Clare Dygert: Thinking Out Loud

Step One: The Email Problem

2012-01-03T16:09:00.000-05:00

I'm the girl who hates to go to bed because I might miss something. I also tend to subscribe to everything, because who knows where my next best idea ever might come from. But as a result, my in boxes, both personal and work, are stuffed with notifications about anything and everything. If it's a social media site, a newsletter, a specialty store, I'm getting email from them.

So today, as the first act of the new simply my life regime, I unsubscribed from almost everything. It's interesting -- I didn't have "Plunder" or "SOCMedia" in my life 2 years ago, and somehow managed to stagger along through life. I feel no distress at all as I unsub, unsub, unsub.

Tomorrow I will start deleting old emails, and along with that, old email folders. Hopefully this will mean that I will spend less time reading and deleting email in the future, and will begin to not find it necessary to obsessively check email even when I'm not working.

Welcome 2012! and 2011 -- Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Ass on Your Way Out!

2012-01-03T10:41:00.000-05:00

When I evaluate my progress towards my goals for last year, I have to admit I didn't do very well at all. In fact, I would have to say this was the worst year ever, in terms of accomplishing my goals. Here's what I said I would do:

1. Using a methodology I describe here, perform an analysis of the skills and experience that I need to develop in order to determine what I need to do to maintain my position. I did exactly nothing on this. Well, I take that back. I did find a job posting that I would describe as "perfect" -- but that's about it. And I only found that by dumb luck.

2. Learn to use InDesign and complete a project using it. Nope, not a bit.

3. Work on understanding what I can do to maximize the creativity and innovation displayed by my team. Write an article or give a presentation on leading a creative team. Sadly, I didn't do anything on this as well.

4. Develop an idea for a mobile device app that I recently came up with. I did find out that my idea wasn't original. So I didn't go any further with this.

5. Investigate moving this blog to WordPress that I host myself. Didn't do this either.

Why was this year such a flop? Usually, I am the queen of list making, and generally follow through with my plans. Why not this time?

I thought a lot about this at the end of last year, and I think what it boils down to was I didn't have any real passion about those goals. They were things that I thought would be good for me to do ( and probably they would have been) but in my busy and crowded life, they didn't demand any attention. They couldn't compete with the other demands on my time. So they were abandoned.

I read a great blog post that helped me understand what went wrong, and how to create goals for myself that will actually be accomplished. It was written by Leo Babauta and you can read the whole thing here. Here's a brief quote that I think really sums it up:

A simple life has a different meaning and a different value for every person. For me, it means eliminating all but the essential, eschewing chaos for peace, and spending your time doing what’s important to you.
It means getting rid of many of the things you do so you can spend time with people you love and do the things you love. It means getting rid of the clutter so you are left with only that which gives you value.

I started thinking about my life, and all the things that fill my time. What is really important to me?

1. Doing my Buddhist practice.
2. Maintaining and improving the important relationships in my life: My partner, my daughter, my family, my sangha.
3. Maintaining and improving my physical health.
4. Writing and other creative work.

Everything else is really just clutter. So my goal this year is to reduce the emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual clutter in my life so I have the time and space to do the things I love, to be with the people that I love. I will begin to ask myself: Is this important to me? And if it isn't, I will let it go.

Let's see how this turns out!

Prezi about My Team's Work

2011-11-14T13:56:00.000-05:00

EDR at NTID on Prezi

New Tools

2011-10-27T10:02:00.000-04:00

Last week I had the opportunity to visit Philadelphia and attend the Educause 2011 conference. Educause is perhaps the biggest conference for higher education and technology, both in terms of quantity of presentations and also quality. While there, I attended an excellent half-day session on Instructional Design presented by Ed Bowen. Here are some new tools that came up during that session:

Glogster – This is a tool for making interactive posters. Think collage meets Web2.0. I think this could be very interesting for elementary school teachers to use with their students.

PassTheNotes.com– “PassTheNotes.com is a SAAS (software as a service) for educators, students, and developers to create, manage, distribute, and monitor interactive themes and content. We are passionate about revolutionizing education through our platform and realize there’s lots of work to be done. We’ve created the foundation and now we’re opening it up for the world to start working together to make it great.”

Splashtop – “Travel light and have full access to the computing power of your main PC or Mac. Access your files and multimedia content on a remote computer with exceptional audio, video, and real-time interactivity all from a Mac.
FEATURES:
• Connect from anywhere via local network or across the Internet
• Access important files or photos on another computer without worrying about syncing, converting, or compatibility issues
• Use MS Office, Silverlight, and other Windows software without having to install it on a Mac
• Play HD movies and music from your central media libraries without the hassle of transferring files
• Run graphic-intensive PC games on a powerful machine and play them from a portable Mac
• Save energy with Wake-on-LAN”

Wall wisher – “Wall Wisher is a web tool that allows you to have an interactive cork board. Imagine the ability to post notes with reminders about class trips, even the PDF file for the permission slip, as well as photos and other great items for your peers and students. Wallwisher is simple to use and can be shared or kept private. It is an easy way to share a workspace either with students or colleagues.”

Poll Everywhere – “Poll Everywhere replaces expensive proprietary audience response hardware with standard web technology. It's the easiest way to gather live responses in any venue: conferences, presentations, classrooms, radio, tv, print — anywhere. It can help you to raise money by letting people pledge via text messaging. And because it works internationally with texting, web, or Twitter, its simplicity and flexibility are earning rave reviews.”

Lead with the Why

2011-10-26T14:18:00.000-04:00

I've wondered why I do so well when I interview for a job. I'm not good looking, only average smart, have had only average experiences. I am hard working, and creative, but so are a ton of other people. But somehow, if I interview for a job, I get an offer about 80% of the time, and almost 100% of the time if I actually ask for the job. Why is that?

Today I found out why. I saw an 18 minute TED video by Simon Senek. Simon Senek presents a very simple idea that he calls The Golden Circle. It's a simple idea -- three concentric circles. The outside circle is "What". The next circle in is "How". The inner circle is "Why". Simon Senek says the what are the features of your product, or perhaps the facts of your resume. Everyone in the company knows What the company does. Most of the people know How the company does it. But maybe very few know the most important thing, the Why.

Simon Senek says that the conventional way to sell something is to start with the what and move in. So we describe the features of the product. But the exceptional people start with the Why and go from there. People are attracted to the why.

I know this is true from my own experience.

When I interview for a job, I have naturally focused on the Why I do what I do. At this point in my life, that seems to be the most important part, maybe the only important part. I don't care so much about the money. I don't care so much about the fame or the power-- but I do care a whole lot about what the Buddhists call "ending suffering" -- my mission. And that's what I talk about. I figure at this point that if the company and I don't share the same mission, then there is no point in me working with them at all.

Think about your own Why and when you are interviewing or selling or leading. Start with the Why and see if you don't experience greater success. I know you will.

Sharing the Dream

2011-10-26T12:36:00.000-04:00

Watch this video, and think about how we can use this idea to develop better business skills content. To see the video with subtitles in English, please go here.

Don't You Wish You Had This?

2011-08-18T11:32:00.000-04:00

Here's something amazing: A shared Google spreadsheet of all the TED talks!

Business Skills Training

2011-06-27T10:24:00.002-04:00

I'm working on a fascinating project right now -- development of business skills training for Deaf professionals. Teaching judgment and decision making is a complex undertaking. I have even heard people in the training profession suggest that it can't be done. Of course, they are confusing something that is difficult with something that is impossible. Teaching judgment making is very hard, not impossible, though. Thank goodness for that, or we would have even fewer people in this world making good decisions!

This training will have three parts:

Self-paced tutorials;
Group instruction, through webinars or something similar;
One-on-one mentoring.

Self-paced tutorials I think can be effective for some kinds of content -- what has been described as "knowledge needed" or "What do I need to know before I can start to learn how-to do something." Defining terms, giving students facts, describing the structure or process of something are all types of content where a self-paced tutorial comes in handy. It will give the student the opportunity to learn something at the speed he finds most comfortable. I anticipate that learning English vocabulary and specialized terminology will be important to Deaf professionals, and self-pace tutorials are the best way to learn this kind of content.

My concept for this training is something like the way they doing over at e-Cornell. There, if you buy an online course, you only have access to it for a period of time. That is because they have real live teachers at the other end of the wire. Contrast this to Element K's product, which is 100% online and without the intervention of humans. I think the e-Cornell approach is preferable, even though I worked at Element K and lead their early efforts at business skills development.

Much of what is currently available in the realm of self-paced tutorials is incredibly boring and ineffective. So whatever we develop has to be entirely new, interesting, engaging, and effective. We are experimenting with using the features of ASL to guide our graphical interface development. The hope is that signing individuals will find that the content "works" for them, and is more effective and engaging because of that.

Self-paced tutorials fall very flat when it comes to teaching how to make judgments, and making judgments is what business skills is all about. Why won't a self-paced tutorial do the job? Because when learning to make judgments, we need subtle corrections from experts. Self-paced tutorials just can't distinguish between almost, almost right and almost right. It can only say right or wrong. The kind of gross distinctions that self-paced tutorials make is not fine enough to really help people understand how to change, if they aren't dead on immediately. To do that we need feedback from a live person, and in my plan, we will do this in a group instruction setting, such as a webinar.

But new judgment makers need even more feedback than that -- they need the input from a coach or mentor that is focusing just on them, and on their unique situation. So I am proposing a time-bound engagement between learner and mentor, where the mentor will give focused feedback and encouragement to a Deaf professional. Of course, it would be optimal if these coaches were themselves Deaf, but that might be a challenge in the beginning. But ultimately that is what we will want -- people who themselves have been successful in advancing their careers serving as mentors and coaches.

Information Costs and Flat Organizational Structures

2011-05-16T09:26:00.004-04:00

One of my most strongly held management principles is that decision making should be pushed as far down the chain of command as possible. This is counter-intuitive to many (most?) of my brother and sister managers who, because they are responsible for successful outcomes, naturally want to maintain control over critical processes. But in doing so, they are actually guaranteeing that results will be suboptimal. Here's why:

Take the case of your local instance of a national jeans store. It is probably staffed by 20-somethings or even teenagers, while far, far, away, a much older person makes decisions about the inventory in the store. Ms Store Clerk knows that the snap on those "boyfriend" style jeans has a little rough spot on the inside that is uncomfortable. She knows this she asks when the customer comes out of the dressing room, "How did those work out for you?" and the customer says, " What's the deal with the snap? It was totally scratching me!" And then Ms Store Clerk folds the jeans and puts them back on the shelf.

When Mr. Corporate sees the sales numbers for the store, he doesn't have access to that critical piece of information. But the human brain will fill in the blanks, if information is missing. Its the way we are hardwired. So Mr. Corporate will have a story for why the numbers are low on the "boyfriend" jeans. Perhaps he will think that the style is now out of fashion. So when he re-orders, he won't order more of those, but instread go with the capris. From the same manufacturer, who is still using the same snaps. And when the customers see that their favorites, the "boyfriend" style jeans are no longer stocked by that store, perhaps they will switch to the other national chain store in town. Just maybe.

In this case, the information costs are the costs of the lost sales, the lost future sales, and the purchases of the wrong stock. If the organization could somehow ask Ms Store Clerk about things, it would be able to make much better decisions.The take away for us is that decisions should be made as close to where the process is that they will affect as possible. It will be a negotiation to find the best place -- but I bet you will be surprised when you figure it out!

Happy New Project Year!

2011-05-14T11:18:00.000-04:00

My department's new project year actually begins October 1, but we like to get things rolling a little before that. So recently we have be soliciting new project ideas from the staff and faculty at NTID. Our projects can be requested by anyone, and if it either supports learning and teaching, or if it promotes NTID, we can accept it. Projects are assigned a budget up to $5000 and the use of my entire team's skills: video, programming, instructional design, graphic design, photography, web development.

This year looks exciting. Although we haven't completed the selection process (a collaborative process that the entire team participates in), here is a sneak peek at some of the technologies and concepts we will be working with:

QR codes, both for instruction and for administrative use
Iphone and Android development
Xbox development ("You are the controller!"
Using Drupal sites to encourage collaboration
"Fake" 3D
Use of emotion in instruction
Rapid curriculum planning strategies
Business skills for D/deaf professionals
More collaboration with student workers and co-ops

Looks like it is going to be an exciting year. I'll let you know how things progress!

Using Research in Design

2011-05-14T11:07:00.000-04:00

I was having a conversation recently about designing effective eLearning, and I made a statement that my design is research-based. When pressed for details, I mentioned the name of my ID guru: Dr. Ruth Colvin Clark. Dr. Clark was instrumental in the development of the instructional design model I used at Element K, and her work continues to have a profound effect on me.

But of course, Dr. Clark hasn't been specifically working with D/deaf college students, so of course while I can use her work as a starting place, it doesn't answer all the questions that arise when developing instruction for a totally different culture and language, especially a language that is manual versus spoken.

So for the past three years, I have been working on an instructional design model that starts with my specific audience, D/deaf college students. Many in this group use ASL as their primary language, and English as a second.However, some use English, and only begin to sign when the come to NTID. And others are scattered along the continuum between ASL and English.

(Side comment: learning a second language while trying to invent an instructional design model for native users of that language isn't so much like building a canoe while rowing it as it is like growing the forest, felling and milling the trees, building the canoe and rowing it! Everyday I learn another little piece that helps me to internalize and know more.)

As I have thought about each section of my design model, I've asked myself: "What does the research say about D/deaf adult learners and this?" I've read mountains of research of various topics, such as:

How do ASL signers expect/want/need content to be ordered and chunked? How is this different from the way I (as a native English speaker) expect/want/need it done? (Because, let's face it: Our default audience is always "me".)
What features of ASL can be incorporated in to my instructional design? What features are critical, and what don't matter? For my my non-ASL students in the crowd, this would include things such as presenting material from general to specific, mentioning time first, using a topic-comment pattern, and showing, not telling. There is a lot more to it, but that gives you the gist.
What kind of illustrations/graphics are most effective?
What kind of text is most effective?
If we incorporate captions, or English, what is the best use of that?
At what point are what kind of practice activities most effective?
Are there actually such a thing as visual learners? If so, what does this mean in the development of my content?
What aspects of Deaf culture are import to incorporate?
How can non-manual sign components (such as mouth morphemes, gaze, facial expressions, and body shifts be effectively used?

What I have found is that researchers like to research tiny tiny tiny little pieces of things. And I need research on much bigger chunks. So while I continue to read and ask questions, I have also started to establish relationships with researchers so I can hopefully influence the future direction of their research. I firmly believe that it will be through those partnerships that I will finally be able to craft the most effective and engaging instruction.

We are starting to build the first prototype -- business skills content for D/deaf professionals that desire to move into first-time manager roles. I am confident that this process, with it's millions of design decisions, will lead us to ask more and better questions. And asking the questions, well, that's the first step, isn't it?

Nobody Tells

2011-05-11T22:57:00.000-04:00

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

– Ira Glass

True, eh?

Scatter/Gather: Where Have You Been All My Life?

2011-04-19T13:06:00.000-04:00

It's so exciting to me to find a site/book/person who says what I have been thinking but so clearly and fluently.

What if you could text a one-dollar donation for every story you heard on NPR that really fascinated, moved, or taught you something? It would be extremely easy to do, and probably at least as likely to bring in $50 a year (the threshold for station membership) as the twice-yearly membership drives where NPR implores listeners to remember the importance of those same programs. Added to the usual membership option, the text-a-dollar possibility would provide an instantaneous reward for them and, however surprisingly, for you. That’s because the incentive isn’t a random prize; it’s an emotionally affirming action, tied to an experience you’ve already decided is important to you.

From my most favorite site I just discovered: Scatter/Gather. The entire article is here.

