Robert Paterson's Weblog

Blogging and Small Business - This is where the revolution begins

How does a small business really advertise? In most cases by word of mouth. For instance, who would you go to on PEI to repair or renew a piece of fine furniture? Well I could tell you to go to Witold, but you would not even know to ask me. Witold would have to spend a fortune to advertise conventionally to get his name around. If he lived in Toronto with more demand, he might be able to afford this. But as he lives here, he has a probem as do all who run small businesses that are outside the conventional such as plumbing.

Weblogs change everything for reputation based small businesses. Here is Witold's blogg
See how you can get a sense of who he is and what he does? He intends to write regularly on the techniques of furniture maintenance so that you can go to his site for tips. His wife is an accomplished portrait painter. You can see her work.

Hugh has been a big supporter of his tailor friend, Thomas Mahon who just does not make a pitch but talks about his love of tailoring and what it means to him.

It is easy to see Weblogs will give small business as much power in word of mouth as a major corporation. It is not hard to imagine that small business like this will adopt much more quickly than the big business and take back a large part of the market as a result.

Jon writes more deeply than I on this topic in the context of his brother, a designer.

If you have read Christenson, it is clear that the revolution starts at the bottom. This, in my mind is the way. Let's get small business going!

I need a laugh - The truth about Consulting

Thanks to Dave

The huhcorp Website - Everything you knew about consultants but did not want to know
God Help those in the Google ads

Homeschooling on PEI

I have been contacted by the folks who run the national Homeschooling resource pages on the web for Canada.

Do you know who may be homeschooling on PEI and who may be able to represent PEI?

"Life is Learning" - Learning Design - Natural vs Machine

If we are to design the new, we have to be very careful not to use the asssumptions of the old. An assemblage of the new features in a body does not make a new tool.

Recall that HMS Inflexible on the left had all the gear of a modern warship. But it was Dreadnought on the right that was the breakthrough. Why? Because Dreadnought was built on the assumption that battle would be faught at the most extreme distance possible. As a consequence, all its systems were configured around this objective, Inflexible still held to the Nelson doctrine that real men faught face to face. Dreadnought had the power to sink the entire German Navy on its own who at the time still held to the Nelson doctrine themselves.

Christopher Alexander is again very helpful in explaining the difference in assumptions behind a mechanistc view and a natural view of design.

In the traditional mechanistic design, the entire process is aimed to a known and specific end. After all, the core metaphor is a machine. In education today that end is a credit or a passed test.

As this is a machine design where everything is separated: the teacher from the learner, math from English. Many important sources of growth are outside the box. Sport is outside. Food is outside. Home is outside. Work is outside. Learning from life itself is not counted. Only what is in school is in.

In nature, everything affects the other in an intregrated and in a dynanmic process. The acorn has the potential to be an oak tree just as the infant has the potential to become the adult person. All information about how to be a tree or a person is inside it. What the acorn and the baby need is the right set of linked proceses to interact with so that all this potential can be released. For a tree, it needs the community of other trees and all the substrata of bacteria that links the forest under the ground. It needs the community of the animals that propagate it and defends it from enemies.

The core process for babies is the interaction with the parents and the home. For 4 million years all the tremendous achievement of humanity was generated by this process. This is where our world view is created. It is the foundation of learning. Are we safe or secure, loved or worthless, can we wait for things or not, do we have power or not. Our current view of learning separates and devalues the influence of the home. The only learning process that counts is the school. As the family crumbles so does the foundation.

The second core process was interaction with the immediate community. Today most of our communities are mere dormitories.  So there is no one to learn from naturally in the physical community. What did we learn? We learned how to behave. We learned about how we interacted with the natural world. We learned all the domestic skills. We learned our people's story. We learned our context as a person. Now we only interact with other peers who are as lost as we are. Instead of neighbours, we have the TV! Without a community, we have no social context.

The third core process was work. Today we have separated work from community and from family. Work is a mystery to most kids. To gain a work skill we then spend lots of money later in life to pass a course. Some kids are lucky like my neighbour Logan who has been working as a carpenter with his Dad since he was 5. How will a grad from a community college compete with Logan? How will a Compu College grad compete with say Jevon who has been been under the hood  since a small boy? Without a vocation, we have a declining base of skills.

The fourth process that I can see is the learning of mystery. We have lost wisdom and we have lost the interaction betwen the elder and the neophyte. Instead we have told ourselves that we will never die and we shunt our elderly in waiting rooms for a death we deny. So the mystery of how we will meet our end and its revelatory power to help us live is also lost. We look to priests and to churchs instead and we hope that some book will help us. Without a sense of how we fit into the universe, we have only consumerism.

