Valerie Aurora, Mary Gardiner, and Leigh Honeywell have co-authored a great blog post “No more rock stars: how to stop abuse in tech communities”. The article is primarily about supporting women, but it’s also a great read on making more supportive, collaborative, creative teams.
It’s probably worth taking another look at Godin’s Linchpin with ideas from this article, and see how it holds up against the “rock star” metaphor.
When I was 15 years old, I definitely wanted to be Todd Howard:
On November 10, Howard’s latest project arrived like a thunderclap: Fallout 4 is the biggest game his team has ever made, a Skyrim-sized post-nuclear world brimming with more than 100,000 lines of spoken dialogue, coupled to a mammoth crafting system fed by all those wasteland odds and ends players can pluck from dilapidated desks and derelict trashcans.
In other words, he creates vast, virtual worlds for video games. These days I’m not as interested in the virtual worlds, but Howard’s work itself—the work it takes to create those worlds—is very interesting!
New evidence that I should stop using Apple devices: Apple Now Owns the Page Turn – NYTimes.com.
But, if they didn’t do it, wouldn’t someone else? Let’s reform patent law… even more!
Here I am giving an Ignite-style talk two weeks ago at The Digital Media and Learning Conference in Long Beach, CA. It was my first time (both giving this style talk and attending the DML conference), and I really liked the format—20 slides auto-advancing every 15 seconds for 5 minutes. They’re supposed to be fun and thought-provoking, which was a good challenge in the context of a conference about “designing learning futures.” I tried gently poking fun at the audience by suggesting that we’ve all dreamed about being the person who, once and for all, creates a “Facebook-for-learning.”
The main point of the presentation was to think through how we’d go about building it—with a focus on development choices. Based on a simple rubric of what characteristics such a learning-centered application would have, I asked the audience to consider four diverse models of “social” apps (Facebook, Amazon, Moodle, and the SATs). I suggested the image of an Okapi neatly summarized the development conundrum, and concluded that such an application should be complementary to Facebook—not its replacement.
Well, there’s no guarentee my talk was substantial enough for the audience, but I enjoyed putting it together and delivering it. Several of the other speakers shared heartfelt, personal stories, and I couldn’t help feeling a bit upstaged. Deservedly so!
But the subtext of my talk—which I hope I sparked in at least a few of the couple hundred people in attendance—was to consider the necessity of developing niche applications for educational contexts. That is, it’s glorious that Facebook has a community of 600MM+ users, but it’s unlikely that learning communities will benefit much from being part of such a large-scale project. Sure, it would be great to preside over such a massive community as a software designer, and there are many feats that could be accomplished with data that it would throw off, but I’m skeptical it could serve learners more powerfully than smaller, more focused tools.
So, though I asked people to think about development issues, I hoped they walked away thinking about a learner’s “user experience.” I am cautiously optimistic that at least one person did so, as she tweeted:
“Facebook for learning. Okapi problem.”
Today I attended the final day of an intensive workshop event hosted by Working Films. The event brought together a diverse group of talented filmmakers, powerful activists, and leaders in the education sector – I was lucky I got to crash their party! In their own words, it was:
a residential workshop designed to help filmmakers and non-profit organizations leverage the power of films that document some of the most significant problems – and innovative local solutions – that unfold every day in schools across the United States and the world… [The last day] is a day of serious strategy for groups already committed to advancing change in the educational sector!
Cool stuff. At the center of the event were seven amazing films (links below). After hearing from the production teams and seeing clips from their films, we workshopped “social action” strategy in small groups.
Social Action
Action. Justice. Change. Transformation. Learning. There was a lot of passion in the films, and a lot of potential to start conversations, dialogue, etc. So that’s where we started. It was a lot to take in: the filmmakers (and by extension the production companies) shared their visions of the kind of impact they wanted their films to have. Better educational opportunities? Yes. Empowerment for underserved groups? Yes. Social change? You bet. Some of their ideas overlapped, some diverged.
