As a result of what I would consider a “the jury’s still out” feeling, I decided to sit down and try to create something in the iBooks Author Software.  I sit on both the technology and professional development committees for our school district, so I figured putting together a book with iBooks Author served several purposes.  I would learn the tool by playing around with it, and I could make a book that could explain things like digital citizenship to teachers and parents.  The goal is to also have others help write the book as well, if they have time, and to customize it for our school district, making it a pretty decent “project-based learning” exercise for everyone involved.

It’s early on in the project, but I’ve found that iBooks author is pretty easy to use.  It works very much like the Pages application on the Mac, so getting started is pretty easy.  It took a little bit of fiddling and using the help feature to make sure I put hyperlinks in properly, and I could not find the footnoting feature, but I assume I’ll figure that out today.

It’s incredibly easy to add keynote presentations and videos into iBooks.  I had a one-step conversion process to take a YouTube Video and convert it so I could embed it in the text, and a Powerpoint presentation from the Pew Internet and American Life Foundation was easily converted into Keynote and included as a “figure” in a chapter. (They have their data available for use as open source with credit, so inclusion is not a copyright violation.)

My initial thoughts are that this could be a great tool for teachers and even people who regularly teach adult classes or trainings to put together interactive texts, aggregating resources and more.  For example, for folks in social media that are trying to teach folks how to use WordPress, it would be simple to put together a few slide shows, short how-to videos, and the like, and hook them together with text to create a much more useful and instructive guide.

The biggest problem I see with iBooks is making sure that IP rights are respected.  If you look in the back of any textbook, there are tons of footnotes, references and the like, because textbooks are, by their very nature, a conglomeration of expert advice from all over.  With iBooks Author, it’s very simple to cut and paste from all over the web to create a really terrific interactive book, yet determining whether anyone selling an iBooks Author text through the iBooks Store is “profiting” from work they did not actually create is going to be tricky.

The tools provided to create really terrific looking EPUB books are simple to use.  The application to sell your books in the iBooks store or distribute them for free is also pretty straightforward.  The aggregation of information and preserving intellectual property rights for a book format that relies on aggregation of information may be tricky.  But certainly for most teachers and educators who may be considering creating their own textbook or compendium of information they use for their lessons every year, this will be a terrific tool.

The only additional wrinkle is that so far, the epub multimedia format of the books produced will only be available for viewing on ipads.  I get that- adding video and slide presentations in an interactive format won’t work so wel on a Kindle or e-ink readers, especially when hot links to websites and secondary resources will require web access.  I’m not sure why the books should not be viewable in a reader on a Mac or PC, but I suppose if there’s enough demand, those problems will be solved as well.

iBooks and iBooks Author tools are an interesting business play for Apple, and provides a great way to let anyone, even children, create multimedia books and projects that are truly impressive.  We’ll have to wait and see how many people adopt it, but so far, it’s been a much more interesting way to put together a book than just using Microsoft Word.

I go to Educon every year because it’s always inspiring.  You hear what’s happening in other school districts, and realize both how much more you could be doing and how far along you are, as well as how common and universal certain problems seem to be. Resources, even in well off school districts or private schools, seems to be an issue, even the ones issuing kids laptops and ipads simultaneously.  People are nervous about making a decision and spending money that might look wrong headed three years from now, but also know in their hearts that if you wait for the perfect answer, or the most convincing data, the road to the future will be even more steep and unwieldy than it seems now.

Regardless of the uncertainty of it all, the people at Educon are optimists.  They’re optimists because they are betting on the kids they see every day,  betting on the kids’ creativity and promise, despite the obstacles that often leave them drained at the end of the day.  These are educators who realize that technology is a tool to open up the world to kids in ways we could only dream about a few years ago, while realizing that the most important thing that happens in a classroom doesn’t involve electricity at all.  The most important thing about school is community.

