How do you do homework?

Don't go any further Jimmy, you'll fall in

There is a theme that comes up in the newspapers regularly and it relates to our education system. It tends to go something like this: “education is not relevant to work”; “young people not given the basic skills for work”. The basic premise being that education doesn’t prepare our young people for the real world.

It’s early evening now – I’m still working and will be for some while – again.

In his bedroom my son is also ‘working’ – I think (he was earlier anyway). They still call it homework but the Internet and IT in general has changed it to be something radically different to what I remember. At least it has for the privileged teenager in our house who has grown up regarding a whole set of technologies which I would have regarded as dreams as normal.

For the most part I did my homework in isolation. I lived a good bike ride from any of my school friends the need to collaborate wasn’t strong enough for me to be bothered. As we speak Jonathan is talking to two of his friends over Skype, they are using MSN for IM and file sharing. The barriers to collaboration are so much lower, in terms of effort, that they are choosing to collaborate. It’s part of their culture. It’s how they do it. They will be so disappointed if they start in employment and their employer doesn’t allow them to interact in this instant rich way.

The other day the three of them worked online and produced a flash animation on World War I as a response for a history question that they had been asked.

They regularly collaborate on a presentations and present them to the class.

So here is my question – are employers ready to release all of this fresh new employees into the rich collaboration experiences that they are used to? Are they going to provide them with the flexibility that goes with it? Or are they going to be subjected to the endless boredom of poorly structured meetings running at the pace of the slowest person with little or no value.

Name in the Guardian

Jmmy and Grandad wonder where the smell is coming from

Just a quick pointer to an article in the Guardian which mentions yours-truly .

Comes from this post.

(It’s shame I don’t have a picture of Jimmy and Grandad reading a paper – don’t have time to take one now)

Count Your Blessings #52 – Poems and Poetry

Beverley Snow

I thought about leaving this post until tomorrow being Valentines day and all; but actually I’m not talking about the romantic type of poetry. The poetry I like is the type that paints a picture in your head that draws you to imagine.

Today someone pointed out a web site with lots of the type of poetry I really like. This type of poetry takes you out of yourself and shows you the bigger world and even beyond.

I suppose it must be fairly self evident as a blogger who mainly writes that I like words. I actually see words as a means to an end, I don’t love words because they are words, I love words because they have the potential to communicate something that takes me to somewhere else. I’m not talking about escaping, I’m talking about travelling and in travelling experiencing something new that broadens who I am.

The other thing that poems can do is to express something that we struggle to express ourselves. Last night one of the young guys in my Cell Group got baptised. In our church people who are getting baptised say a few words before-hand. It’s a daunting task to stand up in-front of a few hundred people and talk about yourself. So what does a young guy do – he reads a poem; it was great.

Anyway, here’s one that I really liked:

Performance for an Audience of One by Gerard Kelly

If you had been the only one:
Yours the only ticket sold;
Your solitary bottom
Spoilt for choice
In an ocean of empty seats.
If you had been
The only one:
He still would have staged
The whole show.

The brooding, hovering chords
Of the overture
Unfolding
For your ears only:
Stars spinning out like Catherine wheels
Across a dark but lightening set,
Until dawn was uncorked
On green home.

Act 1: the building of a nation:
A people wooed and won
And lost
And won again.
For you alone the whole cast
Weaving and turning through dances
To fill a joyous expanse of stage.

Act 2: the cry of a child
In a vastly empty universe;
The adventure of hope and betrayal;
The seat-gripping climate:
Triumph diving, death defying,
Through the fiery hoop of tragedy.
The clamour of the crowd scenes
Building
Toward an unimagined finale –
A cosmos, purged of guilt
Restored,
Dressed for dancing.

If you had been the only one,
Your grimy pounds
The total take:
He still would have staged
The whole show
And wept for joy
At the warmth
of your applause.

Single-Point to Multi-Point

Jimmy and Grandad play hide-and-seek

One of the concepts that has been most pervasive within IT since it’s inception has been the idea of the cursor or the pointer. We have had over all these years, almost exclusively, a single point of focus on our screens. The mouse has then been the universal interface to this concept. This concept was developed in the days when computers could only cope with doing one thing on a screen at any one time. Many of us prefer the keyboard because it allows us to get an approximation of a multi-point interface but really all we are doing is driving a single point interface as fast as we can. It’s a bit like a virtuoso pianist using all of their fingers but only pressing one key at a time.