A theme from the ongoing discussion that stood out to me was what someone in the group referred to as a “transmedia strategy” – from the idea of transmedia storytelling across multiple platforms and formats (Kinder 1991, Jenkins 2003). The conversation that emerged throughout the day was how the filmmakers – if they wanted to enhance the transformative potential of their films – were likely going to leave the more familiar domain of film… and enter into meatspace and cyberspace in new ways.
Or, in other words, the essential question of the day was: How can films lead to action?
I think everyone was sympathetic to the idea that discussion isn’t enough – that talk is cheap, as they say, even with respect to democratic action. And there was a shared sense among the activists and the educators that the films could do even more.
Notes on Transmedia Strategy
So this was my schtick about trying to get things done online: Start by creating opportunities for “engagement” across a spectrum of actions ranging from simple to complex. (Twitter = simple. Facebook = pretty simple. Embedding video = getting harder. Coming to your site = not so simple. Using your tools = takes some dedication. Putting content on your site = hard.) The Internet may be somewhat indifferent to your ideology (so to speak), but it is definitely not indifferent to the design of your software/applications/etc. A strategy that includes many of these elements – and successfully engages your audience – is a sufficient transmedia strategy.
Across the seven projects (“projects” seems better than “films” in this context), there was already a variety of thinking about online and social action strategy. Interestingly, I sometimes couldn’t tell if an idea for an “app” or a website was a tie-in or a tool – and it occurs to me now that that’s probably a bad sign. Allow for a quick clarification of terms: for me, a tie-in is a filmworld thing (to bring people to the experience of the film), and a tool is an educational thing (that empowers people to change things). The two can go hand-in-hand – and I nodded my head positively as we talked about that – but it is an uneasy relationship.
I suspect it would pay off to disentangle a tool from other tie-ins. They’re different animals. A good example of this kind of distance is the “professional development experience for teachers.” That’s something that someone else builds, and inserts some excerpts from your film into. It’s not a tie-in as much as a tool. And: let someone else make that tool.
But, let’s say you want to build a tool for social change, and you want to do it yourself.
You want to build a way to help parents connect. A way to give young learners a voice. A way to make families without children care about education. A way to help people achieve a new literacy. (Let’s agree to ignore the teachers here on the premise that they got the professional development kit.) You’ve now taken off your filmmakers’ hat off and put on a crazy new hat. You’re building a new tool.
First of all, you still need the aforementioned transmedia strategy: that’s your so-called social media funneling people of all kinds toward your film experience. A tool isn’t that. And, perhaps sadly, it’s not your film either – that helps, but it’s a non-starter in an online/digital/phone/app space. It’s also not your festival-in-a-box (that’s a tie-in). If you want a great tool, don’t confuse amplification with transformation. Amplification is about getting the word out and the conversation started. Transformation is when you enable every person to make it their own.
Sidenote: let’s agree not to aim to change policy on day one. Not with the tool that you’re going to put online (or on a mobile device). Let’s be realistic here: it would be a huge win if your chosen constituency finds your tool as useful as a scrap of paper. You’ll have to build up from there.
So, secondly, and most importantly, you need to make a useful tool. A humble, easy-to-understand tool. One with a little inspiration and imagination. It’s just one part of your transmedia strategy. It’s the part that aims at a very specific group of people and allows them to engage or enact the ideas that are buried deep within your film. It’s a super simple thing that may spring into the world wholly-formed, or take shape through many stages of refinement and revision. Sure, it’s a tie-in, but it shouldn’t look like one. It has to be a gift.
So let’s get to the unpleasantries. Unpleasantry #1: If you want your film to be part of a tool, you have to give your media away for free. Yep: that’s how the Internet wants it. That’s how educators want it. That’s how students want it. You don’t have to give it all away. And this isn’t just a strategy to get people to come and pay for another experience. This is a reality. It’s a reality for films that are good, authentic, truthful, honest, and transformative. If that means your film, that’s probably a good thing. Get over it. Keep your day job. Etc.
