tech roll-outs from my public school teaching days factored in little to no funding for end-user training and somewhere around 5% for tech support. The expectation for teacher or technicians to train themselves is a guaranteed failure and no business expecting success would begin there. You roll it out, you support it and that includes training. Funny video, but not a funny situation. jbb

Sources:
YouTube video: “Creative Ways to Use The MacBook” by WilsonTech1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXFoyOOxmr8 retrieved on 06/07/2009

Image: pacbell01.jpg by Joe Bustillos

FS Ad

Went looking for information about local Macintosh user groups and thought to begin by visiting the website of one of my favorite mac-macs, Lesa Snyder King. She had several user groups listed but none within striking distance from my domicile. Damn. So while I cruising about the website looking for info I stumble upon the ad list here to the right. Yeah. My school Full Sail has an ad on Lesa’s site. I was jazzed and jealous. It was in her Google ad-sense so there’s no “making it happen.” Anyway, it felt like seein’ a friend on TV. You point, make a funny sound and then move on when no one thinks it’s as cool as you do. Oh well, I guess I’m too easily amused. [sigh]

Before iTunes entered and then destroyed the market, there was a budding little industry of RSS readers that would also pull down your favorite podcasts. Someone actually suggested an app that goes back to those crazy days called Juice (formerly called “Lemon” and before that something with the word “iPod” in it until the cease and desist letter arrived). Cute, but it’s not 2005. The next contender was the web app, iGoogle. iGoogle was the EMDTMS team favorite until it was redesign and the tabs moved to the side of the interface. Blah. I didn’t care about the tabs, but I did care that I couldn’t rename the labels to my students’ RSS feeds because they had the whimsical tendency to name their blog things like “Catchin’ the tech wave” and other completely useless names, making it completely impossible to be able to track their blog entries. Nyet. Next on the hit list was Netvibes. Very flexible, I loved that I could put my students in separate tabs per their sections and spent the better part of the afternoon getting one section set up. When I started setting up a second section it dawned on me that this was way too hard and my beloved tabs were going to make it more complicated to track the whole group. Ugh. Then I noticed in the sidebar on the left side of my screen that Flock had a Feeds panel all set up and ready to go. In fact, when I was opening my students blogs and then clicking the icon to get their RSS feed, Flock had been giving me a button to push to add the feed to list in the left pane the whole time. Ack. I got all three sections entered and in handy little folders in a third the time it took to do one section before. Damn. Flock, for the win!

The folks do a great job explaining stuff like RSS…

photo by B Buffington

I loved Benjamin Zander’s analogy of the conductor and orchestra. Too often educators forget that we are not there to fill there little brains with information all day long. This is where the NCLB act has brought us, though. His analogy was a reminder to me that I am not a teacher but a facilitator to great things. I have to create a safe platform for students to take risks and increase their interests and abilities… The way I see it, there is not enough freedom and fun in public schools now-a-days. For goodness sake, they even took away recess! (B. B.)

I was understandably horrified: What?! No recess?! Even us office drones are told to get out of our chairs every 15 to 30 minutes by most productivity experts. How the hell are little bodies supposed to learn cooped up like factory chickens in their little learning pens. Argh.

I try not to allow Zander’s conceptualism bother me–it goads me like a poker when he says “language is replete with a variety of ‘things’ that have no existence in time and space but seem as real to us as anything we own–’justice’ for instance….” … If everyone has their own personal framework of possibility, I fear we’ll lose the intimacy of sharing a common framework. Take the Hubble photograph above. The beauty of the Pleiades Cluster is not a construct of my mind–its beauty is there to be discovered by any who would attend to it. The community of astronomers who photograph it share a common beauty between them–something bigger than any one’s construct. Isn’t this what makes possibility appealing? What possibilities are worth seeking and having in my life? R. Swindoll

My response: Wonderful observations and pondering questions. I find it interesting that you comment about trying to not let Zanders conceptualizations bother you and then you spend the rest of the post wrestling with them. You are touching on the universal question between perception and empirical reality. Without going too much into what seems like a “dancing on the head of a pin” question, I believe that it’s foolish to think that there is no external reality. Thus the miracle is that we do seem to share in a common framework of understanding despite the fact that our consciousness is trapped in the “black box” of our individual skulls dependent on imperfect sensory organs to perceive and communicate with this seemingly infinite external universe.

