Five for Friday - edition no. 3

So, I'm back again. I was traveling and had limited time where my fingers could be on an electronic device long enough to pen anything beyond a quick text or note. That's an important lesson though in our hyper-connected lives. Sometimes you have to just go live and have experiences worth coming back and talking about. So I've been storing up adventures like a squirrel preparing for a long winter. This week I'll tell you a little bit about:

1. Why I don't care if The Martian is scientifically accurate
2. Pffft, your generation would have done it too
3. Big love for Big Magic
4. Looking in my magic 8 ball about gamification
5. Speaking of permission slips

1. Why I don't care if The Martian is scientifically accurate

Full disclosure: Ridley Scott directed one of my all-time favorite movies, Blade Runner, so there was a better than average chance I would like The Martian. I also come from the movie critique camp that judges a movie based on what is in the four corners of the screen. It is the director's choice what we see. I don't slam a movie if it doesn't follow the book exactly or makes decisions about how to tell the story as long as it works within the story that the movie is telling. So, while I am a science lover, I don't care if all of the science in The Martian was accurate. I care that it had several cool lessons.

Mark Watney: In the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option, I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this.

First, it's about trying things, solving problems, and keeping at it. You won't always get the right answer, but you can learn a lot along the way. It's important to look for the questions, not just the solutions. If you don't keep asking, and pushing, and probing, you will never know what is really possible. Hey, what are you gonna "science the shit" out of?

Mark Watney: None of this matters at all if I can't find a way to make contact with NASA.

Second, each individual can do amazing things. OK, we may not colonize a planet, but we can all leave a mark. However, there is always the need for collaboration. Matt Damon's character never once assume he would get off of Mars alone. He needed to do what he had to do to survive until help could get there. As Clay Shirky wrote in Cognitive Surplus: "Humans are fundamentally individual, but we are also fundamentally social."

Teddy Sanders: Every time something goes wrong, the world forgets why we fly.

And finally, although there could be a host of other lessons I could talk about, there was the harsh reality that even when you do it all right, you follow the rules, you try really hard, it may still not work out. But we have to keep moving forward. We can't forget why we fly.

2. Pffft, your generation would have done it too

Hey, let's go back to Clay Shirky's book for a minute. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connect Age is about five years old now, but still a solid read. I returned to it this week because I recalled it had some ideas that were reignited in my head after seeing the story of the young women who were made fun of for taking selfies at the baseball game. Aside from the fact that they had been encouraged to do so because they were participating in a contest intended to spur fan engagement, they were exploring an opportunity made available by the connected age. Opportunity is the key work here. As Shirky points out: 

Generations do differ, but less because people differ than because opportunities do. Human nature changes slowly by includes an incredible range of mechanisms for adapting to our surroundings.

I have no doubt that young people of my generation would have selfied the heck out of everything if we had had the opportunity to do so. So before you say, kids these days, think about the human motivations they are acting out. 

Behavior is motivation that has been filtered through opportunity.

Are they really so different that kids those days? 

The people surprised at our new behaviors assume that behavior is a stable category, but it isn’t. Human motivations change little over the years, but opportunity can change a little or a lot, depending on the social environment. In a world where opportunity changes little, behavior will change little, but when opportunity changes a lot, behavior will as well, so long as the opportunities appeal to real human motivations.

There's a whole lot of other discussion possible here about making more opportunities available to more people. But one final reminder from the book is about how poorly we can predict how new technological opportunities will play out.

Study after study in the 1990s asked potential users what they would do with the internet if they got access to it, and the commonest answers always clustered around “I’ll use it to find information,” “I’ll use it to help me with my schoolwork,” and so on. Whenever a poll asked people already online what they actually did, the answers were quite different. “Keeping up with friends and family,” “sharing photos with others,” “talking with people who share my interests,” and the like appeared near the top of every list. Because we’re so lousy at predicting what we will do with new communications tools before we try them, this particular revolution, like the print revolution, is being driven by overlapping experiments whose ramifications are never clear at first.

3. Big love for Big Magic

I loved this book start to finish. Elizabeth Gilbert talks to readers like we are adults, like we are her girlfriends having coffee together, and like that tough sports coach or Gibbs from NCIS that has to smack you on the back of the head to wake you up figuratively, emotionally, and creatively. To pick out my favorite parts of the book was like asking me to pick out my favorite piece of pepperoni on a pizza. I couldn't do it. But in the spirit of not over-indulging, I included five short, but sweet quotes in the hopes that you will go and read more.

when I refer to “creative living,” I am speaking more broadly. I’m talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.

Basically, your fear is like a mall cop who thinks he’s a Navy SEAL: He hasn’t slept in days, he’s all hopped up on Red Bull, and he’s liable to shoot at his own shadow in an absurd effort to keep everyone “safe.”

Or if you do worry that you need a permission slip—THERE, I just gave it to you. I just wrote it on the back of an old shopping list. Consider yourself fully accredited. Now go make something.