Inherent in the purpose of school is bringing a group of people together every day in the classroom to learn with and from each other.  It’s about creating small families that may meet for all or part of the day, and that learn, over time, to leverage their strengths and weaknesses so all boats rise.  It’s about seeing kids as individuals, not just within your classroom, but as whole people with worries and even troubles that can effect everyone.  It’s about trying to teach and model resilience- how you get through challenges and come out the other side better for it.  The best teachers are wizards at turning a group of kids into a learning community- one that has its own ups and downs, but centers around mutual respect and common goals.

This is something you can’t buy from any business or publisher.  It’s not for sale, but it’s probably the largest predictor of whether the education in your schools is working or not.  It’s the common thread that the folks at Educon share, and talk about with passion and feeling.  It’s what moves them and keeps them in teaching every day.  It’s the chance to care and effect kids and help them learn as much about life as about the subject matter at hand.  It’s mentoring and nurturing and caring, and from that core, all other decisions are fairly clear.

One principal shared a story of having one of those dreaded moments of imposing clear line discipline with a student that violated the fundamental rules and trusts.  As he returned to his office, he saw a group of students there waiting for him.  He expected they would be mad, need to talk, or otherwise have an “us vs. them” conversation, but instead, one of the students asked him “Are you all right?  What can we do for you?”  They knew imposing this penalty was a hard for the principal as if he was doing this for one of his own children, and it still brings tears to my eyes as it did to almost everyone in the room.  It demonstrated that when you show real caring and empathy for the folks you deal with, you are in turn, understood and treated the same way.  this is the way discipline and learning should happen everywhere.

Instead, I worry that in too many schools, the caring is slowly being beaten out of everyone, students and teachers alike.

We all know and say this- but the best things in life are free.  They don’t come out of a box and they are unscripted.  But they do require an awful lot of time invested into community, common purpose and mission, and caring about everyone as people first, and people that are imperfect, changing, developing, and doing their best every day.  If we can start to humanize our schools, to lead with empathy, caring and understanding, we’ll have truly transformed schools without spending a dime.  But it will take the biggest commitment of all- one that begins and ends in our hearts.

From the Econ and Statistics Administration of the US Dept. of Commerce

I was with my trainer this morning, and we were discussing post-holiday things, as is typical the first week in January.  And I was struck by the following thought:

We got ourselves out of the Great Depression by an expansion of productivity, consumer spending, and eventually World War II.  (I will grant you up front this is probably largely simplified.) I don’t think we can do this again, and looking for consumers to haul us out of the economic doldrums alone without something else, is a mistake.

In this great recession, we’ve initially looked for consumers spending again at previously high levels.  But a series of articles over the past few weeks, have led to me to doubt that that will happen, in part, because we don’t “need” as much as we have in the past.

Look at the Chart above from the US. Department of Commerce.  Despite an increase in net worth, consumer spending is flat-lining at a decent, but not overwhelming rate.  Is it possible that we simply no longer need any more stuff?

Hear me out for a minute.  After the Great Depression, there was a vast input of new consumer devices that helped make the average person’s life more productive.  Think of everything from telephones to dishwashers to washers and dryers.  Think Refrigerators, TV’s, VCR’s and more.  Even computers, cell phones and the like have helped drive consumer spending.  But this year, as I did my holiday shopping, my family had much less on their want and need list than ever before.  We’re pretty much saturated with stuff, and we’re starting to move into the “let’s spend money on experiences” – ie. go someplace or do something together, rather than add to our inventory.

Sure, there’s replacement of old stuff.  There’s some upgrades to our older stuff as well.  But there’s not a lot of earth shattering upgrades that fundamentally alter functionality or time or anything else that we really need.  I may not be typical, I grant you.  We also tend to be a geeky household with more technology than is perhaps decent and seemly. But even as a self-proclaimed member of the technorati, I haven’t bothered to upgrade to 3D TV or Blu-ray because I don’t see the point, really.

Even the nifty stuff we did buy this year are niche products like coffee joulies, and we’re waiting for our Touchfire keyboard.  My husband thinks the Nest thermostat is something he wants.  But these products are what I certainly would call niche and weird.  Seth Godin has about a jillion blog posts that hit this subject matter, including his great book, We Are All Weird.  It comes down to innovations and opportunities being smaller and at the margins, but doable, and profitable for those willing to take the risk.  It’s not about the mass, vanilla middle anymore, and it may not be about making mass companies to produce mass products either.