We have put all official learning into the space of an institution. In the institution everything outside does not count. But in reality, we learn in the context of the space of a community - in the context of many commmunities. We learn by doing and observing and most of all by conversing with others. Our mechanistic view is all about separation and hence works against learning.

Any design for a learning tool that continues the idea of separation will fail. The design that will work will the design that brings the individual back into the communities that we need to be human.

Learning itself of course is not a separate function from any part of our lives. This is the ultimate failure of the old system in that it has made this separation betweeen life and learning. There is no "life long learning" at an institution, there is only life itself.

Life is learning!

 

In search of a new learning tool - Drupal

I am using an online learning tool based on Drupal and modified by the guys at Good Basic (Will and Jarrod) to teach at UPEI. We are in our 3rd iteration of the design and I am increasingly happy that we will have a tool that will offer professors, students, and learners of all types what they really need. It will be very easy to use, inexpensive and powerful.

But what do I mean by powerful?

I have been very demanding of the folks who are struggling to find the right tool for ePortfolios. I have asked them to keep asking themselves what is it for. So I put myself in the same place for a learning tool. What is it for. Powerful to do what?

This was my answer to the Drupal community.

Hi My name is Rob Paterson and I teach a number of online courses at UPEI. Will Pate and Jarrod Piccioni have been developing a Drupal site for me over the last year. We are now in version 3 Beta - I would ay that we are with 20% of a release value.

I have been teaching online now for more than 4 years and think that I am beginning to get it. Please bear with me but I felt compelled to offer some context in the midst of this conversation about a feature.

I am in my mid 50's and grew up utterly imbued with the teacher/student set up that we all know. The teacher is the sage on the stage and imparts the wisdom to her students. The curriculum is clearly bounded and can be therefore tested. It is the job of the student to learn the stuff in this bounded curriculum and to be able to repeat it back to the teacher. The teacher will then reward this with marks. The rewards are extrinsic and are in the control as is everything of the teacher. Sounds familiar?

Most online tools tray their best to replicate this set of assumptions in the tool. With the greatest respect, knowing that we are all prisoners of the prevailing culture and pedagogy, I know that tools that replicate this approach will fail.

The history of innovation is one of a lag in culture behind the effective deployment of a new tool. A few examples. In 1940, the French had more and better tanks than the Germans. But the French were defeated in weeks. What happened? Why did the French who had the advantage with more and better of the new fail and so badly? Because they used the tank in the context of it being a mobile pillbox or infantry support (the problem of the previous war) while the Germans used a new context of the tank as a strategic assault weapon. Those that used the PC as a small mainframe, missed its true power as a connective tool (Even Bill missed this for a while) Those that saw its role as a connector did best.

The power of online learning is not only the obvious: that it breaks the barriers of time and place. It is that it changes the relationship between all parties. Learning is now derived not from the explicit - what can be written down in a book - but is better derived from the tacit - which is derived from the inner recesses of knowledge (The Gold) This can only happen in conversation and only in a conversation that is safe. The tacit is also intrinsically motivated which means that the learning sticks. How much of what you learned for a test remains? How much of what you learned for your self do you still have? Such a new way demands a very different relationship with the teacher. Tests have little place in a learning community. Imagine that I am a programmer in a Drupal community such as this. Where does a quiz fit? If I don't know something I ask the community for help. Sometimes no one person has the answer but a conversation between a few will extract it.

If you think of the tool only in terms of a set of features embedded in how we have always done this, then Drupal will end up like WebCT. This site is a real learning community. We don't know how to do all this stuff so we are talking about it. We are having a conversation.

The easiest metaphor for the bottom line utility of Drupal for learning that I can think of is eBay. eBay have above all created a SAFE PLACE where people can trade directly. Think how different this is from a store! This is the scale of the cultural gulf that we have to consider. The learning tool that will take over the world will be one that whose utility creates a safe conversation between a group of learners facilitated by the prof/facilitator whatever.

This safe place can be bounded by a course with a set of learning limits (I would be happy to show you what Will and I are up to at UPEI) and also will be unbounded places where people with a common problem such as diabetes will learn from each other how best to mediate their symptoms, their treatment and their health. It will be a place where oncologists keep current and help each other.

Some have said that a conversation will not work with a set and known area such as a book or math. I disagree. If the book is say Tale of Two Cities there is no better way of understanding and getting to love the book than by sharing experiences of reading it. All math problems were new and mysterious to those that first solved them. They are presented today as givens. Well they are not and if they have a context and conversation then they become as mysterious and wonderful as they really are.

