Seeqpod and Everything

Thanks to a simple Scott Leslie tweet, I wandered over to Seeqpod and my head blew off.

How is it possible that every day every day every day there's another site or tool or blog that I can't imagine life without? Yesterday, I was loyal to pandora.com and my customized, intensely personal and private radio stations. 

Still love Pandora, but seeqpod allows me to listen to any artist I want for as long as I want, while Pandora offers variety (within the channel constraints) that often annoys me. Depends on the mood, but let's skip over my whims and wants and address the technology. 

Everything is at my finger tips all the time. Ideas, images, music, facts, figures, and more. 

I'm never lonely and more often, never alone. I start to 'jones' if removed for long from life on the digital stream. 

& I can't help but wonder, if this is my life today, what will it look like next year? In five years? In ten years? My professional life depends on understanding emerging technologies and I will openly admit that I'm hitting my limits. Incredible, exciting, overwhelming and how do we keep up, sort, make meaning, categorize, and shed what's not of value?

Seeqpod? Too cool for school. Add it to the list. 

Think less, be more

Odd post title from me, known for dismissively claiming that "the mind should transcend the body" as I make my way through the plastic noses, breasts, lips and even (yes, it's true) buttocks now, here in the kingdom of surgical vanity procedures. The Phoenix/Scottsdale/Tempe triangle is an odd place for a natural, food-loving soul like myself to land, but I stay aligned to sanity by holding tight to the values of university life.

cognition uber alas!

And here, this becomes the coin of the realm and the smarty-pants are the vanity crowd. But everywhere, everywhere everywhere it's becoming not how well we think but how busy we stay in managing the task of thinking itself. Thinking as demonstrated in emails, v-mails, text, calendar meetings, and rushing from place to place.

Not good. Turns out, not even smart. (Gasp)

Read the BBC News Magazine article "No time to think?" and rethink your silly, busy, exhausting ways.
Loved the idea. So here, now, at 9:15pm local time, I'll yank myself away from the laptop and pay a bit of attention to the physical life around me.

What a wonderful world!

I see babies cry, I watch them grow
They'll know so much more than we'll ever know
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

I have great hope that, with time and tenderness, higher education will do right and put its bright, lazy mind to the task of reformation and relevancy. For too long, we've been failing to educate so many of our citizens and a recently released report by the National Commission on Adult Literacy made me shudder. OK, the rich and lucky babies still get the best education in the world...even though even the privileged aren't majoring in the science or math fields. We can continue to claim we're a great nation, but it's not evidenced in the data on American literacy and competitiveness. Nationally, we're crawling in a hole and HE is playing peek-a-boo with the problem. ("I can't seeeeee you!!")

Access. affordance, engagement, relevancy. These are all topics that cry for attention as an aged and out-of-touch industrial age institution batons down the hatches. I love my ivory tower but oh YouTube. I was bemoaning this thorny problem to a friend of mine last week and noticed that the discomfort we're feeling is similar to the one we get when sipping milk just before it goes sour. You can tell it's just this side of turning, still...good enough, but use it fast because in no time you'll be at that reflux stage if you sip it.

Here's what WICHE wrote about the report in a policy alert email they sent out:
"It presents evidence that our failure to address America’s adult education and workforce skills needs is putting our country in great jeopardy and threatening our nation’s standard of living and economic vitality. The Commission makes several recommendations for immediate action to reverse the course we are on."

TinyURL just got better

Custom TinyURLs? Yes. Yes Yes.
An idea whose time has come and a practice we've all been anticipating.

Appendage to last blog post: sometimes, the value of the tool is intuitive and needn't be explained, explored or analyzed. I now can customize my tinyURLs. I'm a happy camper.
Here's pretty URL for last blog post: http://tinyurl.com/carmeangkflow
Nice, crisp, to the point, easy to remember in context. (It's all about the context)

Wonder whether creating short and meaningful URLs will become an art? Or a critical skill for the digital age? I could be the first to offer a workshop on the practice!

In Search of Meaning and Flow

I haven't been blogging. Mea culpa. Working on dissertation, family illness, job demands, etc and there just didn't seem enough time to make meaning out of all that I was reading and learning from other bloggers. Then, life changed (dissertation done!) and Lilia Efimova shamed me into thinking about blogging as healthy routine again.

Granted my life is still chaos, but in the right context, it is beautiful chaos ripe for sharing. I'm in Chicago at the School of the Art Institute (TICA & more on that later), and one of the participants said that my work is like "being a kid in a candy shop." Too true, but even kids want vegetables/macaroni and cheese/protein now and then and lately, I'm feeling urpy (technical term) by the tools, information, ideas flowing past. George Siemens recommends we learn to accept that we miss out on the flow when we "eat, sleep or whatever". Hard to do when your job is to find application, meaning, value amidst the rubble. No sleeping! So - hoping it lasts - I'm focused on returning to making meaning while here, awake and on the grid.