And perhaps the universe was indeed laughing at me, that I would attempt to answer the student’s pondering because, after I had drafted what I thought was a perfectly crafted comment I inadvertently clicked a button on the screen and sent all of those wonderful words straight to hexadecimal oblivion. No small about of screaming or laughing at the absurdity would bring those perfectly positioned words back. Thus the above rendition is the best that I could bring back from a brain that wasn’t very happy with it’s fingers. Imperfect sensory organs indeed.

Music: Goodbye by Kevin Shields from the Lost In Translation – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

The Zanders understand the transformative effect of the mind reframed. And they don’t linger on the hard parts of living a transformed life (because after transformation, the hard parts are worth it). Still, I would like to hear more stories that have no clearly defined ending–that end unresolved. Possibility takes faith in the face of empirical reality, and faith is a hard to have when our life stories are in their second act. Frankly, it isn’t the power of positive thinking alone that can “construct a new world.” Ben Zander’s opening premise is only proverbially true. (R.Swindoll)

One thing I love about working with my students in their blogs is that I can respond to their thoughts with comments of my own. I commented to the above observation: Your right that their stories had a cute red-bow satisfying endings to them, but then it wouldn’t be a very good book if they introduced scenario after scenario with no ending (sounds like some novels I’ve read). Actually I have read some books that never quite delivered on their promise, so I’m glad that the Zanders bring endings with their observations.

My student continued: “Ben and Roz Zander’s stories assume Providence is on their side. The Art of Providence… that seems a more fitting title of the book, given what I’ve read so far.” R. Swindoll

To which I responded: Very interesting word game… I don’t think that the Zanders believe that Providence is on their “side” because I don’t think they believe in “sides.” I think they’re more coming from the idea that the world is so much bigger than most of us are able to navigate (predict), that most of us miss the good or the possible because we put ourselves in a protective posture whining that we want “ours” before it runs out. It’s more than a proverbial observation but not new age “name it and claim it” magic.

I work in one of the most wonderful places and have some of the most amazing students. jbb

music: Great indoors by John Mayer from the Room for Squares CD

The Onion News folks did a perfect job echoing the hype and often irrational fandom of all things Apple. Then Hayman spent the next hour making me want to be an iPhone/iTouch programmer. Yikes. I really got sucked up into thinking about how easy it is to program the little things and what I could possibly come up with that would be fun to do, and possibly lucrative for me. Even as I was walking out to the car, talking to Holly about the cool things that could be done, I remembered, “Oh yeah, I just restarted my doctorate program, I’m going to find it hard to find time to sleep…” Damn. I wonder how I could work this into a dissertation research question. Hmmm.

music: Mr. Blue Sky by Electric Light Orchestra from their “All over the World” CD

Having earned a masters degree and working toward a doctorate both online, I have more than a little insight into the matter. I’ve heard many say that they could never do online learning because they feel like they lack the self-discipline to get things done without the face-to-face pressure. As someone who is not know for having a well-balanced proactive-get stuff done early work habit, I can say that I have done better with online learning because I’m never not in contact with my classmates and professors. Unlike my ungrad work where the educational experience was largely staring at the back for someone’s head for three-hours every Thursday then forgetting about the class or doing my assignments until the day before the next session, online I found myself working with a small group of friends on a daily basis helping each other get through the process. One would assume that there isn’t any educational experience as lonely as doing it online, but when it’s done right, nothing could be further from the truth. Granted this sense of community isn’t something that happens entirely by accident. What happens is that smart program designers, course developers and students take advantage of the technology and the removal of restraints to have to meet at a certain time in a certain place, and make their educational experience into a “hello” via IM or TM in the morning and an ongoing chat conversation all the way through the day. Because the learning and dialogue is not limited to a certain place or time, it can be made to go on for the entire time one is in the program.