Five Critical Skills for New Employees

2011-04-02T12:10:00.000-04:00

I am asked occasionally to act as an interviewer so our students can have some realistic experience to prepare for their job search. Our students are generally very well prepared when it comes to using particular technologies. They are ready to enter today's job market.

But are we doing an equally good job preparing them for tomorrow's? Here are my five top skills students need to possess to be successful in the future:

1.Ability to collaborate and communicate digitally.
2.Solve problems.
3.Both be able to tell a compelling story using multimedia tools, and maybe even more importantly, be able to deconstruct and interpret a compelling story using multimedia tools.
4.Validate a proposed solution.
5.Negotiate.

Ability to collaborate and communicate digitally.

The "cloud" or whatever you want to call the digital realm, is no doubt, the meeting room of the very near future. Our students need to be comfortable both with the technology and the gestalt of these spaces. They also need to be able to collaborate there...to be able to present their own ideas, build on the ideas of others, abandon their own ideas if better ones are presented. Our students will be called upon to create new knowledge and productize it. The most efficient way to do this is through collaboration, and in a global economy, collaboration is digital.

Solve problems.

More than once I have assigned a task with a team member, only to find later that s/he got stuck at some point, and was not able to move ahead. His/her response? To just wait, either for me to come back or for a miracle to occur that would unstick them. The current generation seems to be extremely unprepared to solve problems. I look for individuals who can correctly define the problem, who can break it down into parts. I also want to know how others have solved similar problems. And sometimes similar problems are in a totally different field. Once the problem is defined, solutions must be proposed. Note I said solutions, plural. And a solution must be planned and implemented.

Both be able to tell a compelling story using multimedia tools, and maybe even more importantly, be able to deconstruct and interpret a compelling story using multimedia tools.

Multimedia tools are no longer the property of one group of individuals, namely graphic designers. Everyone must be facile with these tools. But telling the story is perhaps the easy part. Students must also be able to deconstruct and interpret the compelling stories others tell. If students are unable to do this, their perspective and understanding will be dictated wholly by the storytellers.

Validate a proposed solution.

This skill is closely related to both problem solving and interpreting stories. But I call it out because it is so critical. If students are unable to validate solutions, they will choose the easiest, least expensive solution. Or the one fronted by the most compelling storyteller. And frequently, the best solution is neither the cheapest, easiest, or compelling.

Negotiate.

Finally, our students must be adept at finding a reasonable middle ground that preserves the most important attributes, features, or qualities of both sides. Today's world is woefully short on negotiating skills as anyone who reads the daily paper can see. My experience has been that my youngest employees are particularly poor at this. They frequently adopt an all or nothing position that frustrates and puzzles their co-workers.

It is our responsibility to prepare our students to improve the human condition, and giving students vital practice in these five critical skills would be an important first step.

Professional Development for Deaf Professionals

2011-03-31T10:22:00.000-04:00

I'm really interested in developing some kind of materials for professional development for NTID grads. I saw some statistics that say our students enter the job market at the same pay rate as their hearing colleagues, but when they have been in the market for a while, they stop making the same sort of gains in position and salary. My thought is that our students aren't being promoted to management positions at the same rate as their hearing colleagues. I think that there may be five reasons for this:

Weak written English skills
Lack of opportunities to be mentored
They don't "overhear", so soft skills information isn't being passed to them in that way
Lack of appropriate professional development opportunities. (I don't believe simply providing an interpreter at a workshop is enough. And I am not sure that employers are actually making these programs available due to the additional cost of interpreters.)
Unwillingness by Deaf professionals to move around, due to the difficulty of training hearing co-workers how to communicate. Once Deaf professionals get things worked out, they may be reluctant to repeat the process.

Here are the topics I believe would be useful:

Personal goal setting
Time management
Conducting a meeting
Project management
Some kind of negotiation skills training
Focused business writing: emails, meeting minutes, meeting agendas, status reports
Presentation skills
Self-branding and planning your career

I saw some e-learning that was developed at Cornell. The "class" has some material that the student does on his own, and then some webinar sessions where the students are "together". I want the self-pace material to be developed in a way that takes advantages of ASL features. I am planning to work on a prototype of one of these as a "Major Design Project."

Translating Ideas to Practice in the Classroom

2011-03-25T13:39:00.000-04:00

"Teachers will not take up ideas that sound attractive, no matter how extensive the research base, if the ideas are presented as general principles that leave the task of translating them into everyday practice entirely up to the teachers... What teachers need is a variety of living exapmples of implementation, as practiced by teachers with whom they can identify and from whom the can derive the confidence that they can do better. They need to see examples of what doing better means in practice." (Black and Williams, 2008)

Truer words were never written.

Divergent and Convergent Thinking and Why You Care

2011-03-01T16:47:00.000-05:00

I was trolling the Internet for interesting information and ideas and came across this old school site called Divergent Thinking.

"The goal of divergent thinking is to generate many different ideas about a topic in a short period of time. It involves breaking a topic down into its various component parts in order to gain insight about the various aspects of the topic. Divergent thinking typically occurs in a spontaneous, free-flowing manner, such that the ideas are generated in a random, unorganized fashion. Following divergent thinking, the ideas and information will be organized using convergent thinking; i.e., putting the various ideas back together in some organized, structured way."

Divergent thinking is probably something we should be teaching our students. It is one of the fundamental building blocks of creativity. Being able to generate a number of ideas and then put them back together in some new and original way is essential. Creation of new knowledge is what our students will be required to do, if they want to be successful.

This divergent thinking - convergent thinking cycle is the part of my job that I enjoy the most. Things I do almost every day (every GOOD day!) are:

Taking time to think about something -- almost anything will do. But it is important to just stop and think.
Meditate. Meditation is to thinking as practicing scales is to playing the piano. It will help you to nudge your mind in the right direction.
Writing. I use my blogs (I write three now!) as the place where I put ideas back together in new and original (at least for me) ways. Sometimes an idea will will present itself and I will use my writing as a way to explore it. Sometimes I will take two subjects and then challenge myself to think of ways that they can go together.

Putting things together in new and novel ways is not a "nice to have" any more -- it is an essential. How will/do you practice divergent and convergent thinking?

Figuring out What's Next Big Trend and Why Maybe You Don't Want to Know

2011-02-24T09:56:00.000-05:00

That title -- "Figuring Out What's Next Big Trend and Why Maybe You Don't Want to Know" sounds kinda ominous, doesn't it? Well, I didn't mean it like that. I'm not afraid of the future. Not a bit.

I think the main trends that we are going to be dealing with are all about the crowd. Crowd everything: crowd financing, crowd sourcing are going to be very big. If you haven't already, check out Kickstarter.com. Kickstarter gives creative people -- or at least people with an idea -- a place to make a pitch, and then let other people support them financially. I've supported:

TickTock, a wristband that transforms a Ipod Nano (the new, square ones) into the coolest watch ever.
Lumina, an eye mask that wakes you up by gradually getting brighter, like the sun rising.
The Stork, "... a game/social experiment which encourages people to perform brave acts of kindness."
The Manual, "a new limited-run print magazine that takes a fresh look at design on the web."
The Shape of Design, a book that combines one person's thinging about "design and thinking about the topics that orbit the practice: storytelling, concept, craft, and improvisation."

These projects, and others that haven't been succussful in their bid to be funded, are novel and interesting and cool. In the old, 3 years before now world, I would only be a part of these projects if I was actually a part of the project. I most likely wouldn't have had the opportunity to know these people in the first place. And my puny little $10 or $25 or $100 contribution wouldn't be very useful. When my tiny contribution combined with other people who also think these projects are cool, it has the power to make dreams come true.

Crowd financing and micro financing aren't extremely new, although I think the way that idea has been blended with social networking at the Kickstarter site is novel. Another related idea, though, really is new. That's the idea of a Network of Strangers That Have Something in Common.

Right now we have some pretty robust networks on the net -- Facebook and LinkedIn are two that I participate in daily. But these networks are networks of people I know or have some direct connection with. LinkedIn, in fact, actually actively discourages me from linking to people I don't know. And I get why they feel that way. But what if I could search a network for people that share common interests or want to do something that I want to also do? If there was some sort of rating on my reputation, like rating systmes used on Yelp or Ebay, where people who had worked with me could rate the quality of my participation, then you wouldn't necessarily need to "know" me to want to team with me. So Network of Strangers -- you heard it here first!

Which leads me to my next trend -- Influencer Identification. Just like back in High School, there was that one kid who led the pack and set the styles, in groups there are individuals or groups of them, that are driving the bus. In the past we ordinary mortals didn't have enough data presented in such a way that we could see what what was happening. But we do now, and visual information analytics is becoming more sophisticated and more available, every day. This technology can also be used to determine where innovation is happening, and how that innovation is being funded. Quid is one of those tools. Bloomberg.com quoted Bob Goodson, one of Quid's founders as saying, "The idea is to pinpoint where innovation is happening, what trends are emerging and who is funding them." Bob Goodson uses Quid to mine YouNoodle, a site that introduces entrepreneurs to people who want to fund them.

So with all this wonderfulness going on, why did I say, "Why Maybe You Don't Want to Know" in my title? Because if your aim is to increase your ability to monetize yourself, perhaps you don't want people to know so much about you because with the decrease in uncertainty, comes a decrease in the volatility associated with you. The Harvard Business Review (March 2011) in it's article "Experts are More Persuasive When They're Less Certian," says, ""People value potential more than achievement. Given identical stats for a veteran pro athlete's first five years of performance and a rookie's predicted five-year performance, study subjects choose to pay the rookie nearly $1 million more in year six."
In other words, because we don't know just how wonderful the rookie is, we are will to pay more money for him. Because he might be fantastic. And the veteran, even the best, most wonderful veteran, is a know quantity. You've probably noticed this effect at work, where the person who is hired off the street starts at a sometimes significantly higher salary than the person who is already employeed by the company. So if you are on the rookie side of that equation, perhaps you don't want the company to know TOO much about you! Only enough to be sure that you are indeed wonderful! It would be very interesting to to see how the fees paid to people who have community ratings relate to the people who don't have those ratings. Or how people's fees in networks where you "know" folks relate to those in networks of strangers.

I'm fascinated by the way the future is unfolding. Let's see if I'm right about these tends.

Far Transfer and Second Language Acquistion

2011-02-23T09:44:00.000-05:00

This quarter I took a great class: "Structure of ASL" taught by Kim Kurz. Kim is a great teacher, and I found the class really fascinating. Kim used the book by Clayton Valli, Ceil Lucas, and Kristin J. Mulrooney as the basis for her instruction. One of the points she made in class was that there is a difference between a user's competence in a languague and a user's performance in a language. In other words, there is a difference between how a what a person knows about a language and how the person uses the language.

This is definitely true in my case.

Several of my ASL teachers have taught these four general rules of ASL:
1. Time goes first in the sentence.
2. General goes before specifics.
3. Concrete before abstract
4. Describe the location in space from the signer's perspective.

I KNOW all these rules. I UNDERSTAND these rules. But do I APPLY these rules? Not consistently. When I'm in the middle of a conversation, I flip back to English rules. This seems to be especially true if the person I am conversing with is using sim com, or is a hearing person who voices (even in whispers) when she signs. If the person is a native ASL signer, it is easier for me to maintain closer adherence with ASL rules. But I still make mistakes.

So I know what the problem is, but I don't have any idea on how to fix it. The advice I commonly get here at NTID is to spend more time with ASL signers. That would be nice, but my work here is more about me spending time at my desk, in front of a computer, than it is chatting up ASL signers. And I will admit to a reluctance to using my colleagues and work friends as unpaid tutors.

I've spent some time trying to find any research that discusses how to increase far transfer skills in seccond language acquision. So far, I haven't found much of anything. So if you are aware of any research that might be useful for me, please point me in that direction!

What Do the Best Companies Have That You Don't Have?

2011-02-09T10:33:00.000-05:00

I read an interesting page on the Hay Group's site. Here's what the Hay Group says about the "best" companies -- companies that can "surface, identify, and use great ideas."

90% of the Best Companies expect employees to lead, regardless if they have a formal position of authority.

All of the Best Companies manage a pool of successors for mission-critical roles.

90% of the Best collect leadership development best practices from subsidiaries and share them

Cultural diversity means 95% of the Best can respond to the challenges of competing in a global economy

95% of the Best Companies have a ‘family friendly’ corporate culture to support employees raising children.

100% of the Best have programs to develop leaders who can bring together resources across the organization

The Best give all employees the opportunity to develop and practice the capabilities needed to lead.

100% of the Best pay male and female employees the same rate.

95% of the Best Companies have programs to help expats deal with the local culture.

100% of the Best get local leaders to participate in decisions made at HQ to share ideas and best practices

For more information about the Hay Group, click here.

The Wisdom of Crowds and the Changing Nature of Leadership

2011-02-08T14:55:00.000-05:00

The Center for Creative Leadership has published a research white paper on the changing nature of leadership. They interviewed 389 individuals about leadership and organizations, and I found the results to be very interesting.

According to the research, 84% of respondents believe that the definition of what is effective leadership has changed in the past five years. 60% believe that leaders face challenges that go beyond their individual capabilities, and 58% believe that interdependence work is the foundation of effective leadership. To me this means that the concept of a leader as the person out front, singularly leading the troops to some semi-distant goal is no longer accurate. Perhaps either because of the growing complexity of problems, or the flood of data, more and more of what identifies true leaders is their ability to effectively team with others.

A second area of study seems to reinforce this conclusion. CCL asked about the three core competencies that they use to define leadership: setting direction, gaining commitment, and creating alignment. According to the study, only 50% agreed that leadership in their organizations sets direction effectively. Only 46% said leadership gains commitment effectively. And perhaps most telling, only 40% felt that leadership exhibited the the competency that seems to be the most connected to working with others, creating alignment effectively.

The notion of the wisdom of crowds isn't a fad or the latest business buzz term with no substance behind it. It actually represents a fundamental change in the way people view reality. The challenge will be to lead people with this changed worldview, especially since the manager who strives to lead them attained his/her position by successfully manipulating the old paradigm!

The whit epaper also reports on activities that are rewarded by companies, comparing what is happening currently with what the crowd felt should be rewarded. While behaviors like "making the numbers" and individual performance are currently what is rewarded, the crowd thought that teamwork, collaboration, long-term objectives and working across boundaries should be rewarded. The paper didn't discuss how this fundamental disconnect between what the organization is doing and what the crowd feels is the more appropriate action tends to undermine leadership. Perhaps this is why leadership can't create alignment effectively.

The worker bees of the organization do understand the trade off between "making the numbers" -- an activity with monthly or quarterly horizons -- and long-term objectives, which ultimately will create a more stable environment, foster innovation, and invest in quality. Some time ago, I worked for a company that was purchased by another company. Immediately before the sale, we were pushed hard to "make the numbers", so our balance sheet wotul be as attractive as possible to potential suitors. This caused our management to attempt to make as much salable product as possible, with little thought to quality. After the new company made the purchase, we had a period of relative calm. But eventually, the new ownership began to exert that pressure again. There was no desire to listen to the wisdom of the crowd, and ultimately many excellent people left the organization. Until management is rewarded for having a longer view and encouraging collaboration and innovation, the organization is going to be in conflict with the current values of it's workers. Not only does it miss out on all that wisdom, and make suboptimal decisions, but it is going to loose the best workers, who simply will not stay where they can't participate in a meaningful way. And this is going to happen even in a sub par economy.

The Changing Nature of Leadership, by Andre Martin for the Center for Creative Leadership, can be found here.