This video and this link show the way it could be; bi-manual, multi-point and multi-user interactions on a graphical interaction surface. It’s one of those videos that makes you think about the way it could be. It would mean a completely new way of looking at software, but it could be so much more productive.

We will communicate, we will communicate

Grandad has a dream

An inability to step outside of one’s own head may be behind e-mail miscommunication, according to recent research.

So starts an article in the American Psychological Association: Monitor

It would appear that we grossly over-estimate our ability to communicate, especially when we write (oh, dear):

The participants then listened to or read their partners’ statements, guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.

Both the e-mailers and those who recorded their messages were highly confident that their partners would correctly detect their tone–both groups predicted about a 78 percent success rate. The speakers weren’t too far off–their partners got the tone correct about 75 percent of the time. The partners who read the statements over e-mail, though, had only a 56 percent success rate–not much better than chance.

What’s more, the participants who received the messages were no better at predicting their own success–both the listeners and the readers guessed that they had correctly interpreted the message’s tone 90 percent of the time.

I suppose that means that half of you reading this have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, but I believe that nearly all of you get it.

Rubyard Kippling: “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

Via CMS

Windows 2003 R2 Single Instance Storage

Grandad consults the gnome

Some interesting articles from The Filing Cabinet on Single Instance Storage

  • Part 1: Introduction

  • Part 2: SIS Design; creating links, assessing links, breaking links

  • Part 3: The SIS Common Store and Common-Store Files

  • Part 4: Backup and Restore Support for SIS

It’s definitely very interesting.

The Guardian Causes a Storm with it's Article on Notes

Grandad nearly flicks Jimmy off the Seesaw

The Guardian today: Survival of the unfittest.

Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive?

Ed comments:

With a kickoff paragraph like this, you can only guess where the article is going…

He then goes on to complain about how the article was constructed and he does seem to have a point.

I’ve written previously about my opinions and others have responded.

IBM really do need to get on the front foot on the client. We’ve heard a lot over the last couple of years about the changes in the Domino infrastructure, we’ve heard a lot about Workplace, all this meant that we heard (and by this I mean listened and took in) little about the changes in the Notes client. Personally I have had numerous discussions with IBM in which I raised the issue of the users disliking the client – their response was nearly always to minimise the issue. I have left many a discussions with IBM with no answer to the question, “What are you doing for the end-user?”. Ed is starting to stand up to the mark but there are a lot of minds to change and a lot of technology to deploy.

Smaller Simpler Collaboration Solutions

Tyke doesn't think Grandma and Grandad are up to a walk

Bleeding Edge highlights a view of collaboration that I have a lot of sympathy with – the simple one. They then go on to highlight a new service based on email; I’ve not tried it so I’m not going comment on the particular approach.

I have a lot of sympathy for the simple collaboration approach but I don’t actually subscribe to the black-and-white one in Bleeding Edge:

What we eventually learned about groupware and collaborative software, after the expenditure of more than $US1 billion dollars, was that it led to a dramatic blow-out in IT budgets, for little increase in collaborative productivity. The only tool that did boost collaborative output, it emerged, was the one we’d all started out with at the beginning of the networked society: e-mail.

I agree that email has by far outstripped every other collaboration technique, but I don’t see it as the ‘only tool’ that has boosted collaboration output. Where my perspective is different though is within teams within organisations where they have managed to build a common sense that has made the team significantly more productive than it would have been without it. The main impact wasn’t the technology, it was the ‘common sense’ (the working process). These teams moved t the point where they lived in a collaboration space and practically never used email, email actually became an annoying interruption.

Email makes sense to people because it’s ‘common sense’ is obvious, other collaboration techniques suffer because they expect people to learn a new ‘common sense’. Other technologies may have a simpler common sense and lead to a step change in collaboration but I don’t see that happening any time soon. In the present teams will become more productive if they use technologies and build a ‘common sense’ but that takes time and effort.

Count Your Blessings #51 – A Different Perspective

That's a Tree Perspective

Some times you need someone to say something or do something that gives you a different perspective on things. I have been struggling with these posts a little because, to be honest, I haven’t had anything to say. Nothing has stood out as something that was worth writing about.