My friend Patricia McGee and I have been attempting to think through a model with focus on meaning & value by not talking anymore about the tools, but about narrowing description of use. We're expecting push back from those who are in it for the wild ride, but for us, it's about the value the deep learning the return the outcomes.
Patricia believe one avenue (perhaps the only, certainly the best) approach is through story. Case study is story. Best practices is story. What didn't work is great story. More on that when she finishes her latest oeuvre.

Meanwhile, the Havas Media Lab have put up a very compelling white paper describing the framework of meaning as "user generated context". What HML has done for rethinking the business model, (yes, following on the work of so many great bloggers; see my list gathered via SNA at Shared Knowledge Project) those in higher education should be doing to make sense of the flood of tools, technologies, places and spaces we're exploring daily.

We know the tools. (FYI: Jane Hart did a great job of compiling consensus on tools relevant to learning) but I don't think we're doing a very good job of making sense and meaning/demonstrating value of all this technology, chaos, beauty. Those who work in this realm (hey, I resemble that!) should move forward and take responsibility in getting the social, distributed, shared nature of digital knowledge incorporated into the fabric of higher education. I'm suggesting we stop promoting the tools and address the value. User generated context. Meaning. Value. Integration into the flow of the course and the desired outcomes of the discipline.

OK. Enough blogging. Chicago is calling my name. So is the pizza, italian beef with two peppers/dry, hot dogs with everything (neon relish, tomato, pickle, onion, mustard and NO ketchup), sudsy Leinenkugels, and muggy walks in verdant greenery. I'll defend desert life till my throat hurts but Chicago is a great place to visit after a rockin' workshop on Web 2.0.

My Night with David Gurteen

Bet that got your attention. Those who know of David's work with Knowledge Cafes in whatever international spot he lands will know already of what I'm speaking. As David travels the world, he offers to facilitate a free, open to community, informal exchange and sharing of ideas on whatever burning question that locale might wish to consider. Informal but not unstructured. David uses a specific, distributed, what I would call "emergence" format where 'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts' for encouraging knowledge transfer amongst participants. No leaders, no report outs, no death by PowerPoint. Everyone matters, every voice counts.

The closing moments of a Knowledge Cafe reminded me of a Quaker meeting. You don't speak unless you're compelled to share an important thought, realization, or theme that emerged from your multiple small group discussions. Some participants violate the framework and just need to be heard, but like the Quakers, everyone listens respectfully and reflects on the thought without the need for comment or debate. I think the format works because David seems to be one of the nicest people on the planet. Not sure what would happen if a less gentle soul asked the same behavior of a crowd. I'd love to hear more out there from those who've tried his Cafe format on their own.

Thanks to David's Twitter post, I discovered on Tuesday that there would be a Cafe here in my home town on Wednesday eve. He was here in Phoenix to present at BSEC 2008, and stayed an extra day to help KM leaders in the Valley think through "How could the Valley become a vibrant knowledge capital? What role would our business community play and what would be the benefits?"

The topic was briefly introduced by Jay Chatzkel, author of numerous pieces on the topic, and a small group (~50?) spent the evening in shifting clusters of 4-5 people imagining the Phoenix area as a thriving knowledge hub. A wonderful evening of deep, thoughtful, diverse ideas.

The group will gather again in September (without David) to see where each of us have taken the ideas and where we might go with them from there. A great evening, great meeting one of my KM heroes in person, great example of Twitter as pipeline for information immediacy.

Giving the Devil His Due

OK, trying to teach 'mashups' to my students: what, how and more importantly, why this may be a key new media literacy. They're not enthused. Deep thinking required to create meaningful new content. So I'm looking for ah-hah moments.

And here's where you have to nod to MicroSoft. They're cranking out SilverLight applications without much fanfare, keeping low key, very beta and some have potential.
I'm not going to desert the Google search engines easily (scholar is getting me thru my dissertation research), but take a look at tafiti meta-search engine, powered by SilverLight and Live Search. Newest version is a bit scarey in interface (Halo 3? looking for a market that's not me) but the earlier release had a 'tree view' which was a lovely little mashup.
Visual media. Visual literacy. Visual integration of data across sites and services.
The students get it when it works. We all do, without needing to ponder.

So then the students go over to PopFly and create their own silly, sweet and sometimes compelling mashups. User site and rankings is a mess, but the interface certainly beats the dead Yahoo Pipes project.

So, MS approach is unclear. No promotion or noise. Must be a method to the madness somewhere. (PopFly is often slow, perhaps they're tuning before selling), but if anyone has better idea on how to get learners into mashups, let me know.

Meanwhile, does ANYONE understand why or what is with their clunky OfficeLive site?
Google Docs did it as well as we could ask. I'm all for competition on freeware, but...huh?
But that's a whole nuther post.