If any school should understand this way of thinking about learning it should be Full Sail. In the face-to-face program classes are held around the clock, covering in four-weeks what other institutions ramble through in 14, limiting students to one or two classes at a time and expecting them to become fully engaged in learning from the very first day. There are no part-time students. It’s intense in the extreme but incredibly effective for the students and efficient as far as facility utilization. You go to Full Sail because you want to quickly learn about filmmaking, music production, entertainment business or media in education from the best and you want to turn that learning into a career in the shortest time possible. It’s the same in the online program. Except that we don’t require that you move to Winter Park, Florida. You can get that same experience from the comfort of your own home, just don’t expect it to be some part-time half-baked at-your-own-pace correspondence course. Ack. jbb

Phase 2

You are listening to pop music — After a while you are so busy that you are not sure if you’re coming or going anymore.

Phase 3

You are listening to heavy metal — This is what you feel like after ONE month.

Phase 4

You are listening to hip hop — You become bloated due to stress, you’re gaining weight due to lack of exercise because you are so tired and have so much school work to do and, when you do get home, you feel sluggish and suffer from constipation. Your fellow teachers are too cheerful for your liking and the walls of your classroom are closing in.

Phase 5

You are listening to GANGSTA RAP — After more time passes, your eyes start to twitch and you forget what a ‘good hair day’ feels like as you just fall out of bed and load up on caffeine.

Phase 6

You are listening to the voices in your head — You have locked your classroom door to keep people out. You wonder WHY you are even here in the first place and WHY you became a teacher!

(courtesy Latricia DD, thanks).

music/podcast: The Totally Rad Show – Episode 84 – Friendo – Fable 2, Changeling, Let the Right One In, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Halloween Pumpkins!

Geek moment, Full Sail students were doing presentations in Second Life and I thought that I’d take a picture of my rig. On the right is my macbook pro with my two chat clients running on the extreme right and Second Life running on the rest of the screen. The laptop is connected to my 32″ LCD TV running some software I use to write my notes as the students do their presentations (the software is called, appropriately enough, Notebook by Circus Ponies). On the left of the Notebook app is my Contact app, open to which ever student is doing their presentation, so that I can see their real smiling face and info while jotting my notes. Next to the TV, on the left is a third screen (19″ LCD), where I usually have a browser running to check notes/info while the sessions are running on the other screens. Yeah, major geek-out.

So, one other thing that came out of the conversation was that one of my best friends (and boss), Holly, generally reads the blog up to the first paragraph, but stops reading at that point if I don’t mention her. Hmm, so I wonder if she’ll continue to read this, in that I didn’t mention her until the second paragraph. Oh yeah, the point isn’t just to mention her but to say something witty (or if I’m smart, flattering). Awkward pause. Damn. Do you know how weird it can be to have shared years of very personal stories and experiences, hear the unfiltered thoughts of fellow-workers and try to remember to pay attention to who might be in earshot when I open my big fat mouth? The scary part is that I write a publically available blog. So on more than one ocassion Holly has stopped me mid-sentence and asked, “is X at her/his desk?” just as I was about to say something that might not be taken well by the party under question. Doh! Talk about being smart beyond her years. Smile.

She joked that I might become frustrated because knowing that the blog is being read by various parties, administrative and students, I might fine myself stifled. I guess if that were to really become a problem then that would be a sign that I’m not in the right spot and should probably move on. But just as with my previous jobs, I find that the frustrations and screw-ups of my bosses, students and co-workers are perfectly in keeping with what one might expect from passionate flawed human beings. My co-workers are special because they have chosen to pursue a goal that sets them apart from most of their contemporaries. Beyond that, you have some of the most brilliant inquisitive minds that look past the mundane day-to-day burdens of the work-a-day world to see a much larger picture, but then at the same time completely derailed because they take personally some anonymous criticism from one disgruntled student out of dozens. Far from stifled, I love my co-workers all the more because they openly own their flaws and poke fun at each other because we are such weird and wonderful human beings.