Even if you have only fifteen minutes a day in a stairwell alone with your creativity, take it. Go hide in that stairwell and make out with your art!

Guys, please don’t mistake your creative work for a human child, okay?

4. Looking in my magic 8 ball about gamification

(photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ursonate/)

I was asked for some thoughts on gamification in learning as part of an upcoming ebook (details to come) and one of the questions was about the most plausible future of gamification. The following was my response.

I hope that the future is for there to be more collaboration across areas of expertise. Game designers don't know how to create learning. Instructional designers don't design games. Gamification designers and researchers are drawing from even other areas of expertise in behavioral economics, psychology, marketing, and more. We all have pieces of the puzzle and I think some organizations are doing a really good job of combining those skills. Not every venture into gamification will be successful but I think there are enough success stories that it is here to stay in some form. The novelty has worn off and now we can start to see some really creative, innovative, and effective approaches.

Much of the success of gamification is tied to the power of social. I think that as we create more and better gamification options in learning we will move away from the elements like external rewards and leaderboards (which still give it a bad name) and will focus more on the affordances for collaboration and personal development. Its integration into learning events seems a natural companion to the increase in social media and mobile applications for learning. Gamification is so fused with informal and social learning that I hope we will be able to stop talking about it like it is a whole separate creature and realize that it is all part of the blending of tools and techniques. Just as better UX design has helped learning technology get out of the way of learning by focusing on the people using the technology, I think gameful learning can create ever better designs because it is learner-centric and focuses not only on what learners want and need to know but why and how they want to experience the learning.

5. Speaking of permissions slips

Yes, this week is a lot about stuff I've been reading and writing, but it's good stuff. Important stuff. And my final piece of wisdom for the week comes from Seth Godin whose book What to Do When its Your Turn (and its Always Your Turn) was a perfect companion read to Big Magic. Didn't like Gilbert's permission slip? Left it at home? Dog ate it? Well, here's a second one. Godin's book is a call to action and a call to share, which he made really easy since he sent extra copies of the book I purchased for the sole purpose of sharing the ideas. So, it's your turn. What are you going to do with your turn? Leave me a comment and I'll put all responders' names in a hat, or bowl, or some suitable vessel and pick one to receive a free copy of the book.

Five for Friday - edition no. 2

Phew, narrowing the field this week was tough, I still had some things from the previous weeks. Eventually I'll catch up ... maybe ... but for now, here are five more cool things.

#1 Make progress and achievements visible
#2 How my self-directed learning habits helped save a bird
#3 Visit before you visit the Willowwood Arboretum
#4 Making time for making
#5 A musical interlude

#1 Make progress and achievements visible

I have spent a lot of time the past few years writing and speaking about gamification. I've taken on the grumpy cats who claim it isn't suitable for learning or the workplace or wherever. Usually their arguments stem from fear of the unknown and/or bad experiences or examples of bad design. And I'll write more about all of this other times, but the key thing today, as I tell people who come to my sessions is that whether or not you gamify anything, we can all benefit from some of the key concepts. One of my key takeaways is always "Make progress and achievements visible." Showing people where they are, where they are going, and the giving them mileposts does magical things to their motivation. It's not about badges, it is about the meaning that the learner can attach to that badge. It is a symbol of success and success breeds success.

Here's my personal example of the week. I just completed one full year of using my Fitbit activity tracker. I have mine set with a goal of 5 miles of walking each day, which for me comes close to 12,000 steps, a bit more than the suggested 10,000 steps. Every day for the last 365 days I have met that goal. How do I know? Because I can see it on the Fitbit dashboard on my phone or computer. I have gotten badges and stars and other nice-to-haves, but it is the visibility of my daily progress that keeps me hooked. But, hey, it is pretty cool to know that I have walked the equivalent of transversing India (1,997 miles). And it's not just me. In the coming weeks my mother, who is 83 years young, who uses a walker, will complete one full year of meeting her daily goal of 2 miles (which is a more modest, but equally impressive for her capabilities). She knows she needs to exercise to keep up her stamina and strength so that she can continue to live independently but it is easy for any of us to take a day off, which leads to a couple of days, and then .... But making the progress visible has helped her to stay the course. As of today, she has walked 1.7 million steps over the past 50 weeks. Trust me gamification, but whatever name, works.

#2 How my self-directed learning habits helped save a bird

A couple of weeks ago, late in the evening, my husband and I were out for a walk and found a wounded bird standing on one foot in the middle of the street. It appeared to have bands on both ankles and was a pigeon, but clearly not an urban-poop-on-park-statues variety. Not wanting it to become roadkill or a midnight snack for one of the neighborhood cats, we scooped into a big plastic bin and took it home ... with absolutely no idea what to do with it. And oh, did I mention it was a holiday weekend? But being resourceful I decided we could figure it out. Life forms need water, I already knew that, although I also knew that scared animals don't always want to eat or drink, so we put some water in the bin, covered the top to keep it dark and decided that if it survived the night, we would do what we could.