Underneath all of this is a new approach to design. We have been gripped by the machine model. All design is to a tangible goal. In nature all design is about how supporting processes interact and produce a dynamic called life. The old learning works to a goal called a mark or a credential. The new opens the student to her own mind. to a community who stimulates her and in the end to the realization that learning is not something separate from the other activities in her life but is central to her existence.

Sorry this is a lecture and an interruption. I make it because I am finding Drupal close to being the type of life giving tool that I know will be the winner. I make it because I feel in the community, a need for such a tool and the energy to move forward very quickly.

So we are, as always, at choice. We can stay with the old way of seeing the world or we can see the potential of Drupal to change it

"Wank-Word Bingo" - or how to stop using Corporate peak

I only stopped laughing when I realized that I was worse than Barry
Thanks to Johnnie

What does work in the new feel like - silverorange

Many of us speculate what it may be like to work in a human and not an institutional way. All most of us have known is the Plato's Cave of the Institutional World - that includes many young people whose only view has been watching their parents and school.

Well here is a view based on experience of Dan James the "President" of silverorange, a small but vibrantly successful group of young men on PEI

Here is a snip of how they see some issues that strike at the heart of difference between what they experience and what most of us live in the traditional set up

• Fear of not having enough money – We move more money now than we ever thought we’d be moving. Money is a result of what we do. The more we fear not having enough the more likely it is that we will not have enough. Scrambling for cash, worrying about cash, doing work for cash and cash only, selling our souls for cash, and sacrificing our ideals for cash exhibits an attitude of scarcity. There is always enough. Money has appeared at times to have been tight but looking back we’ve always had it when we needed it. We’ve always gotten that great project when we needed it. We’ve always gotten a raise when rent went up at our apartments. In reality and relative to most others in the world, we’ve had an abundance of cash. I cannot for the life of me remember when a single good idea has ever been sacrificed because we didn’t have the money to do it. Money should always be an afterthought. Money is an enabler. We own the money. The money does not, will not, and never will own us. This is not an excuse to not be prudent, wise, and responsible with our money. This is simply saying that being prudent and responsible out of fear is as good as wasting it on useless things.

• Fear of conflict – Holding in emotions, thoughts, anger, resentment, and bitterness. When we stop saying what we feel. When we no longer see conflict as positive we lose out. When this happens our team will die a slow confusing death. We have ups and downs. Jobs change. Promises are sometimes left unfulfilled. Mistakes are made. People get offended. We need to continue to have conflict. We need to sometimes almost come to blows during a heated argument. We need to be held accountable to each other and our promises. We need to be a living breathing hurting and healing team. We need to say the things in the pit of our stomachs and trust the team to deal with it fairly.

• Fear of failing – The reason for our drive and work cannot be the fear of what happens if we fail. We will not last long if the reason we all come to work is to ensure that we get our paycheque to pay the mortgage payment or tuition. The reason for us coming to work should be to build something cool. To find a cool project. To sort out that problem with that design. To present that idea to the group that you’ve been dreaming up. To be with your friends. To tell the CEO he’s a idiot. To watch the Madden Bowl. To admit to the group that your heart’s not in it anymore. To find the passion that once was there.

• Not playing together – We’ve historically done this well as of late we’ve lost touch with it a bit. We need to play as a team. Computer games, Frisbee golf, paint ball, it doesn’t matter what the game is, it’s just important that we all join in.

• Not Accepting that we’re old and married – Ok, not everyone is. But if we don’t realize and accept that the personal lives of those involved in silverorange are changing and maturing we may regret the amount of time they’re spending at the office, or the time of day they’re at the office. Part of our plan with silverorange has been to build a platform from which we, as individuals, could live life. Part of this is how we mature and evolve in our relationships, marriages, education, and geographical location. We, as a team, need to realize and accept that we will all change over the years. The more flexible we are the better the chances are of our survival.

• Not Resting– We do not take enough time off. We have been gradually tiring over the past few years. Each and everyone of us has. We need to take as much time off as we each need to recharge. This will change for each person each year and that’s ok.

• Bureaucracy – The moment we start to have programs and systems to manage people we loose trust. The day we start tracking vacation and sick days we loose our souls and freedom. The day we punch in and punch out is the day the doors might as well be locked for good.

• Pride – Personal and collective pride will undo us in the long run. If one of us feels we are more important, more popular, more influential, more crucial than any other on the team our team will start to misfire on all cylinders. Likewise, if we collectively think we are too good to deal with “petty” client problems, or look down on that up and coming company we will all fail together, publicly.

