Tuesday, December 22, 2009
6 Ways to be a Human Lightning Rod of Creativity
Why Don't We Value Teachers?
Kawasaki's 6 Twitter Types
- The Newbie. “What am I doing?” The Newbie signed up for Twitter less than three months ago and thinks it’s all about lifestreaming: “Watching my cat roll over.” These people quickly progress to a different type of use or abandon Twitter when no one pays attention to them. Motivation: curiosity about Twitter. Recommended approach: understand.
- The Brand. “What can I get away with?” The Brand balances the tension between using Twitter as a marketing tool and socially engaging people so as not to appear to be using Twitter as a marketing tool. Motivation: greater brand awareness. Recommended approach: observe.
- The Smore. “What’s in it for me?” The Smore (social media whore) sees Twitter primarily as a self-promotion tool to get something from people although a transparent Smore (“Bubbles”) is often a delightful person. The delusional ones are the pains. Motivations: making a buck off and gaining followers. Recommended approach: tolerate.
- The Bitch. “What can I complain about?” Despite deriving this name from female dogs, this is usually an angry man who envies people who generate content. They can be briefly amusing in a “shock jock” kind of way, but their bark is greater than their bite, and their bite is greater than their insight. Motivation: generating angry reactions. Recommended approach: block.
- The Maven. “What’s interesting in my niche?” The Maven is an expert in a field such as recruiting, marketing, or web design. If you’re interested in their field, following them is a rich, rewarding, and time-saving experience. Motivation: getting retweeted and recognized as an expert. Recommended approach: follow.
- The Mensch. “How can I help?” Mensches are few and far between. They lurk in the background until people need help and then they either know, or know how to find, the answer. They are seldom well-known or highly followed, but they save you tons of time and effort when you want to know something like the ideal dimensions of a profile background. Motivation: helping others. Recommended approach: adore.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Why do an M.Ed?
As long as I can remember I have had a passion for learning. My Mom tells me as soon as I could speak, I drove everyone crazy with questions about everything. I needed to know why and why not. Fortunately all my years of formal education have not changed that. Living is still learning; learning is still living.
For quite some time now, the Internet has fueled my passion for learning. If I have a question, all I have to do is Google to find some of the answers I seek. Of course, that need to know extends to my teaching practice. I am always asking how can I better meet the needs of my students. Why are things the way they are? What can I do to change them? While I have found the internet useful for keeping up to date on current issues in education and for finding strategies and resources to improve my teaching practice, I have come to realize self directed study may not be the most efficient way to do this. That’s why I have decided to pursue a Master of Education, and that is why I am taking the course I am right now.
I have not been disappointed. The course I’m taking not only provides me with direction I seek, but perhaps even more importantly facilitates my learning by providing me the opportunity to be part of a learning community that reads, discuss, writes and reflects on a wide variety of topics related to education. I intend to share here some of my reflections that come from the readings and discussions we have had over the duration of the course.
I’m just finishing my final paper for this my first course. I’ll be honest and say I’m ready for a break.I’ll have some time so I’ll be able to blog more often. I’m not happy about cutting back on my writing here, but I can only do so much. The next course I’m takng starts in January. I’m looking forward to it even though it means I’m super busy.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Thinking Hats for Doctoral Studies
Thank you for the lively participation yesterday. Do not hesitate to ask questions or share your comments regarding the session, the hats, application and so on.
Feel free also to browse around for topics related to thinking (you may start here if you wish but the Search field is yours to fully exploit).
We certainly look forward to hearing from you.
Regards,
Alwyn
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
When Teaching Becomes Socialisation
"If children are fat then we need to teach them healthy eating. If there are too many teenage pregnancies, teachers need to improve sex education. If children are depressed, or taking drugs, we need to now teach happiness. And if children do not agree with the policies of this government, we need to timetable Citizenship lessons. He then quotes Rafael Behr:
By extension, teachers have become mediators in a process of socialisation – policing “values” rather than directing thoughts; a secular political clergy with the education secretary as pope. Pedagogy, meanwhile, has come to look more like therapy, with motivational and psychological techniques coming to the fore, along with a fashionable horror of allowing children to get bored. Everything must be “relevant”.
Read more
3 Kinds of Librarians
1. Those that read and participate in the online think-tank we call social media.
2. Those content to lurk but still hesitant (or unable, for whatever reason) to contribute.
and
3. Those still stuck in the analog paradigm.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Libraries giving way to Kindle
What do you think? Do you feel that e-readers will soon libraries obsolete?
