Cradle to cradle learning

Sally Loughlin and I have traded recommendations for professional development reading for several months. Most recently she suggested one outside of our normal boxes: Cradle to Cradle by McDonough and Braungart. They offer an appealing new approach to design of a wide range of artifacts from buildings to communities and books to cars. The TED Conference invited McDonough to present to their meeting and recently published the 20-minute video of his presentation:

The video complements the text-based presentation of the book well so I wanted Sally to know about the video introduction. I could have sent the link to her but chose this post as a better alternative. It is part of my efforts to move from channels to platforms for collaboration.
McDonough presented a user produced video clip of an earlier dialog. He honors the remix culture. How do these principles apply to our work? We already aspire to life-long learning but find difficulty in doing it because of competition for our time and attention. What can we stop doing to make time for this important work?

Note: RSS readers and Google Readers send this post as an email message do not render the embedded video. Since the link is buried in the embedded text, readers need to "View the original" to find the video or link.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/104

More incentive for dissemination of feeds and reading

In a recent post, Viral dissemination of feeds and reading, I described how Google Reader can help with dissemination of better communication and collaboration practices.

"This 'Email an item from Google Reader' tool seems like it can help encourage use of feeds and readers."

They provided another incentive recently by adding the ability to take your reading off-line. With the click of a button in reader, your browser downloads enough blog posts to a local database to keep you busy for hours catching up on reading that you could not get to in the office.

The way they have implemented reading off-line is even more interesting because it sets up the infrastructure necessary to use a wide range of web apps off-line. The project is currently in beta but it is open-source so I expect that it will develop quickly as external developers provide feedback and new ideas.

Working in Public: Linking Knowledge to Action

In discussions about using Ning.com networking tools for school district business, Kate Greeley and I discussed several advantages and challenges. In looking for a reference link for a paper I am drafting, I discovered another advantage.

Bob Sutton and Jeffry Pfeffer identified a widespread problem in institutions and businesses that they called The Knowing-Doing Gap: managers know what needs to be done but very frequently do not implement the practices. Recently, Sutton reflected on an innovation described by Diego Rodriguez at Metacool To Do Lists: A Way to Link Knowledge to Action:

"Diego at Metacool has an instructive and inspiring new post. He has a picture and a great discussion of a 'To Do' list that was publicly displayed by the staff at the Denver Art Museum, which showed the things that they still needed to get done on a new addition. I love this because it not only advertises to donors what things they need money for, it also creates public pressure on the staff to get things done. As research on commitment shows, public proclamations are far harder to reverse than those that are made in private."

Sutton got one part of the innovation but Rodriguez took it another and more powerful step:

Even better would be to open up that to-do list to anyone. So when I find the typos on the FAA website, rather than writing a snarky post on my blog, I help 'em out by entering an item on their to-do list wiki. Now I'm part of the solution, and probably part of the brand. It's about leveraging the power of the many to create the best pile of real evidence possible about what works and what doesn't. At some point along the line this starts to feel a lot like open source. Might Mozilla really be one be one big public to-do list in disguise?

Back to the Denver Museum of Art. I wish they had a publicly addressable to-do list. I would add an entry right now. Something like "fix those crazy interior angled walls that everyone kept tripping over."

Hmmmm. Shall I add testing this idea to my public to-do-list?

Grass roots development and technology

The World Food Program uses a blog to encourage readers world-wide to understand and act on issues related to hunger and poverty. They also encourage other bloggers to spread the word with goals for sharing. I am using their tools to contribute to their goals and to understand how they have implemented the system. Fortunately, I copied text from the page that I wanted to use for a quote and can add the blockquote and paste the text below:

So I’ve asked around and it turns out there are all sorts of clever ways to generate electricity if you put your mind to it. A story in the Chicago Tribune talks about a foot-pedal-powered generator called a Weza that is now making all the difference in Rwanda. It’s a simple device, it’s portable, and humanitarian organisations are lending Rwandans the money to buy them.

The link to share simply provides the html for linking but requires that users understand html to make it work correctly. I would have found it more helpful to have worked like a bookmarklet.

International Student Survial Kit- gMap

Nils has engaged students from International Programs at WSU to help build Moscowwiki. Nils and I built some maps of Moscow using Wayfaring but they have stopped development. JB Krygier, a geographer at Ohio Wesleyan University in Columbus, has used projects in his course to achieve a similar goal.

So what about mapping your own data? If you can map your own data you can map what matters to you, or your organization, or your company, or your family, or your friends. Indeed, making your own maps with your own data means you are liberated from the confines of what other people think is important (and thus what data is made available) about the world.

Two students, Slesh Anand Shrestha & Trailokya Bhattarai, have created a survival guide to OWU for international students using the new Google Mapping tools. The final part of the assignment requires students to reflect on their mapping experiences:

Reflect on your project and relate it to other mapping you did on the web this semester. Is mapping your own data really more liberating than mapping with other peo/ples data? Can you forsee using the My Maps functions in the future? For what? Is My Maps and similar "map your own data" web sites going to have a impact beyond the "cool factor"?

I'd like to see some of those reflections.

The map includes fancier icons than those I have seen in the recently released Google MyMaps tools. I wonder whether they "come with" the Google Earth Pro tools that are available to educational institutions for free.