I grew up in Rochester New York, which incubated some pretty awesome companies over time.  Kodak.  Xerox.  Bausch and Lomb. Stromberg- Carlson. (makers of Telephones and PBX systems).  It was a town where folks would grow up, get a job at one of the big businesses in town and be set for life.  A manufacturing town, and middle America in many ways.  Many of these companies have moved out of town, or in he process of the big wind-down, as Kodak is dismantling many of their plants because it’s cheaper than selling them off.  And the word on the street is that Kodak let many great ideas sit on the shelf, like Xerox did with its PARC lab, letting other companies with a greater appetite for risk take these great ideas and develop them into whole industries.  (You could argue that Apple alone helped usher in the decline in local print shops with development of fonts, and accompanying laser printers, making desktop publishing a reality, and programs like iPhoto along with digital cameras make printing photos less relevant than ever before, issuing an end to Kodachrome…but I digress.)

The point here is that we have plenty of ideas and even plenty of nifty products, but the end of the mass and the production for the mass market is coming to a plateau.  And as such, I’m not sure we’re going to be able to rely on consumer spending to drag us out of the recession.  It’s going to be small businesses, entrepreneurs, and the like, who now have as much access to consumers all over the world as never before, that will be our new engine of productivity.

I could be wrong of course, but I know I don’t have an un-ending need for new washers, dryers, or other large consumer products, because my current ones work just fine, and the upgrades are not enough to convince me to replace early.    As a result, I’m just not sure where the big consumer demand is going to be to drive our economy forward.  I think the new normal will be relatively flat spending and slow growth, and we should prepare for that reality.

What do you think?  Have I got it wrong?  Why?

Articles and Resources:

Why Best Buy is Going Out of Business…Gradually Forbes.com

Americans Plan to Spend the Same on Christmas (look at the trend lines…) Gallup.com

Lack of Hot Toy challenges retailers ABC.com

12 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2012 (many include “recycling”) Trendwatching.com

Online Shopping Statistics Visual.ly.com

What Drives Consumer Spending, Department of Commerce

Multilevel marketing and Video Email

There’s a “plan” out there I’ve heard a lot about from local business people, called Talk Fusion, that allows you to send Video Email.  It started in 2007, and boasts a large number of people all over the world using this as the next big thing.  The product itself lets you upload videos you create and simply embed them in your email, saying that your email will be much more engaging and “add a new dimension to your business communications.”  (They have other products as well, including video conferencing, video blogging, and more.)

This is intriguing to a lot of business folks, who want to see more results from their emails, bring in new business, and otherwise engage their clients.  This can seem like a great idea, and maybe it is- but you have to ask yourself the following questions:

1. How do I track my current email response rates?  If you aren’t looking at the effectiveness of your current emails, doing A/B testing, finding out when you have the best open rates, etc.  How will you know if any videos you add in will enhance your engagement with email?  Without a good baseline on your current email marketing efforts, how will you compare the addition of video?

2. Am I already using Email marketing best practices?

There are lots of great tips out there for using email marketing effectively. For example, here’s a link to a great post from the Blue Sky Factory Blog detailing 52 fantastic email marketing tips (Blue Sky Factory is now part of What Counts).  If you are going to use email marketing, getting good at that first will deliver much more return than just sending a video in your email will- it’s a whole package of using email to reach your target audience first, let alone engage them with the bels and whistles.  To use an analogy, you can be serving the best (and fanciest) food in town, but if you can’t get anyone to open the door, how will they ever know?

3. How and when/where are my customers receiving my emails?  Many professionals read their email over mobile devices, including iPhones, iPads, Blackberrys, Androids and more.  Only a portion of these platforms support flash players, and the videos in Talk Fusion are all flash-based.  This means all your engaging videos will be invisible to anyone opening up your email on a decent portion of mobile phones and devices, and will defeat the purpose of using this nifty tool in the first place.