The next morning I crept into garage and peeked in the box and guess who was peeking back up at me. Phew, still alive ... but also still on one foot. I started thinking about who I knew that knew about birds. See it is always good to build a network of people who know about a lot of different stuff. I also headed to the Internet. It wasn't hard to find out the basics of what they eat and figure out that while I didn't have wild bird seed I did have rice (uncooked) and popcorn. OK, we could put a dish of food in the bin with the water until we could get to a store for seed. Oh, and I learned that I should splash my finger around in the water so the bird would hear the sound and know there was water.

I kept reading, and learning, and after another day and night of rest for our pigeon guest we decided to freak him out again, as we had when we rescued him from the street (wow, that sounds dramatic), and try and get a better look at the ankle bands. I had already found information on how to read the bands, assuming by this point that it was a homing and/or racing pigeon. So hubby held the bird, I wrote down the info, and figured out which federation he belonged to. From their website I found the group his owner belonged to and got contact info. Hubby made some calls and we eventually got connected to the owner who lived about 40 miles away. Long story short, we ended up housing our new friend for a couple of weeks while he recouped (so to speak).

One day, he was suddenly in a window sill, and then up on a shelf, clearly improving and trying to get to higher and higher ground as he prepared to return to the skies. Or so we hoped. The owner wasn't in a hurry to come get him. This wasn't a pet per se and I guess it is sort of a occupational hazard of raising racing pigeons that, like soldiers, some don't make it back. We went through being worried that the bird would be killed if it didn't heal up all the way and wondering if we were going to end up keeping the bird. But in the end the owner made arrangements to pick up the bird and confirmed that the bird's leg was fine and he just needed a few more days rest and that the bird was supposed to be in a big race this month and that the new power lines they have built in our area have been causing the birds some problems.

I didn't get to meet the owner but I did get to see him because he told my husband that he was on a TV show about the pigeon races. Sure enough, I few more Google searches and I found videos from the show on the Animal Planet. It was called Taking on Tyson. Yep, Mike Tyson is a pigeon enthusiast and you could tell watching him with the birds that they bring a calmness to him while still fulfilling his competitive spirit. The videos were fascinating. I soon learned what the band on the other leg was for. The one leg had the identification tag with visual information, the other was a race tracking chip, like marathon runners have in their bibs. They scan the birds when they enter a race and then can get a clock speed on them when they return.

Aside from being a cool story with a happy ending, it is also a story of how important it is to be comfortable learning on the fly. I can't tell you how many people have heard about this story and said: "Gee, I wouldn't have had any idea what to do" or "how did you figure that out." Those of us who are lifelong learners sometimes take for granted what a special skillset we have.

#3 Visit before you visit the Willowwood Arboretum

Hey, did you ever consider that you don't have to be at a garden or museum or wherever that has a phone audio tour to enjoy it? I do it all the time for an number of reasons. Maybe I am with friends and don't want to hold up the group or be anti-social by stopping and dialing into the tour at each stop of the tour. Maybe I want to focus on taking pictures and juggling my phone and camera and everything is a recipe for a clumsy technology moment. I make note of the phone number and the numbers that you have to press to retrieve the various messages and then call in later. Or, even better, as Willowwood Arboretum suggested, call in ahead of time and use the audio tour to help plan your visit. Brilliant. They give you all the info right on the website and suggest you plan ahead. Even better still, they provide a printed version of the transcript. And here's a few of the shots from our visit.

#4 Making time for making

I got a chance to go to the Maker Faire this week but I haven't had a chance to review and process all of the cool stuff from there and since I'm traveling much of the next two weeks, it will probably have to wait a bit. But that doesn't mean that I am not living the maker lifestyle. I have been literally making things. Hey, check out some of the cool buttons I'm making for friends who are traveling to NOLA soon.

But I'm also making plans. I'll write more about this in the coming weeks, but by writing here I'm firmly committing to writing more about it in the coming weeks. I have had an idea dancing around in my head for a long time now and it keeps tapping me on the shoulder and clearing its throat and staring at me with a slightly disgusting yet mom-you-didn't-clean-your-room kind of look. So when I return from NOLA I'm going to outline everything.

The gist of it is that we are all presenting 24 x7 whether it is a formal presentation for work or school, a meeting, an interview, a date, a community event ... whatever. And we all have been on the giving and receiving end of presentations and we all are surrounded by pop culture, are all adjusting to the ocean of information we swim in daily, and we struggle to focus our attention and garner the attention of others. The upcoming project will be part book, part workbook, part do-it-yourself learning adventure, and hopefully part community of people who all want to improve their presentation skills and help others to improve theirs because frankly we are all really tired of boring presentations. Amirite?

#5 A musical interlude

For our final spot on this week's countdown, how about a little musical interlude. I will be showing a number of friends around my hometown of New Orleans in the coming days. To get everyone in the mood, I started putting together, among other things, a playlist of musicians and musical acts who have ties to New Orleans. It is by no means all-encompassing but it is an eclectic mix of genres. I'll keep adding to it, but for now, enjoy!