Metacognition is the Golden Key

2011-02-07T15:54:00.000-05:00

I am a strong believer in open education, a trend that some people believe would put all of us working in Higher Education out of a job. What is open education? In my perfect world, it is groups of people who share the desire to know about something, coming together, finding a teacher, and learning it. There are no grades, there is no term. When they are finished they go away. Maybe it isn't even a group. Maybe it's just me, and I find my resources, the books, videos, articles, whatever, and then I think about things. And after I have thought about it, I make something. I add to the knowledge of the world.

The Internet is a wonderful partner to open education because literally everything is out there, just waiting for me to find it.

So what do we, those of us in formal education, what do we offer to our students? Why do they need us at all?

Well, I think we hold the golden key to all this learning and knowledge making. We are the ones who can help our students to understand the gap between where they are today and where they want to be tomorrow. We are the ones who can help them to understand how to actually perform that act of self examination. We are the ones who can teach students to evaluate themselves, and determine for themselves, what is needed to bridge that gap.

One of my work pals has told me that her students don't want to do this. They want HER to do this. Well, too bad. Because if we don't teach students this much, they will never go on to be the life-long learners that our society must have in order to survive. They will be come slaves to their own ignorance. Metacognition is the golden key, and if we don't give it to our students, we have failed to actually teach them anything of value.

Xoom - I Knew 2011 Was Going to Be Wonderful!

2011-01-06T12:11:00.000-05:00

What runs Flash and has two cameras?

Xoom. Yes, I love my Ipad, but I just converted!

2011 New Year's Resolutions

2010-12-23T10:39:00.000-05:00

Well, it's that time again -- time to evaluate my progress towards goals and chart my new course. 2010 was an interesting year. I experienced some turmoil in my private life, but was able to more or less maintain my equanimity. I feel as good about that as I do any of my accomplishments. I set fewer professional goals for myself, and that helped me to focus more. So let's look at how I did.

1. Review and re-define my personal brand. I'm feeling a little unfocused and unhappy with my direction right now and need to figure out where it is I want to be in the next 3 years.
The work that makes me happiest right now is the thinking and talking about innovation and managing creative teams. It seems to me that there isn't a lot of knowledge about transforming teams from ordinary to innovative. I think that I would like to work on that, and in doing so, refocus my brand.

2. Blog more regularly. I really enjoy this, even if (as I suspect!) it is just me and my nephew occasionally reading it. But blogging does help me focus my thoughts. I am going to try to blog weekly. The summers are the hardest time, when all I want to do is be out in my garden. But let's see if I can't be a little more regular with this.
I think I blogged here 50 times, out of a target 52. I also started a new blog for my personal musings, allowing this to become a more professionally focused space. I blogged there 44 times. So the combined effort is well above my goal.

3. Continue to improve my ASL skills. I have 18 months to reach Intermediate level on the Sign Language Proficiency Interview. This isn't a minor goal, to say the least.
I haven't made my goal here yet, but I still have seven months. I feel like my signing has improved. My receptive skills definitely have.

4. Continue work on my Instructional Design Model for Teaching Deaf Adults. I would like to be able to present this at conferences in 2011.
I made very little to no direct progress on this goal. However, I do have a better understanding of the linguistic aspects of ASL and that is helping me further define my model.

Here are my goals for next year:

1. Using a methodology I describe here, perform an analysis of the skills and experience that I need to develop in order to determine what I need to do to maintain my position.

2. Learn to use InDesign and complete a project using it.

3. Work on understanding what I can do to maximize the creativity and innovation displayed by my team. Write an article or give a presentation on leading a creative team.

4. Develop an idea for a mobile device app that I recently came up with.

5. Investigate moving this blog to WordPress that I host myself.

What are your resolutions?

Here's hoping that 2011 is your happiest ever!

Life Cycle of Pride Movements

2010-12-20T16:11:00.000-05:00

I interested to know if there is some kind of a life cycle that has been described for "pride" movements. For example, when I was a young woman, the feminist movement was just getting off the ground and was relatively powerful. Although not all women considered themselves to be feminists, those who did were very vocal and focused, with a fairly clear agenda.

But now, I don't hear ANY young women describing themselves as feminists, although they all enjoy the benefits that the early feminists won for them. It seems obvious to me that there was a period where the notion of feminism was rising and gather steam, then a period when it had enough strength as a movement to effect changes, and then a period of decline, during which most of the societal changes persisted, but no new changes (such as passing the ERA) were able to be accomplished. Does this process actually exist, and can it be used to describe other "pride" movements?

If such a process exists, those of us who are supporters of particular social changes and their associated pride movements might modify our strategies based on where the movement was in the life cycle.

Any thoughts?

Major Themes for 2011

2010-12-20T14:09:00.000-05:00

My boss has asked me to develop a strategic plan for my department at NTID. This has been a very interesting exercise. It has given me an opportunity to talk to people inside and outside about where should we be in three years and what do we need to do to be ready to go there. These conversations have been so enlightening!

I came to this task with an understanding that technology is progressively becoming more mobile and distributed. And that this will have a democratizing effect on the population.

My conversations with my colleagues have led me to see how important the idea of entrepreneurship is going to be to us. You may not immediately connect entrepreneurship to University. Understanding the fundamentals of product management is going to be important to my team, as we strive to support faculty and staff entrepreneurs. I will be exploring that connection in future blog postings.

Design-thinking is another new idea I will be exploring. What I like about design-thinking is that it includes empathy as well as rationality and creativity, and is a method for making innovation happen. Up to now I haven't had language or process to describe how I innovate, so my attempts at supporting innovation in my team have been less than universally successful. In a nutshell, if the person I was working with was an innovator, then mostly I just had to get out of the way. I want to do more than that. Hopefully, learning and implementing design-thinking will make that possible. Expect to read more about that in the future.

I am looking forward to 2011, and the learning and exploration that is going to come with it!

Developing a Place for Innovation

2010-12-16T10:53:00.000-05:00

As I watched this video, I was very interested in Jane's comments about games and "epic wins", which she defines as an outcome so extraordinarily positive that you had no idea it was possible until you achieve it. According to Jane, gamers experience epic wins while playing games but not during real life.

Jane has written Reality is Broken and I'm planning on putting it on the top of my list for reading over the Christmas break. I am intensely interested in establishing a place (maybe I should say atmosphere?) where my team and I can innovate. I think Jane has some ideas that might really help with that. Stand by for more!

DevLearn 10

2010-11-03T21:09:00.001-04:00

I'm at DevLearn 10. It's not as good as other conferences I've been to, and after Educause last month, seems down right puny. The day started out great with a "breakfast Bytes" session run by Terrance Wing. The topic was social media, and although Terrance had some opinions about the subject, he kept things low key. The most important take away was this: If you want to incorporate social media into your learning, find a problem and then ask the group to solve it. That appealed to my little constructivist heart. He also discussed the issues that arise between control (of information, of knowledge, of brand) and the democratizing force of social media. Honey, that ship has sailed. The mantra of my generation: Power to the people has come to pass. The power is with the people, get over it. The problem now is that companies will be pretending that hasn't happened, and be missing the boat. It makes me think of the story my marketing teacher in business school used to tell about the development of transistors. That technology was known to US manufacturers, but there was such an investment in vacuum tubes that we didn't go there. So Japan, who was forced by WWII agreements to not have a standing army and had gobs of money to invest, invested in transistors. And the rest is history.

So we need to realize that social media is a part of the equation. It is democratizing by nature. And it will not be controlled.

So what are you going to do about it?

Educause Day Thee, Part Two

2010-10-14T22:22:00.000-04:00

My last day. Wow. I'm pooped! Ok, here's what I saw this afternoon.

The Top of the Stack: Fuchs on Funding
Ira Fuchs

What the program said:
In more than 10 years as vice president and program officer for research in information technology at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ira Fuchs oversaw the grants program that funded projects including Sakai, uPortal, Kuali, the Open Knowledge Initiative, Fedora, DSpace, and the Open Library Environment. Having been both a pioneer in the development of transformative technology projects and a leader in the higher education community, Fuchs will discuss the grant makers perspective on higher education, including insights to those seeking grants from philanthropic organizations.

My take: Ira Fuchs went over his pointers for grant writers, they they were pretty common sense. You know, like...if your potential finder doesn't fund Heath care, do ask for money for health care. Well, duh! But you know, it was god to hear it because it kind of demystified it for me.

Community Discussion: Next Generation learning Challenges
Ira Fuchs
The program said:
EDUCAUSE invites your participation and expertise in Next Generation Learning Challenges, a new effort to identify and scale technology-enabled approaches that dramatically improve college readiness and completion. Join initiative staff to learn more about the program, including future grant opportunities, and brainstorm with your colleagues on future directions.

My take: This was an opportunity for Ira to collect ideas from those gathered about what we saw as the best ideas for the biggest ideas facing college students.

You 3.0: Evaluating Software, Hardware, and Wetware
Rochelle Rodrigo

The program says:
This presentation by the EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee will describe the characteristics required for enterprise success with evolving technologies. We will discuss IT leadership and the decision-making process in the context of several evolving technologies including mobility, virtualization, and e-readers. Attendees are invited to submit proposal ideas for five-minute Ignite-style presentations to kick off discussion at http://bit.ly/cW3bDG.

My take: Rochelle and her co presenters got 5 minutes and 20 slides to present about their ideas. What a clever idea! They had some very original thinking, and I look forward to exploring their themes more completely in the future.

Educause, Day Three, Part One

2010-10-14T18:16:00.004-04:00

The workshop sessions continued to be excellent. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed at this point, but pushing forward!

An Immersive Learning Experience via the Alternative Reality Model

David Lee Fulton,Web Developer, User Services Mississippi State University
Ronald Jason Tiffin,Sr. Web Developer, Team Leader Mississippi State University
Amy H. Berryhill, Mississippi State University

What the program said:
Engaging incoming freshmen in activities has a positive impact on the overall freshman experience. The Freshmen Common Book Committee at Mississippi State University decided to try a different approach. Using alternate reality gaming as a model, the committee designed an "Immersive Learning Experience" and viral marketing to engage students with clues, mystery, and rewards.

My take: this was a fascinating presentation. These folks basically constructed a theme based scavenger hunt. The prizes they had were "real" and "valuable," and not everyone got them. The second year they changed that and the game was no longer successful.

Distance vs. Distributed Education: Bringing the Campus to the Student
Dr Neil Gershenfield

What the program said:
Advances in integrating the worlds of bits and atoms are challenging assumptions of scarcity that are implicit in the organization of advanced technical education and investigation. MIT's Neil Gershenfeld will discuss the ideas behind this revolution and their implications for improving educational opportunities. Realizing this promise will require revisiting many current practices, including accrediting networks rather than locations, organizing individuals instead of institutions, formalizing informal learning, and creating corresponding career paths.

My take: I think I only understood a quarter to a half of what this man talked about...materials that are computers, that change as they compute... Wha????? But he did talk about an incredible network of open labs all over the world that I think NTID has to be a part of. I will be take g this back to work with me.

Educause Conference, Day Two, Part Two

2010-10-13T23:00:00.000-04:00

The afternoon offered a lot choices. However sometimes the written descriptions don't really describe what the session turned out to be. That was the case with both of afternoon sessions.

Sherpa: Increasing Student Success with a Recommendation Engine
Robert Bramucci,Vice Chancellor, Technology & Learning Services
South Orange County Community College District
Jim Gaston, Associate Director, IT, Academic Systems & Special Projects
South Orange County Community College District

Here's what the program said:
"Students flock to online services that offer intelligent recommendations: Amazon, Pandora, Facebook, iTunes, and Netflix present personalized choices, yet when students reach college they find static menus leading to a bewildering array of choices. At this session we will present Sherpa, a revolutionary personal guide to courses, information, and services."

My take:
In this case the session wasn't what I thought it was going to be, but it was great. Bob and Jim have developed a system that "knows" there

Enforcing Copyright on Campus Networks: Lessons Learned and Next Steps

Kenneth E. Pflueger, Chief Information Officer Pomona College
Kent Wada,Director, Strategic IT and Privacy Policy UCLA
Steven Worona,Director of Policy & Networking Programs

Here's what the program said:
Since July 1, campus networks have been subject to enforcement of the P2P provisions of the Higher Education Opportunity Act. Coincidentally, a variety of government offices have initiated separate reviews of how the Internet is impacting copyright, soliciting input from higher education along the way. In this session we'll review the experience of some HEOA "role model" campuses and discuss how lessons learned will inform and influence ongoing compliance activities on peer campuses as well as federal and offshore initiatives.

Educause Day Two, Part One

2010-10-13T22:59:00.000-04:00

The University as an Agile Organization

Patrick Masson (University of Massachusetts Central Office)
David J. Staley (The Ohio State University)
Ken Udas (University of Massachusetts Central Office)

Here's what the program said:
"Web 2.0 is more than a set of tools; it is a 'platform' for organization, characterized by decentralized and emergent versus command-and-control leadership models. Can our institutions leverage the new realities of social media for better decision making and outcomes? This session will highlight the theory and practice of an 'agile university.'"

My take:
This was a terrific presentation! I realized that much of what I am trying to do with the team is simpatico with Agile, and that is where I need to put my effort in process improvement. When Patrick and Ken described the team at UMassOnline, my mouth was watering! They must be incredible managers to pull this off in a higher ed environment.

They suggested a couple of books:
Agile Project Management by Jim Highsmith
The New Invisible College by Caroline Wagner
The Spidar and the Starfish

I will be devoting several blog postings on this presentation.

Audio and Video Accessibility: Strategies and Workflows
Alice Anderson (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
James Glapa grossklag (College of the Canyons)
Sean Keegan (Stanford University)
Terrill Thomson(University of Washington)

Here's what the program said:
"Higher education institutions have legal and ethical obligations to provide audio and video resources that are accessible to all audience members, including those who are deaf or hard of hearing. This panel session will explore several institutions' his off in a approaches for addressing their media accessibility challenges."

My take:
Unfortunately, these people didn't have anything new to present on making video accessible. I keep looking for a magic solution that will provide instant perfect captions for free. It doesn't exist, at least not yet.

Sherpa: Increasing Student Success with a Recommendation Engine
Robert Bramucci,Vice Chancellor, Technology & Learning Services
South Orange County Community College District
Jim Gaston, Associate Director, IT, Academic Systems & Special Projects
South Orange County Community College District

Here's what the program said:
Students flock to online services that offer intelligent recommendations: Amazon, Pandora, Facebook, iTunes, and Netflix present personalized choices, yet when students reach college they find static menus leading to a bewildering array of choices. At this session we will present Sherpa, a revolutionary personal guide to courses, information, and services.

This blog post seems to be too long for Blogger. So check for the second half, following this post.

Educause Conference, Day One

2010-10-13T00:36:00.001-04:00

Today was my first day at Educause, in Anaheim, CA. Wow, this is one big conference.today was the pre conference day, and I already feel a little overwhelmed!

My first session today was "Pedagogical Consideration in Implementing Social Media: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and More"
"This session will focus on social media and how these tools can be used both inside and outside the classroom. Many of us are already avid users of social media because the marvelous technology allows us to do so many different things. This session will share perspectives from both the pedagogical side and online community-building sides, as well as encourage participants to become part of the conversation and share their experiences. Participants will be able to evaluate social media tools relative to their personal and institutional goals to determine which tool might be beneficial to achieve those goals. Attendees will also develop support networks through leveraging social media tools and sites to facilitate best practices and collaboration during and after the conference."

The session was presented by Tanya Joosten Interim Associate Director, Learning Technology Center,University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Shannon Ritter, Coordinator of Auditions, Interviews, and Admissions, School of Theatre, The Pennsylvania State University. They did a great job. There are some new tools I learned about.

http://www.pearltrees.com/

A way to organize what you love on the web. Looks cool in concept, but can check it out because it uses Flash. And my iPod doesn't.

http://foursquare.com/android/

This phone app gives you an opportunity to learn about your community. I love yelp, so I'm looking forward to using this app.

http://www.twazzup.com

This site is my new favorite. It combines tweets to a hash tagged source, your links and documents. You really need to check this out.