3. Do I know anything about creating good videos?

Regardless of what distribution method you use for videos created in house, is the content itself any good?  I recommend you read Content Rules by CC Chapman and Ann Handley, discussing on how to create great and engaging content online first. (Amazon Affiliate link below)  Whether your video is on YouTube or some other online hosting service or part of an email, it should be engaging, informative, and worth the time of anyone who sees it.  Great content is great content, regardless of how you view it.  But “great” will be in the eye of the viewer, so keep that in mind.

Talk Fusion’s Website   

Interestingly, if you go to the Talk Fusion website, it’s as much about the process of signing up to distribute Talk Fusion as it is about the product(s) themselves.  Google Searches for reviews of Talk Fusion lead you to reviews of it as a business opportunity rather than as a service you might want to buy and use in your business.  This raised a red flag for me.  Many of the reviews themselves on various MLM websites are also next to identical.  This makes them all appear to be canned, copy and paste jobs, than authentic,useful reviews.  This has worked well in generating SEO for reviews of Talk Fusion as a MLM thing, but again, gives us no idea what the “users” think about this solution for video email over, say, creating a YouTube channel and putting links in your email, etc.  Nor does it give you any sense of whether or not video in email enhances conversions or business.

When you google Talk Fusion User Reviews you get many of the same results, but right under the video link, you get this:

This would lead me to suspect that there are many folks who are concerned that this MLM plan is more of a pyramid scheme than a really useful business tool, especially since the reviews of “users” are again, geared towards those using Talk Fusion as a personal business opportunity, selling the service, than as end users using it to boost their businesses.

Ok, well this makes me suspicious of Talk Fusion’s business model, but the question that’s still unanswered is whether video email is a good idea or not.

Let’s try to answer that.  Back to Google.  Let’s start with Video Email Marketing Tips.

Benchmark has a great post detailing video email tips and practices.  As we said before, it starts out with basic good email marketing practices.  One key paragraph says:

Overall, video email marketing is untested waters at the moment, but the format is interesting and can open up many opportunities to make new sales and raise interest in your products and services. The key is to start small and not be discouraged if you get less subscribers than you’d hoped for. In time video email may be the standard format, but for now you’ll need to enhance your regular emails with video to help your subscribers make an easy transition over to this new style of email marketing.

So it seems that at least one provider states this is new and untested.  Hrmmm.  The rest of the tips from our Google search all come from, no surprise, email marketing companies, but none of the ones in the first page are Talk Fusion.  That gives me the impression that Talk Fusion is more about selling itself than seeing people be successful using the product, but again, that’s only my opinion.

But let’s look under the hood.  Other email companies, like What Counts, also offer video email.  But they use HTML5 encoding rather than Flash, and to the non-geeks, this means the video is viewable on any device, including mobile, something the flash-based Talk Fusion doesn’t offer.

Conclusions

I haven’t used Talk Fusion myself, but I’m suspicious of the way the company operates more to promote itself than its actual products.  I’m cautious about the results delivered by video email, especially if you don’t already have great email marketing practices to begin with, which would limit the effectiveness of any email campaign, video included or not.  It seems like a shiny object.  Cool, but what’s the real return on investment for your business?  Maybe being seen as cool and cutting edge is part of the appeal, but the results will, again, depend on the quality of the video you produce, not the distribution channel alone.

Even the on-site hosting of your videos on the Talk Fusion “wall” seems to me to generate more traffic for Talk Fusion, not your own website, and does not allow the same sort of sharing that you might find via free services like YouTube.  (Note: Some folks don’t like YouTube and recommend you create your own “branded” video player, but I would suggest getting your content out and shared is more important for most small businesses than worrying about paying money to create a branded player first.  After all, social media and video is about sharing and making distribution simple, not more difficult.)

I’d recommend starting out with creating killer content.  The better your content, in video, audio , emails, blogs, etc., the more naturally people will want to share it and spread your message.  And in the end, whether you are marketing widgets, or trying to teach kids history, the more memorable and engaging your content, the more likely it is that your audience will respond.

And that’s true regardless of the package you wrap it up in.