Unpleasantry #2: Developing good tools is hard. It’s easy to throw a lot of money at the problem and lose. But that doesn’t mean it’s expensive. You just need new friends. These new friends will be young, opinionated, difficult to communicate with, and just generally strange by your standards. (That’s okay though, right? You’re a filmmaker for goodness’ sake.) The words they should be saying to you are: simple, iterative, open source. That’s not a recipe; it’s just a good foundation. If they’re not saying those things, good luck to you. I have no idea what you’re building.
Unpleasantry #3: You need data. You need to convince your new aforementioned friend(s) that you need data. Each and every new aforementioned friend will not like the idea of gathering data, but with a little push, he or she can create a nice foundation. Traffic? Sure. An understanding of how individuals use your tool? Excellent. Demographic data? That would be nice. It’s unclear what you’ll do with it now, but it’s for the future. It’s for growing. It’s for understanding what you’re actually doing. Collect it. Organize it. Save it. If your tool is successful, it’s going to help you tell your story. Data is the cinematography of the digital world. (Hypothesis for further exploration: collecting great data is the high art of social change.)
Bonus round: give your users control over their content and their data. This will ingratiate you to the geeks and the media literate, but it’s also a great practice that will help you build a community around your tool. Give them an easy way to give you feedback, too.
Lastly, importantly,
I hope this vaguely coherent rant is more clarifying than it is discouraging. There is a ton of room in this world for transmedia for social change. We’re giving up too much if we leave it all up to Facebook, Google, and Apple. Jump in and play a bit. Hey, you’ve made a film… do you really want to do that again anytime soon?
Also, don’t forget about the people in your films. They are the people who have been given the most powerful tool of all.
Lastly, a big thanks to the multitalented organizers of the workshop, and, of course, anyone who had to suffer through an encounter with me, lol.
The films:
Interesting slides (56-58) listing challenges for developing learning tools, via elearnspace:
I’ve just read Douglas Rushkoff’s shortbook Program or Be Programmed, wherein he shares “Ten Commands for a Digital Age.” Though his portrayal of various “biases” of digital technology (e.g., timelessness, abstraction, depersonalization) is polemical, he succinctly describes major challenges of new technologies in 144 pages.
His main point is to describe a new literacy – a digital literacy he says we must achieve to continue to shape our world in positive ways. He argues that the consequence of not being able to “program” (or, he allows, at least being familiar with the scope and power of programming) would be to allow digital technology – and those who wield its powers – to overdetermine our lives.
I am sympathetic to this message, but reading his argument served as a good exercise to review the larger picture – and consider how well this kind of story about “digital literacy” hangs together.
One area Rushkoff’s book helped me reflect on was the design of online learning environments. In line with his descriptions of digital biases, current learning management systems are often positively shaped around the “advantages” of digital technologies. Asynchronous discussion boards are favored. Students are asked to use their real identities. There is “space” for collaboration.
So far, so good. But Rushkoff helps us ask: what about the “speed” of dialogue and collaboration? It seems to me that instructional designers (teachers or their assistants) could make the mistake of hoping that student interactions (with the course, and with other students) only increase. Or, similarly, that the administrative evaluators of such courses favor more frequent interactions.
As Rushkoff points out, such desires could be our ill-considered adoption of digital biases, and in fact, slower, less-frequent interactions could be preferable. While he harkens back to the “early days” of online bulletin boards, and points to the “depth” of discussion that came out of less frequent “logging in and signing on” (p. 24), I think it could more simply be a case of “less is more” – that writing and editing take time, and focus can help one achieve better communication. I wonder, therefore, how we could sharpen the design of online discussions to favor more reflective engagement.
There are already great examples of this online. From the way sites like the New York Times aggregates Comments, to the way tools like Disqus track one’s diverse contributions, there is a lot of good thinking about shaping online discussion. How could educational designers incorporate these and other strategies into a “course” experience?
I ran across this interesting frog design deck while reviewing trends in design research – a summary of the Design Research Conference 2010 (DRC) last May. A quick glimpse at the slides provides a snapshot of how designers continue to grapple with user needs, and how they respond with both simple and sensible strategies (and more than a handful of rhetoric, too).
What do you value in a design process?