Soft Eyes and ASL

2010-09-18T11:39:00.000-04:00

As is often the case, two very different sources of information came together for me recently, helping me to understand something very important. Here is what happened.

When I was at Camp Mark 7's "Silent Week" camp this summer, I noticed a curious thing. There was a woman at camp who was just starting her journey to learn ASL. She had taken a class or two, but going to Silent Week was going to be a stretch for her. I definitely know how she felt, because I was in the very same place last year.

I noticed that when we were chatting that she was staring intently at my hands. This was especially noticeable when I was finger spelling. I remembered one of my first tutors encouraging me to not do this, to pull my self back a little and take in the person's face and shoulders as well as their hands. I knew intellectually that my tutor was right, but I wasn't able to do it. I would hone in on the fingers, and as a result, I would miss a very valuable source of information - the person's face.

The second source was an unlikely one -- a television drama that J and I have been watching: The Wire. Set in Baltimore, MD, this show follows drug dealers, junkies, teachers, dock workers, and police. In season four, a seasoned detective gives a new detective some important advice: that she needs to have "soft eyes" at a crime scene.

Soft eyes means you are looking at nothing and looking at everything at the same time. Instead of focusing hard on one thing, we relax the muscles in our faces, take a breath and release the focus. This is the same as when you are doing eyes-open meditation, when the gaze is about 12-18 inches in front of your face, a little lower than normal eye level. Try it right now.

Soft eyes relaxes more than your forehead, at least for me. It relaxes your jaw, neck and shoulders as well. It helps to put you in a mental state that is close to "shower thinking", where your brain isn't firmly focusing, but relaxed and able to allow new thoughts and combinations of thoughts to happen. It also increases your peripheral vision.

When I use soft eyes, I find I am much more able to follow signing, especially signing by native ASL signers. I stop reading SIGN SIGN SIGN and instead move to concepts, ideas, thoughts. I am able to "hear" the "voice" of the signer.

When I am fiercely concentrating, I tend to be more scared. I am more relaxed, which absolutely helps me.

Granted, you need enough vocabulary to get started, but if you are a ASL student with a year or two of classes and interactions under your belt, give it a try.

Book Review: God is Not One

2010-09-05T17:25:00.000-04:00

One day I was doing a bunch of ironing, and I had the tv on, to distract myself from that boring chore. I happened upon a program about Stephen Prothero, and his new book: God is not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter. This man really got my attention with that title.

I have heard people say, when talking about religions, "We are all going up the same mountain, right? Just up different paths." This always kind of disturbed me, but I didn't really know why. It sounds like the right thing to say, doesn't it? But as a Buddhist practitioner who was raised as a Catholic Christian, I know that the teachings of the Catholic Church and Buddhism are directly at odds with one another. But it was hard for me to understand exactly what the difference was, on a more metadata level.

Stephen Prothero does an outstanding job explaining the 8 great world religions -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and the religion you never heard of but is everywhere: the Yoruba religion of West Africa (and the world, due to the vast diaspora of African people.) There is also a chapter on Atheism.

The thing that made this book so valuable for me is that Prothero reviews each religion by discussing what it defines as the problem it solves, and what the solution is. Because each of these religions sees the problem differently, people who share that world view aren't really in the market for what the other religions are offering as the solution.

For example, the religion I grew up with was Christianity. The problem, according to Christianity, is sin. The solution is acceptance of Jesus as lord and savior. The problem, according to Buddhism, is suffering. The solution is non-attachment. Think of it as a lock and key. The lock each of these religions views as the ultimate reality are different, so of course the key of one won't work in the lock of another. As a Buddhist, I don't even grok sin. It isn't in anyway a part of the equation. I don't want salvation. Heaven offers no lure for me. In fact, the idea of a heaven that excludes others seems really profoundly wrong!

I think it is important that we ask ourselves, why do we find it necessary to say that everyone thing is the same? I understand that "you aren't from around here, are you, stranger?" has been the prelude to most of the world's suffering. But I don't agree that saying we are really all the same is the solution. Because we aren't. And we need to appreciate and celebrate that fact, not be afraid of it.

Find a copy of God Is Not One and read it. Wonderfully informative, and I promise you will appreciate your own spiritual/religious tradition more than you ever have before.

A Child's Right to Her Language and Our Responsibility as Her Ally

2010-08-25T14:22:00.006-04:00

I'm at Camp Mark Seven, a camp located outside of Old Forge, NY that offers programs for Deaf people of all ages as well as KODAs (kids of deaf adults) and hearing people who want to improve their signing skills. I'm here to do just that. This is my second year. It's wonderful to be in a place were I can use ASL exclusively.

Today we heard little about the Deaf experience and what it was like for our teachers to grow up as part of a minority culture. Like many people who use a language other than English, my teachers experienced aggressive pressure to not use their natural first language, ASL.

I have no wish to co-opt the Deaf experience. That experience is one I will never have. But as a member of a minority culture, I do share the general experience of not being part of the dominant culture.

Our culture, as Americans, is one that values white, able-bodied, hearing, straight, English-speaking, slim, young, christian, Protestant people before all others. I realize that some of my friends who are white, able-bodied, hearing, straight, English-speaking, slim, young, christian, Protestant people might feel that they themselves value people that are different from yourselves. To that I say,well, that's probably why I love you. But you only have to ask a few of you "different" friends to hear some rather sad or shocking stories. Yes, and not from 50 years ago, either. From right now in 2010.

Even some of my friends that are part of a minority group may say that they themselves have never felt undervalued. To them I will point out that this kind of pressure can be extremely subtle. It doesn't have to be a sign that says, "We reserve the right to deny service" or "whites only." In someways that kind of under-valuation is easier to deal with because it is so obvious. When instead, it is wrapped in a cloak of a parent's love, it is so much harder to see. What good parent wouldn't want her child to have every advantage, including the advantage of being in the majority culture? But when that means the child is robbed of her natural language and full membership in her culture of origin, it is a profound and deep wrong.

Every person has a basic and inalienable right to be who they are. And most fundamental is the right to their own language. In my mind, depriving children of this is no less than a type of genocide and must be fought as furiously. Those of us who speak the majority language but understand this truth must be unflinching allies in the struggle to maintain the language rights of those around us.

Your Personal Value Proposition: Choose Your Own Adventure!

2010-08-16T10:35:00.001-04:00

Several times, over the course of this year, I have been invited to coffee or lunch by folks who want to talk about their job search with me. Sometimes they are interested in a job at the university where I work. Sometimes they want a job in instructional design. I enjoy these conversations because they have really helped me to deconstruct my strategy for getting a job.

Most folks, even folks that use social networks like LinkedIn, go about the job search process in a rather "rat shot" fashion -- throw enough resumes at it and eventually one of them will stick. It's the "even a blind chick gets a piece of corn once in a while" approach. The problem is that there are a whole lot of blind chicks out there pecking away. Somehow you need to separate yourself from the flock.

A job search is like any sales transaction. If what you are selling isn't what the person in front of you is buying, then you are not going to make a sale. Period. To improve your odds, I suggest you start thinking about your personal value proposition A value proposition, according to Wikipedia, is " an analysis and quantified review of the benefits, costs and value that an organization can deliver to customers and other constituent groups within and outside of the organization." A personal value proposition looks at your personal skills, experiences, and values, instead of those of the organization.

Constructing your personal value prop can be done in four major steps:

1. Determine your market.

Focus, focus focus! It may feel counterintuitive to narrow down your search, but doing so will ensure that your offering is actually what the potential employers are looking for. You need to state in one to two short sentences what industry and job you are seeking. It needs to be crystal clear to you.
Know what that market values. This isn't the time for guess work and assumptions. Even if you have worked in this sector in the past, you need to take the time to go through the analysis. Do not assume that what was valued in the past is what is valued now. You can get this information in two ways, and I suggest you do both. First, find people who are currently working in that area, and interview them. What are the most important attributes their employers are looking for? What skills and experience do they think are the most valuable. Second, look for as many job postings for these positions as possible. make a spreadsheet of the skills and requirements these people are looking for, and tabulate the most desired skills and requirements.
Go beyond skills and experience to gestalt. Gestalt is "a configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that it cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts." In other words, it is the essence or flavor of your potential future company. Study their website, their thought leaders blogs, their employees' responses to questions on LinkedIn. Who are these people? What values rule their life?

2. Determine your gaps and take steps to bridge them.

Using the list of key skills and experience you created in step one, take a very hard look at your own skills and experience. What are you missing? Again, I can't stress enough that you need to not get stuck in the past. It makes no difference how qualified you were in the past. All that matters now is today. Make a list of the things that you seem to be lacking, based on your research.
Are any of these items things you simply can't fix? For example, if you need 5 years of experience in a particular area, and you have none, you can't get into your "way back machine" and fix that. You need to consider that this is NOT an field that you are going to be able to find work in.
Make a list of skills and experiences that you need in order to bring your own skills and experience up to date. Make a plan for how you are going to do this. This is where you need to put your energy right now, not in sending out a zillion resumes to anything that looks remotely like a possibility.

3. Determine how you can differentiate yourself from the flock.

What requirement does your potential future employer have that you meet in a wonderful and unique way? How does your work ethic, your values, your experience, your skills, meet that need in a way that no other candidate can match?
You need to tell a coherent story that connects every data point in your history into a big ol' arrow pointing at your potential future employer.
Using your research about the gestalt of your potential future employer, determine how your experience, skills, and values make you a match.

4. Develop your resume and other "customer facing" materials.

Everything in your resume, portfolio, and other materials needs to support your value proposition. Take a hard look at every line, especially of your resume. This isn't a place to put everything you have done in your life. This is the place to prove that you have the skills and experience to be successful in your new job. Start by cutting everything that doesn't do that.
Use all the free space to offer proof of your experience and skills. Think result, not job duties. What have you accomplished? Don't assume your future employer is going to be able to read between the lines and connect the dots. They don't need to -- there is a big stack of resumes on her desk, so why should she work hard to read yours?
Your materials need to be focused. That means you might have a resume that is suitable for this job only. I can hear your moans of pain from here! Too much work? Not really -- since you are being quite focused in your search, you are doing the same amount of work as you would have if you were sending out a zillion resumes, just differently.
Remember to prove to them how you are a member of their tribe. Tell them the story that links you to them. Back in the day, we did this by connecting to a person who was already an insider. You still need to do this, but even more, you need to help your potential future employer understand that you are indeed one of their flock.

Is this a lot of work? Well, yes. But you will have a much more successful outcome -- for one thing, if you follow these steps, you will really understand who you are going to work for, and you are likely to be happier. And they are likely to be happier with you, as well. Good luck!

ASL, Handshapes, and Schema Learning

2010-08-12T16:34:00.000-04:00

Being an instructional designer by trade, I tend to want to take a very active role in my own learning. Learning ASL is a very high priority to me right now, and I am constantly looking for ways to improve the quality and speed of my learning. In general, my ASL teachers have been wonderful, possibly the best teachers of any subject I have had in my long career as a learner.

At this point I have taken 7 quarters of ASL classes. Here at NTID, the first 3 courses are ASL A, B and C. In those courses you learn some basic vocabulary, and general rules for how the language is structured. After that you can take Communication Practice (which practices expressive skills), Receptive practice, or courses on specific parts of the language, such as fingerspelling, numbers, and classifiers.

There is one thing they seem to be doing lately that I wonder about.

There are certain signs that were introduced quite early in my learning that I am constantly confused about. Maybe in the first week of ASL we learned the sign for "appointment" and "work". I can come up with the sign for "work" -- I have used it many times. But the sign for "appointment seems" welded to the sign for "work" in my brain. And although I know if it is different than "work", but I have to really think hard to come up for it. Why is this happening? When I asked my wonderful tutor Marge Carillo, why these are taught at the same time, she replied that she taught them together because they were similiar signs.

Does teaching things that are close or similar help or hinder the learning process?

My research turned up a chapter of Memory and Mind titled Category Learning as Schema Induction by researcher John P. Clapper, who is affiliated with California State University. (The entire chapter can be found here.)

Clapper contends that adults classify things into groups, and the most efficient way to learn the next thing is to see what it is "just like that, only different" as my brother Clyde would say. So showing the first sign, then showing a second, that is similar in some way -- either handshape or movement -- is good. But it is important how those two signs are introduced. Clapper says,

"As already noted, when instances of two categories are presented in a randomly
intermixed sequence, relatively little learning of either category is observed.
However, when the sequence is arranged so that one category (call it “A”) is
well-learned prior to the introduction of the second category (“B”), then people
will learn both categories easily. Thus, categories A and B will both be learned
much better in a “contrast-enhancing” sequence like A A A A A A A A A A A
A B A B B A B A A A B, and so forth, than in a “mixed” sequence like A B A
B B A B A A B B A B A B B A B A A A B, and so on. The only difference
between these two sequences is the fact that the first six Bs in the second (mixed)
sequence are absent and replaced by the same number of As in the first (contrast)
sequence. Thus, simply reducing the number of B instances (by eliminating all
of them from the first 12 trials of the training sequence) leads to a dramatic
improvement in B learning."

This would lead me to think that teaching one sign - "work" and having the student practice it multiple times before another sign - "appointment" - is introduced, and then contrasted with "work" over and over, would be better than showing the first sign and then the second sign. I think this is especially important if the signs are similar, because they will have less to contrast with. Presenting and practicing the material in the manner that John Clapper suggests would emphasize the differences in the signs, and that should result in improved retention and learning.

Conformity or Out of the Frying Pan into a Slightly Smaller Frying Pan

2010-08-11T08:59:00.001-04:00

I found this clip on YouTube. Take a few minutes and watch it. Then come back and let's talk.

(My apologies that this isn't captioned. Not everything on YouTube is yet.)

I don't remember how I came accross this video, but it raises some interesting questions for me:

In what ways is your conformity to your group resulting in the loss of your authentic self?
If we must have creative and original ideas/products/processes to survive/make money/keep the business going how are we achieving originality when everyone may be conforming?
Thinking is good but doing is better. What behaviors have you not changed that are keeping you from being happy. Why haven't you changed?

American Idol and People that Can't Sing At All Or How Could You Possibly Not Know?

2010-06-28T12:07:00.000-04:00

I've noticed a strange phenomena since beginning work here at school.

I've noticed that many of the sign language interpreters that I meet are incredibly unsure of their ability to sign. I mean, really. These are folks who have had extensive training in ASL and work as interpreters full time. They work at one of the finest colleges for the Deaf in the world, and have access to a large number of native signers. I'm no expert, but these people are very, very, good at what they do. But it is not unusual for an interpreter will refuse to sign a waiver so we can videotape a presentation that includes him/her working. As a beginning student of ASL, I wonder: If this person who uses ASL as a key part of his/her daily work, who's ability to sign is a core competency thinks his/her signing sucks, how will I EVER learn to sign even a little bit? All this self-doubt seemed phony to me, or at least disingenuous.

On the other hand, sometimes I am asked to review students' portfolios. And there are cases (not often, thank goodness!) where the portfolio is TERRIBLE and the student is completely oblivious to this. How can someone be so completely out of touch with reality?

Another example: Over the years I've been seriously dismayed when I have read the self-assessments of some of the people that worked for me. Frequently my weakest performers will score themselves high on their self- assessments. And more than once, the person has been very upset at my appraisal of their performance, telling me that they have never received a negative evaluation before. How can this be? Did the person think they could bully me into a better score? Or are they some kind of egomaniac?