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Negotiation Kinder-Style
Appeal to a separate authority - often granddad, grandmum or the other parent (sometimes Nicky ropes in his 3-month old sister as a last resort; obviously he understands the thing about "balance of power" even if he can't quite define it yet)
- Say No from the start - forcing you to backtrack, throwing you off balance; notice how it's EASIER to keep saying No as opposed to finding new ways of encouraging a Yes?
- Persevere, persevere, persevere - when he wants a Yes, he too knows about switching personalities and approaches, repeating the same request a dozen times in as many seconds, wearing the other party down (with shades of Luke 18:1-8?)
Set the terms and conditions - see no.2, Nicky also doesn't often let me get away with making him submit free-of-charge; he usually demands a 'fee' as part of the deal. Makes you wish there were more chapters on Bartering in child-raising books, eh?
- Go CUTE mode - turn up that pout, speak softly and gently to get more people (incl. the separate authorities) to go awwwwwwww... seek pity points and leech on the sheer sentimentality of others!
- Go BERSERK mode - they somehow came across the parents' manual and memorised that part about parents getting tensed up when their kids go nuts, not to mention the Conclusion : When parents are tense, consent follows easy.
Keep the list going if you can. I'm making notes to secure that next million-dollar project...
Monday, October 26, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
UNN Dissertation Files
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Learning With The Saujana
Monday, October 12, 2009
UNN Research Workshop (Pt.1)
Please remember that the point of the Literature Review is also to help you formulate an adequate research question. You must always bear in mind what research you plan to do and how you intend to obtain the data as you perform the literature review.
E.g. there's no point doing a review on "Financial banking in Iceland" if you have no way of doing research on Iceland!
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Dynamic
So here's putting some meat on that word 'dynamic':
- Do you work fast and well? Can you superiors expect a high-quality event/deliverable way before they start to wonder what happened to it?
- Are you enthusiastic and do you contagiously spread excitement and adrenaline in whatever team you're on?
- Do you ensure that you never shy away from projects (especially if you're fresh out of school)? Are you always volunteering to do the hard stuff?
- Do you have many ideas and are you always trying new things or offering new angles to old problems? Do you make it a point to keep sharing your thoughts and proposals?
The answer to the above is almost always yes or no. Even allowing for the natural downtime in mood, there should be no great ambiguity, not in the context of the workplace. Most importantly, 7 (or more) out of 10 of your colleagues should agree.
It's virtually impossible for someone to be constantly 'exploding' on scene and not be noticed - or, eventually, rewarded.
Value-Adding Lectures
What, then, ought lecturers do to add value? Here are some ideas, by no means exhaustive:
- Give a fresh slant to what's in the textbooks - either give a new perspective or just challenge everything the writer says
- Lecture on a related sub-topic (one not in the generic handouts)
- Facilitate a discussion or a case-study (thus taking the class away from recall-mode to application-mode)
- Get the students to present
- Show a video
- Facilitate a project which takes them out of the classroom (kinda like a case-study on steroids)
- What else?
Adding value nowadays usually involves creating new value. Whatever this is, it's probably not repeating what's already available.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Sunday, September 13, 2009
All At Once
All the ingredients for charged-up learner-centered learning are here:
- multi-directional communication (instead of I-talk-you-all-listen-ism)
- a competitive element with the class as a whole judging the winners (and not the facilitator)
- initiative and creativity i.e. the students shape the learning (as opposed to the facilitator deciding exactly how and what will happen)
- real-world simulation where we really do have to match our voices/performances against that of others (compared to totally abstracted superficial scenarios)
That's what it's all about.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Power-Hunger, Power-Shyness & Power-Joy
This has to stop. We needn't make the choice between power-hunger and power-shyness. What about power-joy? Delight in exercising power for the good of people; fulfilment and belief in one's leadership; gladness and all-out excellence in being a good leader?
I'm not shy and I'm not the next Genghis Khan. I only want to do something great for the community. Wouldn't that be a sight?