This is true for me as well.  I have my own consulting business, helping local businesses learn and use digital and social media, and I have my book to promote.  I sit on committees for our school district, teach Podcasting once as week at the Middle School, and moderate a group on Edutopia on personalized learning.  I help organize Podcamps.  I wear lots of hats, with a focus on digital and social media, and education. I do hope some of these volunteer positions will generate clients, but my first focus is making a difference in my community.  I can do this, because my spouse has the “full time gig” which means my income is our “extras” money, going towards long term goals and acting as gap-filler in our personal household economy.

The problem with having multiple gigs, paid or unpaid, is giving each one the attention it deserves, where focus on one or two core things would be better.  While my big picture focus is clear, the day to day “What needs my attention now” can get a bit cloudy, and it takes a lot of effort to remain focused on articulated goals.  I think this is a problem for almost everyone participating in the Gig Economy- how much of your attention and passion are you using for each of these part-time things?  Is any one “good enough” to become a full time, single focus venture?  Do you want one focus? What happens if any one of these gigs dries up, or requires additional focus- how does your juggling act change?

It seems promising- Should I leave a job for the Gig Economy?

I often hear friends talk about the glamorous world of public speaking.  How can they make money by sharing what they know with others?  One woman was thinking about leaving a successful law practice, because she had a speaking gig that paid her a few thousand dollars.  She started to think that if she could do a couple of these a month, she’s have it made, and be able to spend more time at home with her kids as well.

Potential Hiccups in a Great Goal

The potential problem with this idea is the following:

In order to make this business plan work, she would have to make sure (Minimum) she booked paying speaking gigs equal to the money she needed for her family every month.  Who is going to pay her that much, month in and month out?

-While she may be well-known locally, how many times could she give the same speech or even a new one, to these same folks, for the same money every month? Or every year?

- This would mean expanding her market to reach folks she didn’t know as well, and who didin’t know her.  This means spending time networking and connecting to others, to build her reputation.  It also means setting up a business entity, website and more, which are going to require an initial investment of capital.

-She wasn’t a famed law professor, or have any other “product” like books, or coaching, or other “stuff” to push to help generate additional income and up-sell people attending her presentations.  This means she was currently limited to whatever each organization was willing to pay her, and many organizations also have tight budgets.  This makes setting up a stream of guaranteed income producing gigs, month in and month out for the foreseeable future might not be as easy as this first gig made it seem.

-If she had to expand her reach, she would need to travel out of the area.  Paying or receiving compensation for the travel might lower the speaking fee she received as well.

-Additional travel and preparation for these gigs might actually take time away from her family, not give her more time.

-She would have to generate additional income to pay for things like health insurance, professional license fees and other things currently covered by her employer.

This doesn’t mean becoming a public speaker is impossible, or ill-advised.  It just comes with its ups and downs as much as any other business.  Starting out, the speaking can generate a nice side bonus-income, but until gigs get so numerous and/or lucrative that they start either effecting the main job or generate enough income every month to justify making that choice, the speaking business is really more of a nice bonus side business, not a full-time venture, no matter how terrific it seemed at first.

The Side Gig Economy

There are plenty of folks with side gigs- and there always have been.  This includes everything from selling Avon, Mary Kay, Tupperware or any other “representative” and Sell to Your Friends in Your Spare Time kind of things.  I know many teachers, parents, and other folks who sell this stuff on the side, to generate side income. Many of these programs sell things you and your friends might like, but you can only tap that resource every so often before you become a social pariah.  I have sought some of them out when I want something from Pampered Chef, for example, but I will NEVER go to another Partylight candle party, no matter how much I love you- and the number of these candles at the local Good Will would seem to indicate I am not alone in this feeling.

This sort of side gig is meant to be a side gig and uses the leverage of your social relationships the same way the social web does, in order to spur purchases.  But think what you would have to do and the number of strangers you would need to meet and sell to in order to generate a full time income from this.  These organizations are fairly benign multi-level marketing programs, where a few people at the top get very rich, but most people make at best a modest income.

Multilevel marketing plans are all about generating income for folks further up the scale, and trying to get you to develop more people downstream from you, to help you move up the ranks.  It is a game where you have to pressure people to join as representatives, and each person is then told their success or failure is determined not by the product itself, but how hard you are willing to work to pressure more people to join and sell this way.  It works well for a few folks, but often produces no more than side-gig money and an excuse to get friends together for everyone else.