Well, now I know. It's something called The Dunning-Kruger Effect. According to Wikipedia, that authority on everything, Dunning-Kruger effect is "a cognitive bias in which people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.They hypothesized that with a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,

Incompetent* individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy."

So people who are actually unskilled think they are terrific, and people who are very skilled underestimate their own performance. And, to make matters worse, the incompetent people are unable to recognize competence. So they won't learn from just observing competence.

Another important point that Dunning and Kruger make is that people rarely receive negative feedback. And if they do, for it to be useful, they have to understand WHY the failure happened.

So how do we mitigate against this type of bias that we are all subject to? If we don't clearly understand our strengths and weaknesses, it will be difficult to evaluate risk on projects, plan any kind of self-improvement activity, or in general, understand reality. I think there are two ways we can do this.

Dunning and Kruger suggest that, "If ... people... can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill." Well, duh! I don't know if this is a very useful observation, if we are interested in self-evaluation strategies to improve in domains where one isn't a top level performer.

But a second point by Dunning and Kruger is more helpful. They suggest that people seldom receive negative feedback about their skills and abilities. But even with negative feedback, people need to understand WHY the failure is a failure. In other words, smart feedback is essential.

This article has made me rethink how I going about performance reviews for my team. Last year, I was frustrated by the difference between my evaluations and the individual's self-evaluations. My response this year was to bring people together to write a rubric that would describe behaviors in various levels of performance. Now I'm thinking that maybe that's not a good way to go about it, because my weakest performers are not going to be able to recognize what is the desired behaviors. Instead I am going to need to think of a way to give everyone smart feedback, and at multiple points during the year. This is going to be challenging!

In the process of writing this blog article, I came across two interesting sources that you might want to check out.

The first article was in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology called "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments" by Justin Kruger and David Dunning. This reports on the research that is the basis for what we know of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The second was a blog called Finch, written by Francisco Inchauste. He is a designer, and based on what I see in his blog, a good one! You can check out his article here. I really enjoyed his blog and wish he would write more.

* Kruger and Dunning say this about the word "incompetent": "...We think of incompetence as a mater of degree and not one of absolutes. There is no categorical bright line that separates 'competent' individuals from 'incompetent' ones. Thus, when we speak of 'incompetent' individuals we mean people who are less competent than their peers. Second, we have focused our analysis on the incompetence individuals display in specific domains. We make no claim that they would be incompetent in any other domains, although many a colleague has pulled us aside to tell us a tale of a person they know is is 'domain-general' incompetent. Those people may exist, but they are not the focus of this research."

Interesting Video Sites

2010-06-22T11:52:00.000-04:00

YouTube has undoubtedly changed the world by giving us a place where post our own video. And they are making powerful leaps forward with their automated captioning efforts. But there is more than YouTube out there.

Of course, there can be zillion videos available, but if you can't find them, you have nothing. Blinkx describes itself as "world’s largest and most advanced video search engine" and with 35 million hours of video tagged and available, it looks like that is an apt description. I am still waiting for the day when intelligent auto tagging will make it possible for particular scenes to be located without the need for time consuming human involvement. We aren't there yet. But this is an important and useful first step.

Critical Past makes footage of historical events and people available to professionals and non-professionals. It also gives you the opportunity to buy still photos taken from historical footage. Concerning rights, they say:

When you place an order, the video clips and images provided by CriticalPast.com are licensed to you, royalty-free, in perpetuity... Unlike most stock footage providers, Critical Past LLC welcomes professionals, non-professionals, and enthusiasts worldwide to search our site and license our media.

If you know of other, similar resources, please comment on them.

Returning to the Breath

2010-06-16T21:10:00.000-04:00

Last Monday, J and I watched a show on our PBS channel called "Horses". (You can watch it for yourself here.) The show included the story of a nervous dressage horse named "Chamont". The rider asks the horse to make a particular move, and Chamont rebells, threatening to buck the rider off. Her coach praises her response, and tells her that every time he does that, but she sits quietly, and brings him back, that she strengthenss his confidence and their bond. He shys, she sits quietly. He rears, she sits quietly.

We know that's what meditation actually is. Some people mistakenly think that meditation is sitting really still and having no thoughts. They think that they can't meditate because when they try, thoughts arise. But in reality, meditation is the act of returning our focus to the breath. When thoughts arise, we label them as thought and return our focus to the breath. And return the focus to the breath. And return the focus to the breath. Its that returning that is the important part, nothing else.

In fact, when we look at our life, if we can think of our failures not as failures but as opportunities to return our focus to the breath, to repeat over and over that return, then our failures become a secret treasure. The relapse, the anger, the jealousy, the self cherishing behaviors are all the opportunity to return our focus. Instead of using the precious opportunities to practice self-hatred and guilt, we can use these opportunities to return to the present moment and practice. You can't buy that kind of opportunities. Rejoice in them!

YouTube's Audio Transcription

2010-06-02T13:25:00.003-04:00

I'm attending The Future of Reading conference at RIT next week. (Side note: Margaret Attwood is the Keynote speaker. I love her stuff and am thrilled to be seeing her!). The conference is being conducted by the School of Print Media. The program looks really exciting and I am eagerly looking forward to attending.

One thing that wasn't very exciting is that the organizers have posted videos to YouTube. They weren't professionally captioned and only used the new captioning feature in YouTube. And the results? Terrible! The captions are so far from the spoken words as to be almost completely gibberish. There is no way that a person relying on captions could understand what this video was about at all. I'm disappointed -- I was hoping this would be an inexpensive way to get content captioned. Don't rely on the automatic transcribing feature on YouTube to make your video accessible.

Late addition: I heard from one of the organizers and they are planning to create captions for this video. Good for them! But my main point still stands: Don't count on this as a way to make your content accessible.

And now more: I got the following email from the posters of the video.

futureofreading has replied to your comment on Future of Reading Symposium Social Media Tutorial:@claredygert Hi Clare. We had to wait several hours for YouTube's machine transcription. We have corrected the captioning and it now work's properly.

And it does seem to be working better. I guess the final lesson to be sure to check your video to make sure the transcription is actually working!

Welcome, Summer

2010-06-01T21:18:00.000-04:00

Let's take a little break from instructional design to celebrate the beginning of summer.

Yesterday, on my way upstairs, I happened to notice a little embroidered picture that a friend, Lois Farnsworth, sewed for me in 1996. Lois was an old lady, well into her 80s when she made this little picture for me. I couldn't help but think how much my life has changed in just the relatively short period of fourteen years. Where and with whom I live, where I work, how I view the world, all have changed dramatically. But in 1996 and still today, I live as though things will never change. That life is in some way permanent. And it isn't, not even a little bit.

I hear people complain that "Memorial Day has just become the unofficial first day of summer". Instead of trying to create a day that memorializes lives cut short, let's recognize how impermanent it all is.The first day of summer? Yes, a summer that'll be over before we know it. We can't hang on to the days, no matter how hard we try. So let's celebrate the passage of days.

To celebrate, I made some lovely little Lemon and Lavender cakes, using lavender from my garden. Welcome, Summer. It's nice to have you back again.

Lemon and Lavender Mini Cakes
(adapted from the Family Bites site)
* 3 egg yolks
* 1/2 cup sugar
* 3/4 cup milk with 2 tablespoons of vinegar
* 3 tbsp lemon zest
* 1 tbsp lemon juice
* 3/4 cup olive oil
* 1 1/2 cups flour
* 2 tbsp dry roasted flax seed, ground
* 1/2 tsp baking powder
* 1/2 tsp baking soda
* 1/4 tsp salt
* 3 tbsp fresh lavender buds

Lemon Glaze

* 6 tbsp confectioner sugar
* 4 tsp lemon juice

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a muffin tin with oil and set aside.

Beat the egg yolks and the sugar with a whisk until pale yellow and thick. Add the lemon zest, juice and yogurt and beat well. Add the oil in a steady stream and whisk until combined.

In another mixing bowl combine the flour, flax seed baking powder, baking soda, salt and lavender. Add the wet ingredients and mix until just combined.

Fill the muffin tin 1/2 - 2/3 full. Place in the preheated oven and bake for 15 minutes.

While the muffins are baking, make the glaze. Mix together the confectioner's sugar, and lemon juice and set aside.

Remove the pan from the oven and allow mini-cakes to cool for five minutes. Dip the tops of the cooled cakes into the lemon glaze and garnish with some dried lavender. Allow to set on a cooling rack.

(Makes 12 mini-cakes) Enjoy!!!

Velcro + Ipad = heart

2010-05-27T10:21:00.001-04:00

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Thinking about Social Media

2010-05-23T10:31:00.000-04:00

Way back, kids, back in the dawn of time -- like maybe twenty years ago -- my interest in the Internet had two major prongs.

One was the access to information. To me, the potential of the Internet was the ability to research the topic of my choice with ease. I wanted a super public library mated with The Whole Earth Catalog. What it turned out to be was so much more than I could have ever hoped.

The second major prong was the idea of the social net. From the very beginning I was involved in "lists" where I could connect with other people who shared interests like me. It didn't matter if I was the only one like me in Rochester, NY. There was someone else in Garland, TX or Billings, MT and not only could we easily find each other, but we could talk via email as much as we wanted to.

With the advent of the term "social media", all the cool kids are thinking about how this aspect of the Web is changing our lives, how we do business, how we connect. Here is a site you might want to check out: Social Media Today's primary mission is to "help global organizations create purpose-built B2B social communities designed to achieve specific, measurable corporate goals by engaging exactly the customers and prospects you most want to reach." It is also an aggregator of writing about social media and the social web. You can also add your own blog to their lineup. Check it out!

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

2010-05-18T10:27:00.000-04:00

The National Educational Technology Plan 2010 was published this March. (You can download a copy of the Executive Summary here.) If you work in educational technology, I encourage you to take a look at this -- it is pretty interesting. Here are some points that I found especially interesting:

21st Century competencies that our students must have include critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration and "multimedia communication". I'm not sure what they are thinking of for multimedia communication -- Use of multimedia tools in presentations? Webinars?

Students must be able to both develop deep understanding in specific content areas and make connections between content areas.I think that it is the connections between content areas that is most important, because that is how new knowledge is created.

Assessment of student performance must happen while there is still time to make improvements. I'm afraid that this will be translated to mean have more standardized tests. I believe it would be more useful to teach students how to self-assess. A score on a standardized test is not as valuable as the ability understand one's own strengths and weaknesses, and to chart a course of perpetual improvement.

The Plan calls for a shift from teachers that are "solo practitioners" to one of "connected teaching." To make this possible, the Plan suggests that teacher professional development must stop being "episodic and ineffective" and become "collaborative, coherent and continuous." I believe that we need to move from a model where teachers are dispensers of facts, and more fellow learners who model how to assess, plan, and execute learning.

What is the Future of e-Learning?

2010-05-17T10:00:00.000-04:00

Just recently, someone asked me, "Where do you think eLearning is going to be in the next 3 to 5 years, given the rise of "Web 2.0" and social media? Great question! I think the seeds of the future are here, in front of us.

One of the ideas I collected when I was an MBA student at the Simon School (excellent program, by the way!) was that notion of information costs. Information costs mean that decision making is more effective when it is executed closest to the place where the question arises because detail and meaning are lost in the transfer of information. For example, let's say you own a big retail chain that caters to the 20 something crowd. And you aren't a 20 something. You are a 50 something who has money and business experience, but not the life that is typical of your typical customer.

When you are deciding what merchandise you should stock, you are probably doing a lot of things like asking representative samples of your customers their opinions and using statistical analysis to determine what you are selling. Those sorts of things are what people do to answer the question, "How many pairs of skinny jeans should I buy this quarter?"

But the 20 something salesclerk in your shop knows that people try on your faded and ripped jeans but they rarely buy them. She knows that they like the edgey look but they hate the fact that the waist band is just a smidge too tight. She knows that if the waistband was, say 1/8" bigger, people would be buying those faded and ripped jeans every time. And since your biggest competitor doesn't offer them, you would be selling them to everyone who wanted them.

So the 20 something salesclerk who you pay a little over minimum wage, actually knows more about your business than you do. Why? Because she is closer to the place where the customer is making the decision about what pair of jeans to buy. If you could somehow empower that 20 something salesclerk to actually order the stock for her store (oops, I mean YOUR store!), you might actually do better than you are doing now.

What does this mean for eLearning? That most efficient decision for what to learn is the one made by the student.

The World Wide Web is becoming more and more democratizing as it develops. Where content was more or less controlled by subject matter experts or webmasters in the past, now we see content being developed by unlikely individuals (like me!) and groups of people. Now we have blogging and crowd sourcing. Anyone can be located and linked to or friended. Universities are making their teaching content available for free. Search engines are incredibly powerful. This means learners will be able to and want to direct their own learning. They won't be looking to anonymous experts in text books, or for Grand Poopbas of Learning to tell them what they need to learn and in what order.

So we are now in a time when the efficiency of learner-directed learning can be combined with easily located and rich content. And here's another factor. Employers are asking their teams to actually create knowledge. Unless you want a job that uses the phrase, "Do you want fries with that?", that's what you are going to be asked to do. Most of the other kind of jobs, the jobs our fathers had, have moved to other locations where labor is cheaper than it can be here.

So what changes to our eLearning does this demand?

It is critically important that we give our students a framework for evaluating their own gaps in skill, experience, and knowledge. If they don't have a way to determine those gaps, they can't accurately determine what they need to learn. I don't think I can ever think of an instance where a course or a class started with a methodology for the student to self-evaluate. Either the instructor assumed that if I was in the class I need to know the material, or the instructor managed the evaluation process and owned the results. This is going to have to stop. I predict that students will simply not participate in learning experiences that don't include this element.

Additionally, our content needs to be chunked in to smaller bites and indexed so that learners can locate the specific piece they want to find. Learners need an easy way to build on existing content, to make connections with others and to vet the expertise of their fellow collaborators. That's what the future of eLearning will look like.

If this has happened in the last twenty years, what will the next twenty bring?

2010-05-07T22:09:00.000-04:00

It's amazing to me how fast the social web has unfolded.

ADDIE

2010-05-02T09:04:00.001-04:00

This morning I was reading over the job postings for positions on LinkedIn. (Not to worry - I'm not going anywhere! I just like to stay on top of what is requested/expected for folks in my line of work.) I saw a position that looked really interesting -- a consulting job for an Instructional Design Manager in India. That is, it looked interesting until I got to this line:

Client follows the ADDIE model of Instructional Design and Development.

People, people, people! ADDIE isn't anymore an instructional design model than "lather, rinse, repeat" is a design model. ADDIE, for my non-instructional design peeps means Analysis, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. A design model that has "Design" as one of it's phases -- that's not terribly helpful. A design model should give me guidelines on how to design -- how to decide what's in, what's not, to chunk, order, present content. Seeing this statement tells me that whoever wrote the job description, and likely whoever is the hiring manager, has no idea what it takes to make good, instructionally effective content.Working for these people would be a nightmare because I would be continuously struggling to educate management/the client on what the heck we were trying to do.

Likewise, when I'm interviewing candidates and I ask them "What instructional design model guides you most?" and they reply, "The ADDIE model," I know they haven't a clue. Take a few minutes and simply scan the results of a search on "instructional design" and then you can at least toss around names like Merrill and Clark. Otherwise, I can guarantee you - we won't be chatting at a second interview!

Turning a Corner

2010-05-01T14:57:00.000-04:00

One of my goals for 2010 is to continue to develop my ASL competency. I have to attain a level of "Intermediate" by July 2010. I just got the results back from my lasted evaluation and I am at "Survival Plus" which is the step right below Intermediate. So I have move thru five levels since I started studying two years ago.