Friday, September 4, 2009
HYPE vs. EXCITEMENT
Hype is: | Excitement is: |
An impossible promise | A realistic promise |
Sales-driven | Value-driven |
Exclamation points | Passion |
Obnoxious | Contagious |
Cause for mistrust | Cause for belief |
Overuse of adverbs | Adverb-free |
Narcissistic | Optimistic |
Segway | Bike Friday |
Contrived | Authentic |
Unsustainable | Fuel for the future |
From COTC readers: | |
Bound to burn out quickly | Bound to improve ROI (Zoltan Devai) |
Overpromising | Overdelivering (Dan Limbach) |
"Some restrictions apply" | Free (Bob Poole) |
Mob mentality | Individual thrill (Jeannie Walters) |
Artificially colored cornstarch | Top sirloin steak, medium-well (Jon Nichols) |
Showing off | Showing up (Maria Reyes-McDavis) |
Focused on yourself | Focused on your customer (Bruce Kaechele) |
Friday, August 28, 2009
The One-Post-Per-Day Challenge
Quite a bit.
You'll also have to apply everything you've ever learnt to every occasion you encounter in the on-going process of generating more and newer ideas. Your note-taking and idea-storage methods would be on overdrive. You may even read more because how else would you sustain your learning rate? (And you know you don't want to be writing gibberish)
Thursday, August 27, 2009
6 Ways to Breathe Possibility into People
o An exercise to do that bridges what you said into their unique situation.
o A checklist could to keep people accountable and consistent in the future.
o An assignment that, when they’ve completed it, people will be ready to move forward.
o An equation (algorithm, formula, system, etc.) people can easily plug themselves, their situation or their company into.
BREATHE IN: You words become persuasive the moment someone is compelled to take action as a result of being exposed to them. How actionable are you?
2. Challenge people. Let’s say you’re telling a story about an obstacle you overcame. Either in a conversation, during a presentation or in a piece of writing. Here’s what you do: First, once the story is over, allow it to land. Embrace the pause. This increases the probability that your words profoundly penetrate people.
Then, call to the hearts and minds of your audience by using phrases like, “I invite you to reflect with me,” “Consider this question,” “Plug yourself into the following equation” and “Ask yourself how good you are at these things.”
BREATHE IN: Language like this immediately 180’s the message and moves the story from Me Land to You Land. How challenging are you?
3. Help people. In a few different ways. First, help people absorb and understand what you said. But allow things to unfold at their speed. Do this by becoming a master at letting the pearl sink. Second, help people see their field of possibilities. Ask them how they would coach themselves through this situation.
Do this by asking people Back to the Future Questions. Lastly, help people build long-term, self-generative capabilities. Feed the development of self-reliance. Do this by becoming a listening midwife, that is, helping others give birth to their own understanding.
BREATHE IN: Let people lead themselves. What are you helping people do?
4. Throw people lifelines. If you’re a leader, odds are, you’re not normal. And don’t worry – this isn’t a bad thing. The only challenge is making sure your message stays relevant and relatable. Otherwise “How you did” is perceived as “How the hell am I supposed to?”
For example, I’m a writer. That’s what I do. That’s my occupation. And, sure: I’m also a speaker, coach, consultant and entrepreneur. But writing is my occupation inasmuch as it occupies most of my workday. As such, I spend four to seven hours writing, every day.
Four to seven hours.
Now, upon hearing such a number, most think, “Good god. Four to seven hours? But I don’t have that kind of time to write!” And naturally, I respect that. Because it would be ridiculous to expect my clients, workshop attendees and readers to invest that kind of time each day.
So, I challenge people to start with fifteen minutes a day. That’s it. If you do the math, that comes out to 1/100th of your daily allotted time. (I don’t think that’s asking too much!) In fact, when I started my career as a writer in 2002, fifteen minutes was the unit of writing time I started out with. And if I can do it, so can you.
That’s a perfect example of a lifeline. You inspire others to function at a higher level by telling them to take action things in the context of their unique situation. You breathe life into people’s hopes and dreams by meeting them where they are.
BREATHE IN:Don't run the risk of people thinking, “Oh, but I could never do that…” What lifeline could you throw them?
5. Democratize your experiences. Open the curtain. Simplify and demystify your message. First, ask yourself questions like, “What is the universal human emotion here?” “How could what I endured relate TO (and offer help FOR) people who aren’t like me?” and “What lessons are inherent within my experience that anybody could apply to their own life?
This line of thinking builds a generic equation your followers can plug themselves into. Second, answer those questions with nuggets, keepers, pebbles, one-liners and other digestible forms of wisdom. Third, you physically write those answers down. And fourth, you articulate those chunks of wisdom to stick the landing of the message you’re delivering.
