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

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

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

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:

1. Weak written English skills
2. Lack of opportunities to be mentored
3. They don't "overhear", so soft skills information isn't being passed to them in that way
4. 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.)
5. 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

"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

 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

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

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!