• Guilt , shame, and resentment – If we as individuals feel guilty for our lack of skill, or lack of contribution to the team as a whole this will cripple us. We should not be trying to be better as individuals only because we feel we owe the team something or have let it down. Also, on the flip side, no one should resent someone else on the team for their success, or stature. We are a team. No one is more or less important than the next. Being a team means having different kinds of work and each of us having our days in the spotlight.

• Lack of Equality – If we don’t continue to operate on the premise that we are all equal participants in this team and this company then we will tear each other to pieces. Everyone should be equal. From the CEO to the junior programmer. (ed note they are all paid the same)

• Corporate and individual lack of philanthropy and charity – No matter which way you measure it, we have a lot. We have been lucky/blessed/successful or whatever you want to call it. It is our moral and human duty to distribute what we can to those who have less. (ed note - they don't just give they act)

This is the opposite to the norms and goals of the traditional. So does it work? You bet!!!

The law of small numbers - A different business model

Here is Stuart talking about Skype Voice mail

It is his comment at the end of his post that really caught my eye.

the VM product intrigues me. I think it is probably a must have. As a service it is clearly chargeable. So lets make some quick notes on marketing impact.

Price? Say 10 Euros per year. Current user base (I hesitate to use the current 17m as I have at least 10 profile names myself) Still we are seeing downloads at 80000 per day. That's up to 2 million new users per month. By the end of 2005 30 to 50 million Skypers easy.

So what's the deal here. You give it to everyone free for three months. You get a 20-30% "desired" must have conversion rate. On 40 million Skypers that 10 million who must have VM. You offer them the deal of three years VM for Euros 20. A thirty percent discount. You raise $200 million just like that.

Just makes me think about Skype with half a billion dollars in the bank! As a competitor what would you do? How far away is that day?

A Map for Living - Joseph Campbell

Cyn and Brian and I are a small team in the 100 Bloggers Project. One of the strands that link us, is our acknowledgment of the power of myth to guide us and in the insight of Joseph Campbell to interpret myth. Here are my two favourite passages.

....... we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the heropath. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the centre of our existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

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".....The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. "Live," Nietzsche says, "as though the day were here." It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribes's great victories, but in the silence of his personal despair."

The Hero of a Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell, 1949

Christopher Driscoll - His Concert

Here is Christopher's mum at the concert that followed his funeral
here is what Ron Ryder of the Guardian wrote

A Charlottetown church became a concert hall and a memorial show became a six-hour musical tribute Saturday as musicians, friends and family gathered to say goodbye to drummer Chris Driscoll.

Driscoll died Jan. 9 after a skiing accident on Vermont’s Jay Peak. The 21-year-old was on a weekend outing with friends from McGill University where he was in the final year of the school’s jazz performance program.

The program virtually emptied last week when students and their instruments piled into a charter bus to come to the Island and to wake their friend and bandmate.

From 7 p.m. Saturday until 1 a.m. Sunday, the musicians helped transform Spring Park United Church into a place where music and remembrance became a sort of healing celebration.

Driscoll’s drum kit sat centre stage, backed up by dozens of performers. Some flew from as far away as Vancouver to be part of the evening.

Three drummers, three different companions in Driscoll’s growth as a musician, provided the beat for his passing.

Alan Dowling, who gave a 12-year-old Driscoll his first drum lessons; Chris McCann, who taught him at McGill; and Richard Knox, who began drum lessons with Dowling at the same time as Driscoll and accompanied him into the McGill program — each contributed to the honours.

Dr. Ian Reid, concert organizer and father of Driscoll’s bandmate Pat Reid, said Knox took on a great responsibility and privilege.

“For nine years they had studied and played together,” he said Sunday.

“The finale was these three drummers from Chris’s life with Richard playing Chris’s drums for the last time.”

Reid said the 500 people who came out to Driscoll’s memorial show were transfixed by the gathering of musical talent and by the tribute to someone admired for his talent and for his own self.

“For the past five days I have had upwards of 40 musicians in my house with music coming from every corner,” he said.

“You don’t really understand until you’re among them how these people live; how they relate to their music and to each other. It was obvious that Chris really touched them.”

The concert, ranging from jazz to opera and classical piano, was recorded and captured on video, Reid said he’ll make copies of the recording available through his office.

He said the evening was a fitting tribute to the young man he said was a son of the family in everything but name.

“There were a few lines in the program . . . ‘To a true artist and a brilliant musician; a person for whom life was an exciting adventure filled with potential and opportunity. To one who shared his love freely and in return was loved by all. To the memory of our friend and inspiration, Chris Driscoll’,” he said.

“I think that encompasses so much about this young man.”