ITConversations.com has an amazing collection of IT related podcasts available, including many comprehensive sets from conferences.
One that really capured me lately was by Clayton Christensen, called “Capturing the Upside“. The link will take you to a good synopsis, but I thought I would also post a short summary of the points that were of value to me:
- A very good description of what ‘disruptive technology’ is – probably the best I’ve heard.
- Different types of disruption (e.g. new market v.s. cut-price disruption)
- Why it is so hard for new companies to compete in existing markets
- Why it can be so easy for new companies to work in new markets, and why encumbent companies will often run the other way
- What happens when features or performance exceed customer needs
- The transition from proprietary to modular and comodotised
- The resulting shift in who makes more profits when the above transition happens
- Many great examples of companies dealing with these things – some of whom fail, some of whom turn it to their advantage
- Some application of this to Open Source software
While it is predominantly tech-oriented, I would still encourage a wider audience to take a listen – the processes and market dynamics he covers apply to almost every product we encounter in everyday life and therefore is very applicable to the educational products we love and hate.
I finally got around to following up a glowing recommendation from Dave Cormier at www.edtechtalk.com about “Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web” by David Weinberger. It looks like an interesting book. A good review (in both senses) can be found here, which includes:
…if you think you’re an architect of anything vaguely Internet-related, you should read this book.
Incidentally, you can read the book online for free at www.smallpieces.com.
But this post is not to review the book (as I have not yet read it). What interests me is some of the history of making the book. The author decided to try writing the book online – posting each day’s work to his website to get feedback and comments. This section stands out:
I received today line edits from a reader, Halley Suitt. … she has lots and lots of good and occasionally deep things to say about the topic of the chapter, sometimes anticipating where I’m heading and sometimes taking the topic down paths I hadn’t thought about. In a sense, her comments are too good; I worry about readers taking over my topic before I can be the one to have figured out how to work it out. Ego? Absolutely! This is the ego required by every act of writing, at least up until now. The writer is saying “Listen to me! I have something to say that you didn’t think of already!” What’s it going to feel like if readers anticipate the ideas I had or, worse, was planning on having? What happens if I drift out of the center of my little universe?
The idea that a reader can come to a conclusion before the author has even thought of it really intrigued me. If this is embraced, then the central author could become something of an author/editor/producer who has the intial idea and the drive and committment to set up a website and promote it, and then posts ideas, develops and moderates the community and eventually assimilates the publicly generated content into a concise, coherent form. Almost a medium through who the public write – I will label these roles as meta-author and sub-author respectively. (This brings up the question of what happens to the roles of the traditional editor and producer, but I won’t get distracted by that at the moment).
So does the role of a meta-author become irrelevant? In some cases, like Wikipedia, the central author has mostly dissappeard (although there are something like moderators/deputants for most pages). However, I think that in some productions, it is still important. In a good book, there are many characteristics (themes, structure, pacing, reinforcement, flow etc) that can span the entire book. I think that these characteristics are largely lost if a series of small peices from sub-authors are loosely joined into a book (I do realise the irony) without a cental meta-author.
I guess it could be argued that the traditional book also becomes irrelevant when there is so much information avilable on the internet. Again, I do not agree – I think there is definitely a place for story and flow that can make a book much more than the sum of its parts of knowledge.
I can understand how some people might be put off by this approach if a considerable part of their intrinsic motivation is generated from the satisfaction of creating new ideas and conceptually going places that are new (or at least novel in the knowledge of the author). In fact, I suspect most creative people (of which most authors (including myself) are a subset) are significantly dirven by this. However, it would seen an ideal meta-author would be intrinsically motivated by ideas in general (not so much creation of their own ideas), would enjoy mediation, assimilation and summarisation, and would probably be an extrovert who is energised by interaction with other people.
So it would seem that the meta-author is quite a different type of personality to a traditional author. This is an exciting possibility – that technology is unlocking a whole new class of authors – that may (with a consciousness enhanced by a sea of contributors) even be able to go where no traditional author has gone before…
Indeed, it has been a few months since my last post. A few months I may have apologised for this, but more recently I have been realising this is simply a facet of my personality.
I have come to categorise myself as a “burster”, which I should define before someone gets the wrong idea (which is not hard). I tend to do things in solid bursts – but my head down and try to ignore everything else. At first I thought it was simply a procrastination technique because it seemed to occur most often leading up to an undesirable deadline. But I have since realise that I do it in many positive ways too – it was simply that stress seems to make me more focused (just not always on the most important task). So I am realising that the key is prioritisation – make sure that I burst on the most important tasks first.
This is actually how I started to realise the benefits. For example I was talking to a client and we decided to attempt something quite novel – unfortunately it was for an expo starting in a couple of weeks. But the rest of my calendar was quite flexible, so I dove in head first, and we emerged on time and on target. the client was astounded at what we had managed to acheive in that short time.
The more I become aware of it and talk to people about it, the more I become aware it bursting can be very beneficial. I classic example is email – I often go a quite a while without checking my email when I am deeply immersed in something else. I am now hearing more about the “crackberry” syndrome and how many people can’t resist checking their email when they get a new email alert. Combine this with the research that shows that even a very short interruption can retard productivity on the primary task by 10 to 20 minutes and you really start to appreciate bursting.
I have also noticed productivity advisors and sites like www.43folders.com reccommend similar techniques. But the keys are to burst on the highest priority task, to ‘come up for air’ occassionally, and if there are ‘rapid response’ tasks that need to be done, realise that you are not likely to do them well yourself, and therefore, to manage that (by delegation etc).
So I now I should live up to my self-inflicted reputation and add quite a few posts in the next few days. Wee will see 
Oh, and to give this post an educational bend, I have a couple of thoughts.
Firstly, I think school classrooms can be teriible places for bursters. I remember being constantly interupted and distracted at school and being frustrated at not getting much done by the end of the class (having said that, my grades didn’t seem to suffer).
Secondly, it would have been immensely valuable to have been taught some of this stuff in school so that I did not have to discover it the hard way a decade later – certainly more valuable than some of the memorising we had to do which can now be accessed online (with more accuracy) in a matter of seconds. I guess falls into the camp of “don’t just learn, but learn to learn”, which they figured out a long time ago in “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. Not to be mistaken with “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you get rid of him on weekends”