the Design Experience Weblog Archive

I really like the idea that you can think about the leadership and how a team is structured to predict the results. Hackman says that the leader should set the direction, and let the team find the way to get where it needs to go. This requires the leader to trust the team. It also requires the team really have the experience and resources to get where it needs to go.

Hackman compares a string quartet, where the musicians interpret the music, to a symphony orchestra where the conductor does the interpretation alone.

OpenACS and is predecessors where pioneers in online community toolkits and OpenACS is still the online toolkit that builds everything from the model of users, groups, and how they interact.

I did a google search for the phrase "the community is the content" and found some interesting results.

23 results. (wow looking now, my entry about the phrase is #2 in the results since I posted it yesterday.) The first result is a PDF flyer from MIT Press that mentions MIT CogNET which is an online system that was built on the ArsDigita community system which turned into OpenACS.

Next I searched for "MIT CogNet Arsdigita" and found a great gallery of sites built on ACS from the past. OpenACS should revive this type of feature and showcase current OpenACS based sites and how they use the unique features of OpenACS to solve interesting problems.

I think David is right. Thinking in terms of scalibility is limiting. Creativity and opportunity for change is going to happen in the places where scaling does not work. More effort is required to reach the last few percent than to get to a high percent, or almost all.

I don't know all the answers, I just know we can do better. One article I read (that unfortunately, I cannot find the link to) mentions that one teacher, in front of a classroom cannot scale much past 30 kids. We can't improve learning without increasing the number of people learning alongside kids. I think its a key place to innovate in learning.

Here are some links:

Creation of a learning landscape: weblogging and social networking in the context of e-portfolios and the software that implements those ideas (open source) Elgg. Also see the hosting service for Elgg.

I posted about this on the .LRN discussion forum, and learned that Nick Carroll is working on a version of eportfolios for .LRN called dotFOLIO.

I don't have an Apple right now, so I haven't been able to try this for myself. Lately I have been using planner-mode for emacs, which is really great for implementing the Getting Things Done method of organization. It's also nice because I use emacs for most of my work since I am a web programmer.

Some things emacs does NOT do well for me include: web browsing, email, editing non-text documents, and I can't seem to think of anything else off the top of my head. Well being a web programmer that works remotely the web and email are probably the top two apps besides text editing that I do. So while emacs can organize my tasks, record time worked on a task, and actually perform direct programming tasks, it doesn't do the surrounding support tasks they way I need it to.

So enter Quicksilver, which seems like a great way to tie together apps like you can do in emacs. What is neat about alot of the emacs tools is that they are context-sesitive. It knows what you are doing right now, and can usually do the right thing in that context. It seems to me that Quicksilver adds context awareness to the OS.

Hopefully soon I will have a Powerbook or something to try out my theory!