And that is very wonderful. But I had two things happen this week that help me to understand that I really am getting better at this. First, a kid who has been working for our department for six months came in to tell me that he was leaving, that he appreciated the opportunity to work in the department and he is moving to Washington DC to take a job at a company that a friend of his has started. And he said all that in ASL and he said it only once AND I understood it! And I didn't have that minute of panic and "oh no, he's signing to me!" feeling -- I just understood him!

Second: I have been looking at youtube videos of jokes told in ASL. Up until today, I couldn't understand anything, but today, I got the joke! Whoo hooooo! Here's the link if you are interested in it!

I tell people all the time that if you keep working on something, if you don't give up, that you will get better and better. It sure feels good to see the evidence in my own life!

What's on My Reading List?

2010-04-25T11:18:00.000-04:00

I love to read, and always have. One of my earliest memories was when I was about five years old, staring at the newspaper, wanting to know what it said. Now I read constantly and a little bit anxious if I don't have my "next book" stacked up and ready to go.

Here is what I'm looking forward to reading next:

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larrson.
I really loved the first two books in this trilogy, and was excited to find that I could order this from Amazon.UK and not have to wait until the middle of May to read it. There is a queue of my friends who have asked me to pass this to them when I finish. Here's what Publisher's Weekly said on Amazon.com about the book:
"The exhilarating conclusion to bestseller Larsson's Millennium trilogy (after The Girl Who Played with Fire) finds Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant computer hacker who was shot in the head in the final pages of Fire, alive, though still the prime suspect in three murders in Stockholm. While she convalesces under armed guard, journalist Mikael Blomkvist works to unravel the decades-old coverup surrounding the man who shot Salander: her father, Alexander Zalachenko, a Soviet intelligence defector and longtime secret asset to Säpo, Sweden's security police. Estranged throughout Fire, Blomkvist and Salander communicate primarily online, but their lack of physical interaction in no way diminishes the intensity of their unconventional relationship. Though Larsson (1954–2004) tends toward narrative excess, his was an undeniably powerful voice in crime fiction that will be sorely missed.
(Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Beatrice and Virgil: A Novel by Yann Martel.
Honestly, I resisted the Life of Pi and didn't read it for a long time. Once I did (on a trip to India) I loved it and recommended it to everyone. Here's the Publisher Weekly review:
Megaselling Life of Pi author Martel addresses, in this clunky metanarrative, the violent legacy of the 20th century with an alter ego: Henry L'Hôte, an author with a very Martel-like CV who, after a massively successful first novel, gives up writing. Henry and his wife, Sarah, move to a big city (Perhaps it was New York. Perhaps it was Paris. Perhaps it was Berlin), where Henry finds satisfying work in a chocolatería and acting in an amateur theater troupe. All is well until he receives a package containing a short story by Flaubert and an excerpt from an unknown play. His curiosity about the sender leads him to a taxidermist named Henry who insists that Henry-the-author help him write a play about a monkey and a donkey. Henry-the-author is at first intrigued by sweet Beatrice, the donkey, and Virgil, her monkey companion, but the animals' increasing peril draws Henry into the taxidermist's brutally absurd world. Martel's aims are ambitious, but the prose is amateur and the characters thin, the coy self-referentiality grates, and the fable at the center of the novel is unbearably self-conscious. When Martel (rather energetically) tries to tug our heartstrings, we're likely to feel more manipulated than moved." (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
I participate in a neighborhood book club (The Ladies of Irvington Road) and a couple of our members actually don't like fiction ( I KNOW - what's wrong with them!) so we are always looking for good nonfiction to read. This is going to be one of my picks for nonfiction. Here's what Publisher's Weekly has to say:
"Science journalist Skloot makes a remarkable debut with this multilayered story about faith, science, journalism, and grace. It is also a tale of medical wonders and medical arrogance, racism, poverty and the bond that grows, sometimes painfully, between two very different women—Skloot and Deborah Lacks—sharing an obsession to learn about Deborah's mother, Henrietta, and her magical, immortal cells. Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black mother of five in Baltimore when she died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge, doctors treating her at Johns Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix for research. They spawned the first viable, indeed miraculously productive, cell line—known as HeLa. These cells have aided in medical discoveries from the polio vaccine to AIDS treatments. What Skloot so poignantly portrays is the devastating impact Henrietta's death and the eventual importance of her cells had on her husband and children. Skloot's portraits of Deborah, her father and brothers are so vibrant and immediate they recall Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family. Writing in plain, clear prose, Skloot avoids melodrama and makes no judgments. Letting people and events speak for themselves, Skloot tells a rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society's most vulnerable people. (Feb.) "
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich.
I will admit that I have a hard time reading Louise Eldrich. I never am able to stick with her. But I keep trying, and will give this book a go. I recently discovered that Louise Eldrich and I are both from the same band of Ojibwa (Red Lake and Pembina) and our progenitors were both present at the signing of a treaty with the US government. So I kind of feel like she is a relative and I should be supportive of her work. Kind of silly, I know, but there it is.
Here's what Publisher's Weekly has to say:
"Erdrich's bleak latest (after The Plague of Doves) chronicles the collapse of a family. Irene America is a beautiful, introspective woman of Native American ancestry, struggling to finish her dissertation while raising three children. She is married to Gil, a painter whose reputation is built on a series of now iconic portraits of Irene, but who can't break through to the big time, pigeonholed as a Native American painter. Irene's fallen out of love with Gil and discovers that he's been reading her diary, so she begins a new, hidden, diary and uses her original diary as a tool to manipulate Gil. Erdrich deftly alternates between excerpts from these two diaries and third-person narration as she plots the emotional war between Irene and Gil, and Gil's dark side becomes increasingly apparent as Irene, fighting her own alcoholism, struggles to escape. Erdrich ties her various themes together with an intriguing metaphor—riffing on Native American beliefs about portraits as shadows and shadows as souls—while her steady pacing and remarkable insight into the inner lives of children combine to make this a satisfying and compelling novel."Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This Time Together by Carol Burnett.
Carol Burnett represents a time of innocence to me, a time when none of the sad or bitter or disappointing events of my life had happened yet. Here's what Kathleen Hughes of Booklist writes:
"In her second book, comedy legend Burnett looks back fondly on her long and successful career in short, easily digestible chapters that part the curtain on her private life. Told in a chatty, intimate way, the stories encompass the star’s childhood; early days as an actress doing bit parts in New York City, appearing on game shows and various variety shows; her 11 years hosting The Carol Burnett Show; and life after the show ended its run. Readers will enjoy the comical reminiscences included, such as how she once used her famous Tarzan yell to disarm a mugger, funny interactions with fans who recognize her on the street, and the origin of famous scenes from the show, such as Scarlett O’Hara in a curtain-rod dress. Burnett doesn’t shy away from sad subjects and occasionally touches on personal losses. She also dishes about her famous costars and friends, including Jimmy Stewart, Lucille Ball, Cary Grant, Julie Andrews, and, of course, Carol Burnett Show regulars Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, Vicki Lawrence, and Lyle Waggoner. Fans of both the show and the actress will enjoy this mostly lighthearted though sometimes poignant look back at Burnett’s career."

Need Some Perspective? Watch this!

2010-04-14T16:05:00.000-04:00

Everything *is* Amazing!

New Free or Almost Free Tools

2010-04-14T00:54:00.000-04:00

I just returned from TechEd 2010 in Pasadena, California. I heard about some really kick-ass technology tools, new to me and maybe new to you. Definitely worth checking out. This batch is all free, so there is nothing to loose in trying them.

Here they are in no particular order:

Jing - Jing has been around for a while, but they sure have souped it up. You can capture anything on your desktop (including a video or photo from somewhere else) and add call outs. You can record yourself clicking on software and record a voice track with it. You can upload the result to a shared location Jing makes available for you, or anywhere else you want. And it is FREE FREE FREE. Jing Pro gives you even more and it's only $14.95 a year. Uh huh. I know -- you can only make videos that are five minutes long, but I think that's actually a feature. Longer videos make my eyes roll back in my head. Say what you need to say and stop.

Sky Drive - Sky Drive gives you 25G of storage for FREE. And it's up in the cloud where you can share it with anyone. I'm thinking of a project that I'm working on where I need to make a variety of files available to people all over the world. I'm going to throw them up on Sky Drive.

Google Websites - Am I the only one who didn't know that Google makes a really easy, slick, cool website creator available for FREE? FREE! And the templates are like they were hanging around listening to my innermost desires. Well, ok, not my innermost. But pretty close to there! That project I mentioned earlier? It's going to live in a Google website.

Irubric - Irubric is a rubric creation tool that is FREE -- and it is a pretty good looking program too. I saw a presentation that the creator of this product gave, and I honestly don't understand why the guy is giving this away but I am very glad he is! I am hoping to develop a rubric to use for performance evaluations next year, and this will be the product that I use to do it.

TechEd 2010 - Pasadena, California or Lift Up Your Eyes

2010-04-13T22:02:00.000-04:00

My head is buzzing from my trip to California to attend the TechEd2010 conference. This was my first time attending, and it's not surprising that you have never heard of this little jewel of a conference. The conference is put on by the Community College Foundation, which sounds like it out to be a national organization. And for community colleges. Since NTID is "the nation's community college" I was hoping that the presentations would be targeted to the same audience that we serve. But it seems that the conference is actually only marketed to schools in California. And the economy (especially for public schools in Cali) being what it is, there weren't that many people there. One of the presenters told me that he is on their board of directors and the conference is loosing money. When I suggested they might want to broaden their view and go after community colleges outside of California, he just sighed wistfully. It made me think how often we actually keep ourselves from succeeding because we don't raise our chins and look towards the horizon rather than at our feet. I know I was guilty of that for a long time.

But a couple of years ago I realized that I could actually do whatever I wanted to do. If I could conceive it, I could reach it. All that is necessary is to have the gumption to actually move and the discipline to not stop moving until you reach your goal. And you will have some failures, maybe a lot of them. So what? It really doesn't matter. Just take a step back and look at the situation and move forward. It really breaks down into four steps:

1. Decide where you want to be.
2. Start moving there.
3. If you stumble, stand up and keep going.
4. Don't stop till you get there.

I have about 4 more blog articles to write about the cool products and software I saw at the conference. So I'll get off of this philosphophical jag. But this was maybe the most important lesson of the conference. It's one I have to be reminded of regularly.

Sign Language Proficiency Interview

2010-03-29T12:10:00.000-04:00

Today I took the SLPI -- the Sign Language Profiency Interview -- for the third time. As a condition of employment, I have to attain a rating of "intermediate" by the end of my third year.

Here are the ratings:

Intermediate
Able to discuss with some confidence routine social and work topics within a conversational format with some elaboration; generally 3-to-5 sentences. Good knowledge and control of everyday/basic sign language vocabulary with some sign vocabulary errors. Fairly clear signing at a moderate signing rate with some sign misproductions. Fair use of some sign language grammatical features and fairly good comprehension for a moderate-to-normal signing rate; a few repetitions and rephrasing of questions may be needed.
Survival Plus
Exhibits some intermediate level skills, but not all and not consistently.
Survival
Able to discuss basic social and work topics with responses generally 1-to-3 sentences in length. Some knowledge of basic sign language vocabulary with many sign vocabulary and/or sign production errors. Slow-to-moderate signing rate. Basic use of a few sign language grammatical features. Fair comprehension for signing produced at a slow-to-moderate rate with some repetition and rephrasing.
Novice Plus
Exhibits some survival level skills, but not all and not consistently.
Novice
Able to provide single sign and some short phrase/sentence responses to basic questions signed at a slow-to-moderate rate with frequent repetition and rephrasing. Vocabulary primarily related to everyday work and/or social areas such as basic work-related signs, family members, basic objects, colors, numbers, names of weekdays, and time. Production and fluency characterized by many sign production errors and by a slow rate with frequent inappropriate pauses/hesitations.
No Functional Skills
(May be) Able to provide short single sign and 'primarily' finger-spelled responses to some basic questions signed at a slow rate with extensive repetition and rephrasing.

My last rating was Novice plus I think -- but I am hoping to score in the Survival ratings this time. When I get nervous my fingerspelling gets horrible. Today, I spelled my name "Clari" -- what the heck!?! E and I aren't even similar! My tutor suggested that I be sure to use longer answers -- not brief answers -- and no one has to tell me to talk MORE twice! So hopefully that will help my score.

I do wish I had had the test after my morning class. I definately notice the need to warm up first. IS this something that happens when you learn other languages? At the beginning of the day, or the first person who sighns to me, I'm like all "Huh -- look -- he's signing" and don't get what he is telling me at all. After that, it seems to be less of a problem.

I won't see my results until the end of the quarter -- about the middle of May.

Social Media for You/Your Business/Your Cause

2010-03-22T16:19:00.002-04:00

I seem to be having coffee with a growing number of people and giving them some advice on how to use social media to promote themselves, their small business or their favorite cause. So I am constantly out on the web, trolling for ideas.

This week I came across and article by Mark Hayward that included these pointers. His article included 30; I'm sifting out my favorites for your reading pleasure. If you want to read the entire thing (well worth it!), you can find it here.

3. When used properly, a small video camera like a Flip and a standard digital camera (or just an iPhone), can be like having your own marketing department.

4. Instead of trying to be everywhere in the social media space, determine what online activities work best for your business and focus your attention there.

5. Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is important but it needs to be combined with a well distributed plan for Search Engine Visibility (SEV).

6. Conceptualizing and then defining your social media goals can help to keep you on track.

8. Get to know the online influencers in your small business niche, as well as, the social media pros.

10. Uploading well titled and tagged videos to YouTube and photos to FLICKR can drastically improve your Search Engine Visibility.

12. Technology changes daily. Read often.

16. Spamming and jamming your business down the throats of potential customers only drives business away.

17. Not everyone is going to like you, so be prepared to get flamed and read negative reviews.

19. Your backstory matters and weaving it into your online business persona is important.

23. When starting your social media marketing efforts for your small business you will get frustrated. Try to keep a long term outlook like six months to a year.

24. Don’t discount the power of niche forums that are related to your small business.

26. If you are using social media as a customer service tool, when something goes wrong (and it always does!), being sincere, humble, and apologetic will be greatly appreciated by your future potential customers.

27. Utilizing free email lists like Help A Reporter Out (HARO) can help you find valuable public relations and news opportunities for your business.

28. Social media in the short term does not work. You must be in it for the long term and be persistent, consistent, and committed.

29. Anyone who owns a small business can ‘do’ social media, but NOT everyone ‘does’ it. (And that is your true competitive advantage.)

Goodbye Ellie, Hello Future

2010-03-14T09:29:00.000-04:00

It was a very sad and exciting and busy week for me this week.

My colleague Ellie Rosenfield died. Ellie was someone who lived with so much integrity and courage. I always felt supported and embraced, and could count on her for candid feedback. Ellie, we miss you so much!

I gave my first presentation in sign language with no interpreter! Wow. Please don't get the idea that I was good -- it was definitely a C- performance -- but I did it! I presented about my team at NTID's new Major Design Project campaign and how the changes we instituted last year had worked out. My audience was the other department chairs at NTID, and a more supportive and caring bunch never existed. Small steps, but real steps forward towards my goal of mastering ASL.

Finally, I met with Gerry Bateman, Chair of the MSSE department to talk about starting a Masters of Science in Special Ed. He encouraged me to apply, saying that I'd be good for the program and the program would be good for me. I will only have to do one student teaching stint instead of two since I already have a permanent teaching certificate in the state of New York. He also said I needed to be at an "intermediate" level in sign language by the time I graduated. That's fine, I have to be there in 15 months anyway as one of the terms of my employment at NTID.