At EdLab, our teams often have great latitude in structuring our design processes – indeed, we can change almost every aspect of project management, from inception to final outcomes (and ongoing documentation and reporting). As a consequence, the teams I am a part of – creating diverse software, video, and exhibitions – all work a bit differently. What are the good and bad effects of this freedom? What amount is worth having? To paraphrase Stan Lee:
With great freedom comes great responsibility.
In my everyday work at the lab, I often feel and see the emotional and intellectual effects of shepherding a project through a design process – and negative examples easily come to mind. In considering project work in this way, it is not always clear that it’s a design process per se that leads to each and every outcome (e.g., the emotional response of a team member who feels his or her idea wasn’t adopted), but it seems helpful to consider many (and diverse) aspects of a work environment as part of a design process. In doing so, I hope to assess what structures or freedoms can be articulated as being worth having with a wide range of desirable outcomes in mind.
Consider a common situation: when is a team responsible for documenting its progress on a product? – Every day? Every week? To what extent? And how? What is the cost of this? What is the purpose? What decisions will or could be made as a result of such documentation? A team that has more latitude when it comes to responding to the need for documentation can tailor it to fit the nature of the project. A ready-made rubric, on the other hand, might not allow for the nuances that the team can account for, but I suspect organizations often favor consistency over specificity. In doing so, I wonder what, on balance, they lose. But also: what is the strain on the team that is left to weigh many variables? Such a rubric is a good example of what kind of components constitute a more structured design process.
To better understand the cost of such structures (i.e., monetary cost, but also their effect on goals like creativity and innovation), I have found it helpful to reflect on characteristics of design processes that I value. A few of those characteristics:
Short of following a structured design process, cultivating one, or attempting to cultivate one, I expect an organization would articulate habits, dispositions, and behaviors that are valued. But, I wonder, could these characteristic be understood as part of “a process”? And is it beneficial to frame them as such?
Here’s Steve Jobs, from a recent email thread with Gawker’s Ryan Tate:
Do you create anything, or just criticize others (sic) work and belittle their motivations?
This last missive from Job’s is a nice rejoinder from a back-and-forth with Tate about Apple’s iPad platform (and related technologies). And if you don’t look too closely, you might be impressed by it.
By now it’s well-known that Apple draws the ire of the free software community. But Steve Jobs take the time (here in a private email conversation) to clearly articulate his views and motivations. Really? A CEO taking the time to pursue an email flame war with a spiteful blogger? Very respectable. Admirable, even.
That’s what it seems to take these days to engage the public, especially in the software development space. And I like Jobs’ response and his insistence on participation: he asks (I paraphrase), “Are you at least engaged in similar work?”
But wait, is that enough? Tate started the email thread by criticizing Jobs’ abuse of the language of “revolutions.” Does Jobs offer an adequate defense?
Jobs’ response is related to a too-easy dismissal: “If you don’t do X, you can’t criticize it.” But I don’t think that’s Jobs’ attitude in this case. Tate’s criticism against Apple is steeped in deep knowledge of the software world. I think Jobs’ is asking for empathy, saying (again I paraphrase), “It’s hard to bring these new technologies into the world, isn’t your quibble with us a minor one? Why can’t this discussion be more civil?” Or even, “It’s a mistake to equate what we’re doing here with something important.”
But then that’s why Tate is right and Jobs is, ultimately, a corporate ass: Jobs isn’t taking personal responsibility for his company’s ridiculous (“it’s magical” and “it’s revolutionary”) claims. Jobs’ insistence on deflating the significance of the iPad’s implications for the software community flies in the face of Apple’s language describing it. Once you say it’s revolutionary, there’s no going back and saying that you didn’t mean “in a cultural or political way” (Jobs’: “It’s not about freedom”).
So, frankly, this exchange turns out to be as offensive as it is instructive. I’m glad Tate shared it. Sure, we can empathize with Jobs… it is tough making great things. Especially complex things. But the work of understanding them – seeing their implications, assessing their value, and measuring their impact – is a shared responsibility between both developers and consumers. Indeed, it’s part of the cost of doing business, though easy to forget.
So, how can a development group take responsibility?