I mean, when one of my co-workers has marital frustrations he’ll ask for my opinion and insight on the matter, I, who haven’t had a date in endless days, and another co-worker who has sworn off even the concept of “marriage.” You’d think one would ask for help on such matters from those who have proven to have had some success with the subject. Well, except that finding someone willing to claim “success” in the marriage arena, usually is unwilling to share the “secret” for fear of torpedoing said success or because finding such successes are ranked just beyond finding leprechauns near the ends of rainbows.

Truth be told, I’ve always known that I ride a fine line when I choose to write about the things going on in my life or my observations. I do it because it’s what I do. I do it because, in times of trouble, I need to vent and think out loud. And I believe that writing about it is much better than venting my frustrations on whomever is unlucky enough to be within shout-range. I do it because I love painting the literary picture. I do it because I’ve done it for countless years before there ever was an audience to read my thoughts. My guess is that my relationships in the late 80s and through the 90s would have been horrified at the things I wrote about had they found them published in a public forum, were there such a thing in those days. And I’ve resorted to writing my thoughts and feelings in the last half-dozen years because I usually wasn’t in a position to have that consistent intimate conversation with the one(s) I loved that I needed. So, given that I do have an audience with whom I work with every day, it’ll be interesting to see how this frames my ongoing need to write. And imagining that my current e-Harmony experiment proves to be successful and that I will also continue to have the dear friends I have to share my future frustrations with, what will become of my “sex and the single brain cell” blog? Well, that’s a problem I’d be willing to adjust to.

I don’t know that I’ll ever become a closed off “private” person. After many years of song writing and performing I imagined that I could take all of that public passion and emoting and channel it into my marriage. It was a nice sentiment, but I guess it was way too much to expect from one person and one relationship, especially in view of the fact that I never bothered to communicate those expectations to her. There is something private and proprietary that I hope to have with my special someone, but then just the joy in having that might be something that I feel compelled to write about and share. Ha. That’ll be a challenge because so much of what I’ve ever written about has come from the frustrations and not from the good times. Yeah, that’s a change I’d be willing to adjust to. Either way, fret not faithful readers, I could always fall back and write about my crazy co-workers, like this one time when doctor… oh wait… need to save those stories for a later date. Sorry. jbb

I have a very good job in Florida teaching masters students how to use media and technology in their classrooms and businesses. I left a very uncertain situation in public education in California where most of my co-workers are going to have to look for other teaching jobs or interview to keep the jobs they have in the next two-years. Another friend, who has been battling on-going medical issues, openly wondered whether it was worth the hassle for her to keep her house as the medical bills mount up. And yet with all of this my friends and I are by world standards very, very rich. Our difficulties are generally not about survival but about which luxury activity we’re going to have to forego because things are “a little tight.” It’s hard to balance this kind of life with issues like Poverty.

In a discussion session with a group of masters students last night, one student posed the question about whether our use of technology (some might say “addiction”) was preventing us from living a life connected to our neighbors, our environment or our heritage. He followed up with an observation that it seemed like places that are less driven by technology like some parts of Europe and the Third World move at a much slower pace and seem to actually have a better quality of life. It was an interesting insight to imagine that we are technology rich but our lives our poor in terms of meaningful connections, whereas parts of the world that we would consider poor might have richer, more meaningful existence.