Sometimes I feel like I am not pushing hard enough to move forward towards my goals and dreams. J says I am my worst critic. I am. I can seem my failings so clearly. So it feels good to be able to move forward, even if it is just a little bit.

And That, Boys and Girls, Is Karma

2010-03-08T11:55:00.002-05:00

Are We Damning our Students to Commodity Hell?

2010-02-23T13:35:00.000-05:00

I sat in on a training session the other day. The topic was "How to Write Rubrics". It was an interesting workshop, although the instructor had about 10lbs of stuff to get into a 5lb sack, way too much material to cover. I'm not sure what the other participants got out of it, with no chance to practice or absorb the material.

During he workshop, the instructor referenced Bloom's Taxonomy. I was a little shocked to realize that there were people at my table who had never heard of it. Here is an image of Bloom's Taxonomy, thanks to John Manuel via the Wikipedia Common.

There is a point to all this, stick with me for a sec.

What Blooms Taxonmy has always done for me is to encourage me to push my teaching from the lower levels where students memorize facts (that are are so easy to score and required not much from me as a teacher) to the higher levels where students analyze, sythesize, and evaluate.

What employers are going to demand of our students is that they make knowledge, create new ideas and products, redevelop old things into new. Our students won't be able to do this if they don't learn how to do it in school. This isn't a nice-to-have. This will be absolutely mission critical. Linda Naiman of the Creativity at Work blog says,

"If you are not adding creativity to your products or services, you are doomed to commodity hell, where you are just competing on price."

Our companies in the US can't compete against emerging nations on cost. Wake up -- all those low-paying jobs have left the building. They're in India, Malaysia, China, where workers earn a fraction of what they are paid here. We have to compete on creativity. And creativity is a higher level skill.

We have a moral obligation to our students to teach them how to collaborate, how to be creative, how to generate knowledge. Otherwise we are sending them out in the world unequiped to compete in a global market. That will spell the end of our happy materialistic consumeristic society. Or as George Baily said, when he famously melted down,

"Where's that money, you silly stupid old fool? Where's that money? Do you realize what this means? It means bankruptcy and scandal and prison. That's what it means. One of us is going to jail - well, it's not gonna be me."

Well, maybe not jail. But it won't be much better.

Deaf Poetry

2010-02-16T11:23:00.004-05:00

For my hearing friends who have said, "What is Deaf poetry?" Here is a hearing guy, an English teacher, explaining the poetry of his students.

Buzzing

2010-02-13T11:27:00.000-05:00

Well, Buzz is here. And that changes everything. Again.

It definitely feels like most of my demographic -- the other middle aged ladies -- aren't going to be heavy adopters of social media, unless it is going to be something that serves it all up for them in one place like AOL used to do and Facebook seems to do now. At least most of my friends (the intrepid Vicki being one very notable exception) don't seem to be as excited about the world of networks and mashups as I am.

My whole life has been waiting for mashups, the ability to put a bit of this with a chunk of that, as my interests and areas of exploration change and develop. I like things together and organized. Back in the olden days, say 1999, I made websites with my favoirtie links, very crude efforts at mashups. Later, when PBWiki made the scene, I used a wiki to accomplish this. (Now PBWiki is an "online collaboration space"!) Now with IGoogle I can do it with practically no effort. Here is an article on Mashable about how to get Buzz, Facebook, and Twitter in one place.

Beyond iGoogle, this week I am exploring the fan page functionality on Facebook. I am involved with a number of organizations that would benefit from someone knowing about this.Personally, this also looks like a way I could reach people interested in consulting relationships with me. Like anything the better I understand what I actually want to achieve, the more likely I will be to achieve it! Stand by for more on this topic - I think this is going to be a major theme in my blogging this year.

To Marketta Gregory: What Meditation Is, and What it is Not

2010-02-08T12:49:00.002-05:00

Every morning while I eat my whole grain flax cereal, I read our local Rochester paper, the Democrat and Chronicle. Mostly my reading is the comics, but occasionally I have a few extra minutes and read something else. Today the column on faith and daily living by Marketta Gregory caught my eye. It was titled On the Road to Meditation and Faith. In her article, Marketta, a Baptist woman, describes her attempt at meditation while driving on the highways of Rochester, NY.

I was really distressed at her description of meditation, which she believes is not a part of her Christian tradition. Apparently Marketta picked up her meditation instruction from Eat Pray Love, a book about Elizabeth Gilbert's experiences. Marketta believes that meditation is has something to do with humming -- being quiet and humming.

Marketta, meditation has a long history in Christianity. It also can be practiced with no religious overtones at all. Even if practiced for a very short time a day, say 10 minutes, you can get the benefit of thinking more clearly. And that helps everyone.

Here are instructions for a simple kind of meditation called "calming the mind". I recommend that you try this for 30 days, and then if you don't notice any benefit, abandon it. For people who currently are doing some sort of spiritual practice such as a daily Bible study, I would suggest you do this immediately before your study time.

1. Find a quite place/time. You need 10 to 15 minutes of relative peace, so do this when the kids are napping, or at school, and turn off the tv and your cell phone. You don't need a dedicated place, but that can be nice. But for heaven's sake, don't create requirements for yourself like, "I'll meditate when I get the spare bedroom cleaned out and made into a meditation room." Starting now is better than starting tomorrow.

2. Sit comfortably with your back straight, your hands resting naturally in your lap. You don't need to sit cross legged on the floor, although many people do assume that posture. Most important is that your back is straight and you are experiencing a minimum of discomfort.

3. Your eyes should be open, focused about 18 inches in fron of you, a little above your nose. I suggest eyes open, with a soft gaze. Your tongue should be resting in your mouth. You are going to breath thru your nose if possible. Your breath should be natural and unforced.

4. Start by considering your motivation. Your meditation will lead to a clearer mind, which will make it possible for you to more effectively carry out whatever you see as your mission in this life. Take a few minutes to think about this and then make a heart-felt aspiration that your meditation will lead to this.

5. Focus your attention on your breath. As thoughts arise in your mind, simply label them as thoughts and redirect your focus to your breath. Don't allow your mind to grasp those thoughts. Just let them go as they arise and continue to bring your mind back to the breath. This is what meditation is, the effort of refocusing your mind on the object of meditation, in this case the breath. Some meditation techniques focus on an object, such as a picture, a rock, a flower, a small statue. Some meditation techniques focus on a sound, a phrase, a word. I have heard that in early Christian times, people focused on the phrase, "Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner." A link to information about this practice can be found here. In the meditation I am telling you about, you focus on the breath.

6. Continue to redirect the mind to the breath for a period of time, maybe 10 - 15 minutes. It is helpful to have a small timer so you don't have to continually distract yourself by checking the time.

7. When the time has ended, take another moment and make a short aspiration prayer that your meditation will lead to you being able to better carry out your mission in this life. This will be different for each person, based on their own faith tradition.

There are some common problems that come up. If you become sleepy, it is suggested that you mediate at a different time of day when you are more alert. Raise your gaze slightly. Also, you could have a cup of coffee or tea before you meditate. If your mind becomes super busy, that is also very normal. it is suggested that you lower your gaze slightly. Also, several shorter sessions might be better to start.

Don't become discouraged, however. No one that I know of meditates without thoughts arising, which is good because it is the practice of controlling your mind when thoughts arise that is true meditation. You will be amazed at the control you can develop during the rest of your day. So, if for example, you have negative thoughts, you will be able to control those thougts with greater ease. You will also find that you can think more clearly when you do your bible study or other spiritual reading.

Good luck, and may all benefit from your fruitful meditation practice!

Winter Rose

2010-02-03T20:31:00.001-05:00

IMG_1044, originally uploaded by clare.dygert.

Rochester NY is a sea of gray in the wintertime. The sky is gray, the ground is white, the tree trunks are black with white snow. Usually, by the time we get to February, I have already come home and told J that I MUST MUST MUST get out of here. Now.

But this year I can't get out of here this winter because we are planning a long and expensive trip to Africa. Every vacation day and every penny is being carefully squirreled away.

Last Sunday, to help me make it through the winter, J took me to Arena's Florist, and i bought a bouquet with this beautiful rose. I had a lovely hour shooting pictures. Don't know if this will be enough to get me through, but it sure helped me make it for this week.

Metadata and Video and Why We Should Work With Students in Project Development

2010-02-02T13:02:00.000-05:00

One of the puzzles I have been working on this year is how to attach metadata to video. Yes, I understand that I can attach search terms to a chunk of video -- that's not the problem. I also know I can use the captions as search terms. But both of those scenarios are unsatisfactory to me.

If I attach metadata to the entire chunk of video -- a 50 minute video of a professor teaching a math class, for example, it doesn't help the student find that one part where she is talking about how to solve quadratic equations. To find that, the student has to fast forward through the entire 50 minutes, and hopefully will be able to find it on the first pass. What I want is to be able to search for "quadratic equation" and have the video queue up all the places where the professor used that term.

And what if the professor isn't speaking? What if she is signing ASL? I still want to find all the places where she uses that term. And if she fingerspells it one place, and uses a sign somewhere else, I want to find both places.

AND -- here's the hardest part -- I don't want this to require post production work. Because post production means money means we won't be able to do this all of the time. And it has to be screw-up proof too. For the obvious reasons.

So, one day this 4th year RIT illustration student stops by my office. He is working as a note taker, one of the access services we offer to students at NTID (and RIT too.) And he is taking notes for a student who is sighted, but unable to read. So this notetaker, who's name is Ben Rubin, is drawing notes for the student. Here is some of Ben's work. Very cool and very interesting, but it gets better.

Ben go a hold of a of a special pen called Pulse SmartPen. This devise allows Ben to record the spoken words of the professor as he is taking notes and link particular parts of the lecture to particular parts of the notes. In other words, Ben can insert a bookmark on the fly while he is drawing notes. Then he uploads the notes (and the audio file) to a website, and when his student wants to review what the professor was teaching about while Ben was drawing his notes, he just clicks on the website and hears the audio. Which is very cool, if you hear.

So Ben got to thinking about how sometimes there is also an interpreter in the room for the Deaf students. And what if, Ben said to me, we could video tape the interpreter and use the audio track to sync to his notes and make it so you could click on something and instead of hearing the audio, a little window popped up and you saw the interpreter signing what the professor was saying.

What if indeed!

So I told my programmers that I love this idea and I want to include it as a Major Design Project next year. And I met with the head of Access Services to ask him if we could use a couple or three of his notetakers next year. And he said yes. So this isn't really solving the problem of inserting metadata into video, but it is a hack that might work if we can figure it out. More to come!

Aligning Your Passions and Your Company's Values

2010-01-17T17:10:00.000-05:00

Is it a cheat to quote someone else's blog in my blog? Maybe. But stick with me. I think the journey will be worth it!

An old friend from Simon School days, Jerri Barret, writes a great blog about her "key learnings on Marketing, Networking and Non Profit Life." (You can read it here. She works for an interesting organization called The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. Jerri led me to a really outstanding article on building a leadership brand that your company values, by Jo Miller, CEO of Women’s Leadership Coaching Inc. Jo presented five steps described by Titina Ott,Vice President of Organizational Effectiveness with a leading global software corporation, and founder of their corporate women’s initiative. These really resonated for me:

"1. Understand your company’s vision, goals, and value proposition. These can be found on your company’s web site.
2. Understand the goals for your line of business, by asking your manager.
3. Understand your team’s goals, objectives and priorities. Ask your manager, as this is a critical part of their role.
4. Take a look at your development plan for the year. It is your responsibility to put this plan together. Map your goals to objectives for the company, your line of business, and your team.
5. Discuss your plan with your and manager, to gain their alignment. Ott states 'A plan is not effective unless your manager knows about it, acknowledges it and assists in providing the opportunities and support to execute against it.'"

The entire article can be found here.

My Trip to Tulum

2010-01-11T10:42:00.001-05:00

This is a little video I made using Animoto. The pictures are from a recent trip to Tulum, Mexico with my daughter, Nicole. The music was free on the animoto site.

One Place to Find Me

2010-01-10T10:46:00.000-05:00

I just registered on a site called itmyurls. You can find all my links to social networks here.

Instructional Design Model

2010-01-08T12:37:00.000-05:00

Today I had the opportunity to meet with a group of researchers at NTID. I didn't end up using my Prezi presentation. The meeting rooms are set up so that you have to get up and leave the table to use the computer -- I hate that! So I just talked.

This is my outline, with the questions I am investigating. I asked the researchers to help me with sources of information on these questions. They immediately brought up some very interesting points that were very helpful.

I am going to generate a sample course outline based on this so they will have a more concrete picture of what I am trying to accomplish. This model would work for any type of content, but my first course will be a soft skills course for Deaf adults who are about 15 years into their careers.

If you have any suggestions or feedback, please don't hesitate to give it to me!

Instructional Design Model

Course Hierarchy

Course (I am too impatient to get this list indented the way I want it! )

Lesson
Lesson
Lesson
Topic
Topic
Topic
Objective
Introduction Elements
Context Statement
Wiifm (“What’s in it for me”)
Organizer
Content
Content
Content
Interactives/Practice
Graphical Elements
Summary
Evaluation

Audience – What are the important questions?
Communication style? How accepting will learners be if information is presented in a style that varies from their own most preferred style?
Experience with distance/e-learning?
Expectations for learning situations – teacher/student behaviorial expectations?
What audience characteristics matter?

Introductions
Should objectives be explicitly stated? In what form?
Can prerequisite knowledge be expected, established?
What is the best way to generate emotional response?
What is the best way to establish context, present wiifm?
Should context statement always be job-based?
Should organizer element use “features” of ASL? General → Specific? Visual organizer? Topic → Comment? Others???

4.Content
Types:
Fact – one of a kind information that student will memorized
Concept – distinguishes if something is a member of a class or not. Requires a definition, distinguishing characteristic, definite characteristics, variable characteristics, example, optional non-example. How best to present each part?

Process – A description of a chain of events with phases or stages. Used especially to teach problem solving. Requires a graphical representation of process, with clearly delineated beginnings and endings to stages. How to best present?

Procedure – A series of steps that if followed renders a consistent result. Procedures may be branching, or have optional steps. Generally follows the pattern of Location – Action – Result. Does this still hold? How best to present?

Principal – Teaches decision making where a judgment is required. Requires a statement of desired outcome, guidelines, example, optional non-example. How best to present?

Mode of presentation:
Which of these are optimally presented as self-paced tutorials? Which are optimally taught by mentor/teacher? Which should be presented as part of a collaborative exploration?
What communication models should be used? How much written English, if any, is acceptable?

Order and chunk size:
What is optimal chunk size? What are the distinguishing characteristics that determine chunk size?
What order? Common skills and knowledge first? Simple to complex? General to specific? Other?
How much repetition is acceptable/optimal?

Interactives/Practice:
What is optimal frequency? Following topic? Content block?
Collaborative or solo? When is either optimal?
Feedback during, after, not at all? From instructor? Peers? What form?
Is “life-like” important?
Use of emotion?

Graphical Elements:
Video or other representations of the instructor teaching are NOT graphical elements. Graphical elements communicate meaning beyond what the bare words would communicate.
Photo-realistic? Or not?
How presented?
When are they required?

Summary:
What elements are required?
What best to present? How?

Evaluation:
How to best evaluate student mastery of objectives?

Instructional Design Mind Map

2010-01-04T16:09:00.001-05:00

I worked at home today, sketching out the outline of my instructional design model for Deaf learners. My thought is to review the research on how Deaf learners learn, then to use that research in developing my model. I have been fortunate to have a good starting place. For the six years before I started working at NTID, I was a first a content manager, then lead instructional designer, and finally head of a group that developed soft skills content. During that time I reviewed, argued, and suggested instructional design for courses, based on the work of Dr. Ruth Clark.