Today I read an interview that Adrian Warnock did with Tim Challies. Tim said this:

I blog as part of my spiritual disciplines. If I stop walking closely with God I very quickly run out of things to say. And so I blog to ensure that I continue to read the Bible, I continue to seek after God and continue to read good books. If I become lax in these activities my blog suffers. It really is a thermometer that measures my spiritual temperature. If that sounds selfish, so be it!

Now that’s a different perspective. The issue isn’t the blog, the issue is the rest of my life. So I contemplated what it was that might not quite be right and the answer was quite plain when I thought from this new perspective. I’ve been reading this book as my ‘spiritual’ book and to be honest it’s a bit too nice, perhaps safe is a better word but I think you know what I mean. For my other reading I’ve been reading Grumpy Old Men and to be honest I’m most of the way through and I’ve reached the point where there isn’t actually anything new; there’s only so much of someone else’s grumping that you can take.

This evening Sue and I (with Jonathan tagging along too) went out for a drink to the local book shop and I bought myself a new book. I don’t think this will be as nice, safe or grumpy as my current books; hopefully it will be a lot more inspiring.

Interestingly Adrian seems to be suffering from a bit of bloggers block to.

The other day I stood under three trees and looked up at them and the blue sky beyond. These were tall slender trees going straight up. I wondered what it would be like to be sat at the top of one of those trees. As we walked further on we saw a buzzard sat at the top of one of these tall slender trees observing everything that was happening around searching for some prey; a completely different perspective.

Sometimes different perspectives are exactly what you need. How do you find your different perspective? How do you know it’s a good perspective?

So if you’re serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ–that’s where the action is. See things from his perspective.

Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life–even though invisible to spectators–is with Christ in God. He is your life.

Colossians 3:1–3

Now there’s another perspective.

Washington Post Talk Stuff

Grandad finally gets the deck chair sorted

This is a really interesting article on stuff, you know, all that detritus that we carry around every day just-in-case:

Slogging around with a backpack, a notebook and a bottle of water, you stop for a while and stare at the historic black-and-white photographs in the National Museum of American History. You know, the ones depicting Americans going about their everyday lives: folks waiting for District trolley cars circa 1900, for instance, or people crisscrossing Pennsylvania Avenue in 1905.

Notice something missing? That’s right: stuff.

The people — all ages, all colors, all genders — are not carrying any backpacks or water bottles. They are not schlepping cell phones, cradling coffee cups or lugging laptops. They have no bags — shopping, tote or diaper. Besides a small purse here or a walking cane or umbrella there, they are unburdened: footloose and fingers free.

Now walk outside and take a look around. People on the same city streets are loaded down. They are laden with books, newspapers, Gatorade jugs, personal stereos, knapsacks, briefcases and canvas totes with high-heel shoes inside. They have iPods strapped to upper arms, fanny packs buckled around waists and house keys Velcroed to shoelaces.

I especially liked this line:

It’s the perfect posture for the Age of Insecurity. We fret about our jobs, families, country, manhood or womanhood, ability to be a good parent. We believe someone is out to get us. And to get our things. So, like the homeless, we carry our stuff with us. Just in case something, or anything, happens.

Isn’t it a trap, all that carrying.

For a few months now I’ve had a sore shoulder (oh no he was only just talking about his headaches) and it’s really made me think about all the stuff I carry around. Simple things like spare Ethernet cables just in case I get somewhere and there aren’t any.

The other day though I achieved the ultimate. I got in my car with a notebook and a pen, I drove to a meeting, I took notes and I left. I felt naked, but strangely released.

Now all I need to do is work out how I’m going to reduce the level of detritus that is stacking up in our bedroom ready for our skiing holiday.

Headaches

Grandad tries Pilates

I have been struggling with some mega headaches over the last couple of days, hence little writing. It’s been difficult enough to get my work done.

It’s not the first time and I suspect won’t be the last. I know how to avoid them. Getting older, as we all are, I now need to get a reasonable night’s sleep, not get too stressed, relax, eat healthily and exercise. Sometimes, though, life just catches up on you.

Is my brain trying to tell me something

I often think that my hidden brain is massively more intelligent than the bit that I am conscious of working with every day.

My current wonder is the word collaobration, or should I say collaboration, because I current find it impossible to type collaboration without misspelling it.

As my job is primarily focussed on collaobration software I wonder whether my hidden brain is trying to tell me I’m in the wrong job and that I should give up trying to even spell the word .