I do not pose these thoughts in an effort to generate some “we should feel guilty for being so rich” kind of thing. If anything it should be obvious that there isn’t a one-for-one connection between being “rich” and the quality of one’s life. I’ve been thinking for some time that I need to contact my local chapter of something like Habitat for Humanity and get involved. In a life that’s often overly crowded with things and thoughts I need to do this for me, get my hands dirty and join others helping ourselves by helping each other. Sending a check isn’t such a bad idea, but spending some weekends in someone else’s shoes and neighborhood would be much better… for all of us. jbb

Music: Mad World from the album “Donnie Darko (Music From the Original Motion Picture Score)” by Michael Andrews

This post is part of Blog Action Day 08 – Poverty

I told a co-worker that Twitter is my virtual water-cooler where I get a ton of info, sometimes amazing, often mundane. Other’s use RSS readers to keep up on what’s happening on the Tech world. Since I first signed up and discovered that most of the tech voices that I listen to or watch are on Twitter, Twitter has been my “RSS” feed. Besides the “A” list bloggers, I’ve “met” so many other interesting voices in tech and in church things and in education. And sometimes it was just the amazing serendipity of getting a notice that so-and-so is following your twitter and then checking out their website and discovering someone interesting that they’re following. For example, some time earlier in the year I got a notice that this “old hippy*” living in Maine was following me (*he’s probably younger than moi). When i checked out his website I found some amazing videos and found someone else he was following, a young journalist living in NYC named Alana Taylor who perfectly expressed this frustration of being alone in the Web 2.0 world:

What To Do When NONE
of Your Friends Use Web 2.0
by Alana Taylor

I have a problem. I am addicted to social networking sites. But I have no one to social network WITH! All my friends (who are mostly girls) think Web 2.0 is a type of advanced cellulite-reducing body lotion. And when I try to explain what it really is, they get annoyed, confused, and impatient.

They don’t care. They don’t want to know.

Do you have this same problem? If you do, then I know exactly how you feel.

Like me, you have a lot of “real” friends on Facebook or MySpace, but none at all on the new start-ups like Pownce, Virb, BrightKite, FriendFeed, etc. Who is going to share pictures with you on Flickr? Who is going to recommend songs on Last.FM? Who is going to tell you about their latte on Twitter? How are you going to tell someone about ALANA TAYLOR??

You feel like you are in the dark, and there is no hope for you in the social online world.

Well, there is no need to get down on yourself just yet! Even as little as two months ago, I was exactly in your position. I figured “if my friends don’t do it, I can’t do it.”

So how can you go about making friends on the new sites? Here’s what I did:

1. Forget about the Anti-Internet friends you have.

If you care too much about waiting for everyone to catch up with you, then you will be left behind. The internet is moving faster than ever. One day in real time is one year on the web. You might as well consider yourself out of the loop if you don’t keep up!

2. Join every social networking site that interests you.

It never hurts to have an account on a site, even if you don’t use it. The cool thing about spreading yourself over a wide variety of social media is that people will get to see the different sides of your interests and activities. Plus, people just like it! If someone diggs (no pun intended) the music you like on Last.fm, they might be wondering what kind of movies you make on Viddler! This is the way you start meeting people on a variety of different networks.

3. Twitter

Obviously I had to include my fave! If you didn’t already listen to my song: “The cool thing ’bout Twitter is you meet new people.” And it’s so true. I recommend searching for people with your same interests or just following those who are already really big and getting into the rhythm of doing what they do. People like Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Robert Scoble, Veronica Belmont, Kevin Rose, Michael Arrington and others are a good start off. I am sure that if you start updating what you’re doing and you start chatting with people on Twitter, you will make friends really quickly.

4. Share, Share, SHARE!

The whole point about social networking is not only that you stay updated on what your friends are doing, but also that you share all the cool stuff that you run into! This means digging popular stories, e-mailing YouTube/Vimeo/Viddler videos, sharing pictures, sharing music, or whatever comes across your way! Subscribe to your favorite blogs on GoogleReader (or any other RSS reader) and share those too. You need to be giving as much as you want to receive, and eventually people will find you… see that you’re constantly updating…. and they will want to stick with you.

5. Create.

Lastly, to be one with the FORCE of Web 2.0 is to do your own thang. You can’t JUST share stuff that other people make. You also need to make your own. Saw something cool today? Blog about your reaction. Make a video telling how you feel. And most importantly, dare to try new things. People will check out your stuff if you just do it already! (Oh, and don’t be afraid to show your dorky side too. “Real” wins in here, keep “Fake” out on the streets.)

by Alana Taylor