Later this week I get to meet with the research department at NTID and talk to them about what I am doing. I'm excited about this potential partnership.

Here is the Prezi I have started to develop for that meeting. I'm not sure how interesting the Prezi will be without me talking to it -- I tend to be a bit spare on my slides.

2010 Resolutions

2010-01-01T10:30:00.000-05:00

Happy 2010, everyone! It is shocking how quickly 2009 zoomed by, and it is time for my annual resolutions.

First let's review how I did on last year's resolutions.

Here they are:

1. Work on Brand Clare. Well, I did do this in a limited way. But I now realize that I need to redefine what this is. That will be one of my resolutions for 2010.
2. Upgrade my resume using an online resume site called Visual CV. Nope. Didn't even start. See resolution #1.
3. Learn how to use Adobe InDesign and Dreamweaver. My strategy for accomplishing this was to do it at work. But changes I made in my team's operations made it impossible for me to do much more than hang on there. I don't anticipate I will have much time for more than leading my team this year either.
4. Master enough ASL that I can start taking classes at RIT. I took classes 4 times a week every quarter, had a tutor twice a week, and attended a week long residential program at Camp Mark 7. I feel like I have enough vocabulary to more or less communicate, and I have been able to have meetings with my Deaf teammates without an interpreter. After the holidays, I will attempt to attend Department Chairs meetings with no interpreter. If folks are signing directly to me, slowly, I can usually figure out what they are telling me. This is not mastery by any one's definition of course. But I do feel like I have made some progress here, and I hope that by next Fall I will be able to enroll in another class. Maybe by then I will have figured out what it is I want to study!
5. Finally get my home network setup the way I want. We made some serious strides in the right direction here. This morning I can listen to music streamed from our collection, or the Internet, watch movies streamed via Netflicks, and print. My server crashed one day when Joanne accepted Microsoft updates for it, not realizing that I had earlier crashed it doing the same thing and had vowed never to accept updates without careful research again. But maybe we don't need a server to do what I want. I'm researching other options now.

And these were a couple of "maybes"

6. Buy a mandolin and learn to play it. Nope, not this year.

7. Buy an DSL camera. Yes, I bought a Canon 5D Mark II. Here is a review of it on Ken Rockwell's wonderful site. I have had a wonderful time with this fantastic camera. It is probably the most expensive thing I have ever bought, other than a car, and definitely the thing I have most enjoyed. Joanne and I are planning a trip to Africa for later this year and I am very excited about what I will be able to shoot. My Flickr stream is here if you want to take a look at what I have done so far.

Now on to 2010 Resolutions:

It's obvious to me that I took on more than I could accomplish so I am cutting back a little this year.

1. Review and re-define my personal brand. I'm feeling a little unfocused and unhappy with my direction right now and need to figure out where it is I want to be in the next 3 years.

2. Blog more regularly. I really enjoy this, even if (as I suspect!) it is just me and my nephew occasionally reading it. But blogging does help me focus my thoughts. I am going to try to blog weekly. The summers are the hardest time, when all I want to do is be out in my garden. But let's see if I can't be a little more regular with this.

3. Continue to improve my ASL skills. I have 18 months to reach Intermediate level on the Sign Language Proficiency Interview. This isn't a minor goal, to say the least.

4. Continue work on my Instructional Design Model for Teaching Deaf Adults. I would like to be able to present this at conferences in 2011.

Learning American Sign Language

2009-05-17T09:50:00.000-04:00

I am required to attain a certain level of proficiency in ASL (American Sign Language) by my third anniversary date in order to keep my job at the National Institute for the Deaf. To help me, NTID makes a variety of resources available. I take a class four times a week, have a tutor twice a week, and am going to attend residential camp this summer.

I have been pretty surprised at how little hearing people know about ASL. I didn't know much about it, but I assumed it was a fully developed language. After all, there are many many Deaf people using it to communicate on a daily basis, right? But my hearing friends and family seem to be kind of surprised by this news. It makes me realize how much we (humans) tend to think that if people aren't doing "it" -- whatever "it" is -- the way WE do it, then they just couldn't be REALLY doing it, right? ASL vs English isn't my blind spot, but I wonder what my blind spots are?

Our New Department website

2009-05-02T11:12:00.000-04:00

My department at RIT rolled out a new website on Friday. We are accepting projects from faculty and staff -- called Major Design Projects -- that will constitute about 75% of the work we will do for the next year. To advertise the fact that we are now accepting projects, I asked the team to create a little Second Life piece and also to use augmented reality to make another one. The Second Life thing is on the site now -- the augmented reality thing will be there in a day or two.

I used some of the Scrum principles to manage the projects, and it went pretty well -- well enough that I am going to use Scrum in a much bigger way going forward.

Personal Branding

2009-04-20T21:20:00.000-04:00

Good News ... I'm digitally distinct!

Personal branding is something I became interested in a few years back when I realized that for years I had been working very hard at improving someone else's brand and hadn't done anything to protect, cultivate, and promote my own. I decided that I wasn't going to go very far until I changed that.

My first step was to determine what was my value proposition. I started think -- what did the world need? What skills, talents, abilities, experiences did I have that would fill that need? We don't think of ourselves in this way, or at least I didn't. But once I started to think of myself as a product, it became easier for me to talk about myself to potential employers. It also helped me to focus my efforts because I wasn't responding to needs that weren't going to be filled by my value prop.

Once I had determined my value proposition, I started to think about how to talk about it. I started to look for places on the Internet where I could get my message out.

When you have doing that for a while, it's a good thing to evaluate how your efforts are working. ">Here is a site that can help you.

Wanderings in to Photo Pictorialism

2009-04-10T14:21:00.000-04:00

Commoncraft.com -- What an very cool site!

2009-04-07T17:00:00.000-04:00

I am very impressed by what I am seeing at CommonCraft -- what excellent e-learning. Take a look.

Constructivism and Online Learning, part 1

2009-04-06T15:24:00.000-04:00

A confession. I am a constructivist.

Constructivism is the belief that learners construct mental models of the world, and then integrate new information into those models. Learners need to direct the learning process, because they know where their mental models need work. This integration is an active process, where the learner has to seek out the knowledge, examine it, determine how and where it fits, reject it if it isn't sound. It is about as far away from a traditional learning model, where the teacher is the font of knowledge and determines what is going to be learned.

For a long time I didn't even know what the name of this was. I hadn't heard the term constructivism. But I grew up in a family that revered self-directed learning. As a child and young adult, I spent the summers studying some topic of my own choosing. One year it was falconry. Not a lot of need for falconry in suburban Dallas, Texas in the late 1960s. But that's what I wanted to learn about. Another year it was folklore, the oral tradition and nursery rhymes. I would read everything we had at the Garland Public Library on my subject of choice. Sometimes that wasn't much. It would have been great if there had been a way that someone could have helped me to construct a framework to think about these subjects, or a way I could have discussed my ideas with others. But I did learn how to dig into something for myself, and I didn't have to apologize to anyone for being interested in kind of weird stuff.

Being able to learn on one's own, to direct a program of study, was much appreciated in my family. Here is a story about my father's uncle. (Warning: this is not the History Channel. I have adjusted the "facts" to suit my need, and over time I don't even remember how much I adjusted the facts. I do this all the time. Some people may call this "lying". I call it "story-telling.")

Ok... So, my grandfather and my great uncle had a dairy business. Grandpa was good with the housewives, and Uncle Lawrence was good with the cows. Grandpa was handsome and smooth and a good enough business man that he retired very early and left southern New York and moved his family to someplace nice -- San Diego -- while he was quite young and still enjoying life. Uncle Lawrence was good with the cows.

One day, Uncle Lawrence had a question about the education that his childern were receiving. So, after tending to the cows, he hitched up his overalls and made his way to the School Board meeting. Uncle Lawrence didn't have the advantage of much formal education -- he had not finished high school. In those days people did that, they quit school and went to work to support their families. So when he got down to the School Board meeting, he was a man who knew how to work hard, who wasn't educated and was good with the cows. Family lore has it that the School Board men weren't very hospitable to Uncle Lawrence. Maybe they chuckled at his un-educated, go0d-with-cows ways. They embarrassed him. Uncle Lawrence returned home.

But as I said earlier, Uncle Lawrence knew how to work hard. So he decided to work hard at becoming educated. He visited the free public library and he read and studied. Eventually he became the President of the School Board.

The moral of the story to me was always clear: Education isn't only what happens at school. As long as there is a free public library, there is no need for me to ignorant. Hard work, study and reading are all it takes.

In this series of reflections, I will discuss how Constructivist theory can be implemented into the development of online learning. I encourage you to share your thoughts -- this isn't just me talking, it should be one side of a dialogue. So, please, pipe up as you think of stuff. The conversation with help us both.

I Got a New Camera

2009-04-02T18:35:00.000-04:00

This is the tulip Joanne's kids sent me for my birthday. I was going for a soft focus look.

This is the Japanese Garden in Delray Beach Florida. I saw it while I was down seeing my daughter and her husband.

Learning from My Deaf Teachers

2009-04-02T10:01:00.000-04:00

Last July I joined the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, NY. Because of NTID, there are quite a few Deaf folks in Rochester, so I had some causual experience of seeing people sign. But I didn't know very much about the culture, and never really thought about how my instructional design "played" to a Deaf audience. Our content was captioned, so it was accessible, right? Wasn't that enough?

When I started to dig into the work at my new job, I decided that I wanted to develop an instructional design model for creating online learning for Deaf adults. It only took me a few minutes of watching my old e-learning to realize that it was woefully poor, if you did have the sound turned on. It lost most of it's meaning and the captions just didn't work to fill the void. But beyond that, I want to develop a model that actually works best for Deaf learners, and doesn't just have access tacked on as an afterthought.

So, it seems to me, that a good place to start is to observe good Deaf teachers. I am assuming that a Deaf person would know the very best how to teach a Deaf student. Lucky for me, I spend an hour a day, four days a week with such people -- my ASL teachers.

We have two languages at NTID: English, and ASL (American Sign Language). I have the opportunity to attend ASL classes and also to work with a tutor twice a week. I have a very long way to go to master this lovely language, but I am making progress.

I have had two different teachers for my ASL classes, and they are both really excellent. They are Sam Holcomb and Barbara Ray Holcomb. I have observed four things that they both do. I am going to assume that these are common practices of excellent Deaf teachers.

1. They don't assume that because they are broadcasting, I am receiving. They make sure I am attending before they communicate. I have started noticing my own communication patterns, and I see that I have a working assumption that because I am talking, you are listening. Of course that's not true -- how many times have I said something, only to discover that the recipient of my communication wasn't listening. Then I have to (after expressing frustration!) repeat myself. Barbara Ray and Sam signal that they are ready to begin -- then check to see if I am making eye contact with them - attending to them. They do that with everyone in the class, all 10 - 15 of us. And if someone isn't ready, they wait.

2. Barbara Ray and Sam both check for understanding after they communicate something. They look right in my face to see if I have understood what they are saying to me. If I don't actively communicate back that I understand, by nodding, saying 'ok' or 'yes' or 'right' -- they communicate right to me and keep doing it until I understand. I can't just zone out and not pay attention because they are checking to see if I am following at every juncture.

3. Both teachers will use a variety of ways to communicate new information -- fingerspelling the word, signing it, and sometimes using pantomime or pictures. Sam frequently explains how the sign might have evolved. It is amazing to me that I have developed the vocabulary that I now have almost completely by this method. Can you imagine learning Spanish at the earliest, most basic level without using English? I can't. Yet, this is how we have learned ASL.

4. The curriculum is entirely material that I need to do my job. It is completely relevant to my everyday existance at NTID. We do learn a little about the daily life of Deaf folks, and a little about Deaf culture, and I find that interesting. It helps me to understand how to modify my communication to be better understood by my Deaf clients and colleagues. But by and large, the stuff I am learning is what I need to survive, on the job.

You may be reading this and thinking, "Well, that's not very ground breaking -- that's just good teaching!" and you would be right. However, in my experience in all levels of education, from primary school up to graduate school, I have rarely had teachers who actively communicated as well as these two people do.

I am going to continue to observe Barbara Ray and Sam, and am going to try to observe some other Deaf professors here. I feel like there is a lot of gold here. Watching them is going to help me to devleop my instructional design theory, and after that, develop the best e-learning ever for the Deaf.

Snowy New Year to You!

2008-12-31T09:39:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning, excited about my plans for the day. I have renewed my commitment to exercise recently, and I was looking forward to my jaunt over to the gym.

Then Joanne and I were slated to meet a friend for lunch. And there is a New Year's Eve party at our friends Laurie and Pat, and finally a late dinner at Tastings. The menu looks lovely.

But there was at least 8" of snow on the ground, and it was coming down hard. And although our plow guy had cleared the driveway, the city plows hadn't made it down the street yet. So here I sit. As they say, "Man plans, God laughs!"

Something Cool: Wordle

2008-12-27T10:29:00.000-05:00

I happened upon the Wordle site. You can explore it here.

I made this with my words for my New Year's wishes to you!

Here's how they describe themselves: "Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends"

I think this would make a very cool back of business cards.

2009 New Years Resolutions

2008-12-26T15:22:00.000-05:00

I actually do make New Year's resolutions and I actually follow through and do them. In past years I have had resolutions like

To clean one storage area (closet, drawers) a week
To have more fun (when I realized I didn't know what fun *was* anymore!)
To improve my photography
To learn to play the Uke
To improve brand Clare.

That was my last year's resolution - to improve brand Clare. I feel like I have worked my whole life to improve someone else's brand, and done a pretty good job at it. So last year I decided I should put the same attention on my personal brand.

I thought the idea of a "personal brand" was pretty novel and ground-breaking. Well, It's not! Just Google "personal branding" and see take a look at the zillion hits you will get back. There is a ton out there, for sure.

So how did I do on improving Brand Clare? Not bad. If you Google my name, you will see that I am most of the hits for the first three pages. And there are no "bad" hits -- pages that I would rather not be associated with.

This year, I am going to take Brand Clare a little further and see If I can become associated with a particular message. One of the sites I reviewed on branding suggested that a clear message is essential. So what message do I want to be associated with? Clare Dygert is an expert at leading innovative, creative teams. I think I am good with teams, and that the mashup of methods I use are interesting and novel. I will use this blog as a way to refine my thinking and talking about them.

Other resolutions for 2009:

Upgrade my resume using an online resume site called Visual CV. You should check this out - these people really have something going on here. It sor of reminds me of something from back in the pre-www days called Hyperstudio. Do you remember that? (You will see from the link that Hyperstudio is alive and well.) It will probaby take me a year to build the collaterals I need for a Visual CV, but I am excited about doing it.

Learn how to use Adobe InDesign and Dreamweaver. This will be helpful developing collaterals for the virtual resume.

Master enough ASL that I can start taking classes at RIT. I am working at RIT now and as part of my benefits package I can take courses. But I have to be a certian level of fluency with ASL by July 2010 to keep my job. i want to make significant progress this year, and have decided that until I do I will have to put off other classes.

Finally get my home network setup the way I want. Last year we bough a HP Homeserver, and I have used it to do a few things-- manage our printing, backup our computers, store photos and music. But I haven't done what I wanted to do from the start: Use the server to broadcast music all over the house and to store and stream Netflix movies to our TV. I have a new Onkyo receiver now, and I think we are dangerously close to getting this set up.

And two maybe resolutions:

Buy a mandolin and learn to play it. I am really attracted to the Gibson F series mandolins. Here's a link to one of them here.

Buy an DSL camera. Right now I have a very nice point and shoot -- an Olympus 550uz. You can read a review of it here. It has a fantastic zoom, and shake control, and I have shot some really great pictures with it. But I want to do a little more than I can do with my Olympus.