BREATHE IN: Move people’s hearts and engage their capacity to dream. How democratic is your message?
6. Inspire others with a vision of what they can contribute. Reflect their reality. Show them what they know. Make them aware of their abundant, inherent treasures. One way to do this is to offer your attention and acknowledgment of another person’s contributions to your worldview.
For example, after having a conversation with someone, type out your notes into a bullet-point list. Then email your keepers to that person later that day. Not only does it prove you were listening, not only does it honor the other person, but it helps people see the brilliance they didn’t realize they possessed.
BREATHE IN: Inspire people to continue contributing in their own unique way. How do you reflect genius back to others?
- - -
REMEMBER: The secret to inspiring people isn’t sharing what you’ve learned, but rather, what you’ve done.
AND, the practical application of what you’ve done to their unique situation.
Otherwise “How I did” morphs into “How the hell am I supposed to?”
LET ME ASK YA THIS…
How actionable, relatable and translatable is your message?
Catching Up is the New Looking Ahead
How to Restart your Intellectual Property (IP) Program
Tell inventors the “what.” If you write down the seven areas where you want inventions, and make these areas into a cover sheet on your invention disclosure, you will increase the rate of strategic inventing. Increase from whatever it is now, to over 90%. Until inventors get calibrated, filling out invention disclosure forms is an uncertain, risky, stab in the dark. Tell inventors what you need, and you drain the uncertainty, risk, and much of the career threat from sharing ideas.
Tell inventors the “why.” If you can proactively communicate the criteria by which invention disclosures are evaluated, you will increase your rate and quality of inventing dramatically. I think the best way to do this is to pick four scales that range from 1 (low) to 10 (high), have a legal person rate each disclosure on these scales, and have a technical person do the same. You’ll learn a lot as the two raters talk about the differences in their scores and begin to converge. Information is contained in contrasts such as these:
Scale 1: Bringing in new business
Scale 2: Required investment
Scale 3: Competitive pain caused
Scale 4: Current business protected
This process forces your legal and business people to operationalize their currently implicit theories—for example, “Above 30 is a default file patent decision”. Then you can objectively communicate these scores with inventors to calibrate them to the company’s standards. Numerical clarity simultaneously increases the rate and quality of inventing. Quality comes up rapidly, so rapidly that the IP department budgets become immediately overtaxed with potential patent ideas that attorneys canʼt bear not to file on.
Make a contract between IP and Senior Management. The biggest sin of omission in starting an IP program is not having an activity-based budget contract between management and the legal department. It can seem like an approach of “Break it. We’ll fix it as we go” is a good enough start—especially before you have shown that you can improve either quality or quantity of IP.
It’s not true.
Break-fix does not work for legal departments. Legal is not a BUSINESS function. Legal is a dignified profession. When corporate lawyers need more money, they won’t demand it. Every legal department I’ve worked with has been a wall flower about money—denial ain’t just a River in Egypt. Lawyers won’t pound the table (like psychotic marketing VPs) and demand funding. So without a contract you are likely to end up killing your IP program with success as the legal department chokes on increased activity and improved quality.
If you have a contract between the IP people and Senior Management, the IP people wonʼt drown in the great disclosures theyʼve always wished to see. And management, for the first time, will have to specify (cap) the appropriate activity level for IP in the company.
Establish a translation layer. I have a Ph.D. in marketing with minors in electrical engineering, evolutionary ecology, econometrics, and statistics. When I arrived at HP I was a in marketing, managing printer products. Very soon I was beamed across the group into managing the business side of a million dollar a month burn rate, patent litigation event between HP and Xerox. My background in BOTH hard science and soft science sides was the reason for this assignment. Hard science plus soft science training prepared me to be able to translate between all the stakeholder groups in intellectual property.
Being able to translate between engineer and marketeer, engineer and attorney, between attorney and VP of Technology, and between outside counsel and inside counsel, and most importantly for that litigation event, between the PR people, business people, and patent attorneys, we were able to shut down the HP/Xerox litigation at minimum cost. The IP management game is won by simplifying and accelerating communication. Hire a translation layer person, someone who delights at being stuck in the middle of people who can’t, don’t, or won’t communicate.
