Snow during my Summer Break

Ten minutes ago, my Summer Break started… As always, there were a gazillion things to take care of before leaving. And I think I actually did take care of all those things that couldn’t wait until I return in about three weeks from now. I am now the proud owner of an empty inbox !

(Note that I only have email folders for archives – I don’t use the folder structure to indicate what the messages are about, but I already explained that “everything is miscellaneous” kind of approach before.)

My one and only priority the next three weeks is My Family – not to compensate them for my lack of presence during the year, but rather to indulge myself in their presence.

As we drive down to Tuscany, I will be contemplating what I achieved last year and what I want to achieve next year. Much on my mind will be the theme of the Snowflake Effect, a theme that my Fabulous Friend Wayne and myself have blogged about, keynoted on, talked about over dinners and many a glass of wine.

Over the past weeks, we have quietly launched a wiki site on the idea of the Snowflake Effect. You will notice that this is still pretty rough, and some important stuff will be added while I am away, but the very early draft of a paper (looks like it may become more a book than a paper!) on Snowflake is there. It’s a wiki. You are invited to edit, comment, add, discuss. We want your suggestions: what is not clear? what should be elaborated? what should be shortened? what should be added? removed? do you have additional examples? additional pointers for examples that we already mention? Whatever: leave your comments here or on the wiki. I do hope that there will be a lot of snow falling this summer…

And now, please excuse me: I want to go contemplate my empty Inbox some more

Creepy…

Via William Gibson and Cory Doctorow: Planet Hiltron (temporarily off-line)! Creepy indeed…

Sorry, couldn’t resist

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Learning from Failure…

Boxesandarrows carries a nice series on what and how information architects learn from failures…

As they say:

We talked about our failures—individual, structural, institutional, societal—and not just “failure” in the abstract, but specific situations, specific projects, where we personally failed. We also strove to hold back from blaming stakeholders and clients for these disasters. We owned our catastrophes and spoke about what we learned and why we are doing better information architecture today because of these painful, harsh lessons.

Each panelist addressed a different level of failure: the project level, the organizational level, the institutional level, the global level, but we all talked about why and how we fail, to what extent failure can and cannot be prevented, and how failure is an inevitable byproduct of creativity and experimentation.

I couldn’t agree more with this idea. As readers of these pages know, i have tried to help organise a workshop on WWWrong: What Went Wrong? What Went Right? Exchanging Experiences in Technology Enhanced Learning. When people hear about this idea, they are oftentimes a bit puzzled. After a bit of explanation, the reaction is almost always very enthusiastic and supportive. Yet, this year again, the workshop is struggling to attract a sufficient number of contributions! It seems like everyone agrees this is a Good Idea, yet nobody wants to go public with his failures.

Hey, wait a minute: the WWWrong web site says:

Deadlines

Initial submission: 8th July 2007.

You can still get your proposal in! Please do seriously consider doing so! (And you can probably get a few days extra if you ask me nicely

To “lead by example”, I often mention during my keynotes that I spent years trying to evangelize on the merits of manually adding metadata to learning resources. I would explain how important it was that people would describe their resources in rich detail – a “small investment” that would help future generations to find and re-use the resources. After many years of doing this, I realised that this would never scale, that it is maybe a small effort but a tedious one, that the metadata were often of questionable quality, … in short, that this was not the right approach. That led me to the idea that “electronic forms must die”, which was the start of our work on automated metadata generation, an idea that now is proving very fruitful to us…

We really need to create a “culture of failure”, not to replace, but to complement our culture of success. I’ve suggested before that we should ask job applicants about their failures as well as their successes: if you have been creative and innovative, then, by definition, you risked failing. You can’t risk failure so often and never fail. So, if you haven’t failed anything, then you didn’t try enough innovative things! In the same vein, funding agencies should expect not only success, but should create an atmosphere in which projects feel comfortable reporting on what went wrong too!

In a way though, the workshop idea is a failure Well, …, not the workshop idea is a failure, but more how we’ve organised things in practice so far. I’d love to hear your suggestions on how to do this so that people feel less inhibited to contribute. And i’d love to hear your failure stories too! But most of all, I would love your contribution to the workshop