Build the rebel alliance. Unrecognized in every great technical company is an incipient alliance of people who want to help intellectual property management happen. IP rebel alliance members are sometimes are visible as patent coordinators in business groups, but the vast majority of potential rebel alliance members are below the waterline like an iceberg. By tapping the rebel alliance, I was able to keep IP strategies moving while remaining flat to the wall—not leaving a cost profile that a computer or finance person could see.
For example, I built a world wide automatic payment system for IP payments. But, by tapping the rebel alliance, I built this system without head count, budget, or even an accounting code. No company knows what it should be spending on IP. So the less you have to spend, the more successful you can be. The way to spend less on IP than anyone for a given level of success is to build the rebel alliance.
Democratize inventing. If you haven not engineered an ‘inventing democracy,’ you don’t have it. Being content with inventions that find you, means you have biased and filtered access to the ideas created in your organization. A lot of things make inventing undemocratic: habit, cultural assumptions, ignorance, and inertia. My personal favorite ‘wrong’ cultural assumption is that engineers in engineering groups CAN be inventors while engineers in sales groups CAN NOT be inventors - even if the engineer came from an engineering group and used to be an inventor.
You need to build business processes between the legal department and the inventors. Between the legal department and the business people. And probably between legal, finance, business, and inventors if you have invention incentive program. Democratization of invention is engineered in over time as you feel your way iteratively discovering breakthrough processes. If you design in open-ness, you’ll maximize the quality and income of your IP system.
Be enthusiastic. The root words of “enthusiasm” are “en” which means “in” and “theos” which means god. Enthusiasm is the god within. And enthusiasm is responsible for all the results I’ve achieved in IP management. This was surprising to my boss; he was a twenty-five year managing counsel for IP who once said, “The policies have been on the books for seven years. The doors of the legal department have always been open. Why is everything happening now? … I’m surprised at how much more happens when enthusiasm is behind the process pushing.”
Enthusiasm is not taught in law school. So, enthusiasm is crucial complementary skill to your legal department. Make sure whoever you hire is famous for enthusiasm. For example, while I was running an invention workshop for the first time at a client. During the presentation the IP attorney (now GC for IP) present looked at me and blurted out “This is like an intellectual property revival meeting!” Yes, exactly!!!
Strip your disclosure. Invention disclosures are complex forms created by patent attorneys to pass muster with other patent attorneys. The requirements to document an invention are however, very few. Why complex forms for simple inventions? Because attorneys are shifting the work they are supposed to do, on to inventors. If you want more and better disclosures from the inventors, simplify. Take the legal department’s work, off the backs of your inventors. If the legal department needs more people to process invention disclosures, so be it.
Starting up an intellectual property program is about profit, not cost. Groundrule #1 is that nobody in the system gets to optimize their own costs at the expense of other people in the system. Simplify the disclosure, put a targeting cover sheet on it, you’ll be delighted with how the results come in good and then continue to get better every month.
Close the open loops. Intellectual property is managed open loop. Invention incentives if companies have policies, are always a disaster as far as inventors are concerned. Companies are either months (or years) behind in payments, or the payments come so far after invention (4 years if the patent has to issue before the inventor receives payment) that the “incentives” are useless for making inventors feel like they are part of a team. Basic strategies like how IP pays for itself, are not written, reviewed, measured, or routinely revised.
But donʼt feel bad about IP being open loop. This is what an ground floor opportunity looks like!! Intellectual property infrastructure and culture are built up over-time. Reigniting an IP program is a lot of fun because reigniting IP programs helps companies protect and re-monetize themselves, gets employees working together in new ways, and makes jobs more meaningful for people when they see that their work is valuable, patentable, and part of the company’s competitive advantage going forward.
Competing with the Single-Minded
"When you have someone who is willing to accomplish A without worrying about B and C, they will almost always defeat you in accomplishing A.
"Online, of course, this often leads to doom, since there are many organizations that are willing to get big at the expense of revenue, or writers willing to be noticed at the expense of ethics or reputation.
"But in the short run, the singleminded have a fantastic advantage. And sometimes, their singleminded focus on accomplishing just that one thing (whatever it is) pushes them through the Dip far ahead of you and then yes, they make a ton of money and you've lost forever."
Read the full piece.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
What sort of Meeter are you?
Take the maximum allotted time for the meeting, add 15 per cent for every person from India present to a maximum of three, and 20 per cent for each Westerner to a maximum of two.