Multilevel marketing is now entering the digital space with a vengeance, and I’ll be writing more about that shortly.

What do you think about the new gig economy?  What are its benefits and burdens?  s this the way all jobs are going- where everyone is a hired gun and a consultant?  What are the overall social benefits and burdens of this?  Let’s talk about this more.

My presentation for Podcamp Boston 6 is entitled Business for Nerds.  As part of my presentation(s), I always try to give “take home” notes and resources to help people not only remember what we covered, but the things they can do after the session to implement some of the ideas we spoke about.  You can download my Business for Nerds: Resources for Businesses here.  It contains online resources including helpful podcasts, links to business templates and calculators, books to read, and the Ten Things Most People Forget to Do.

Entrepreneurship is tougher than you think.  By working for yourself, you have freedom, but you also have to fill all the roles in a business that are often filled with others  in larger businesses.  Add in that in a one man band, some of these tasks will inevitably fall outside your traditional skill sets and talents, and you’ll quickly understand why at least having information about what you might not know or have fully considered, will be important.  I hope you’ll get an idea of where folks typically run into problems in their small business ventures, and how to make sure you know where those holes are, long before they swallow you up or cause you headaches.

Please leave feedback here about the session and the handout, and what you find most useful.  I really value the feedback, as well as sharing what small business problems you may have encountered- let me know if I can help!

Education is under fire from all fronts these days, in part because we all know, in our hearts, that kids are having experiences and learning things that often fail to connect up to their daily world- what is taught is not always placed into a larger context to help kids make meaning. The fault for this lies with politicians, parents, teachers and kids alike. Everyone is responsible in part-and here’s 5 issues that are part of the fundamental reasons schools are having issues:

1. We don’t make the process of education and its end goals transparent. How many times did you sit in class and wonder- what am I ever going to use this stuff for? This seems irrelevant to me. How many times did you ask a teacher this question, and they also seemed to lack a good answer? For example, sitting in geometry and learning to do proofs seemed particularly pointless to me as a student- after all, Pythagorus figured out his theorem by 495 BC, so “reinventing the wheel” and proving it again seemed pointless- we have agreed for almost 2,500 years he’s right, so, what’s the point? What I failed to understand then, and what teachers failed to give me was the larger picture. What they were “really” teaching me were things like logic, checking your work against that of others, proving that something was true and not taking it on faith, on top of the basics of geometry which is incredibly useful in everything from physics, to putting carpet in your house, to perfecting your goal kick in soccer. The proof and logic taught work in a subject area, even forming an argument or building a case for any position you have. I think if I had known more about why this elementary skill would be important later, and how it was a building block towards other things, I might have had more patience and interest with it.

2. We don’t let kids in on the secret-It’s as much about the process as the product. School serves many purposes, including as an incubator for citizens. (A point well made by Jeff Jarvis in the video below.) School is as much about learning social skills, getting along with others, even obeying a boss and delivering assigned work on time- as it is about the subject matter itself.

3. We forget to make it relevant. History, for some, seems arcane and not particularly “useful” as a subject area. Yet our current war in Afghanistan and the wars in the Middle East grow largely out of both cultural and geographic issues that have been problems for centuries, and weren’t helped by the way Countries were divided up after World War II and the end of Imperialism. But if you don’t understand things like tribalism, religion, culture, and the history of “who owned what and whom when” then what’s going on lacks the important context necessary to even begin to find a solution. Politics and history are much more intertwined than many a high school student might realize, but if we can’t help them connect the dots, why should they be patient when we tell them “this will be relevant some day.” When exactly is “Some day”?

4. Life and technology are changing faster than we can research its effectiveness. There was an article in the New York Times that decried whether technology expenditures were showing the rise in test scores that would “prove” that the tech was enhancing education. There were several folks who defended the spending on tech despite the fact that test scores were flat, for a variety of reasons, making very valid points. However, the problem is the question is framed incorrectly.

Kids will need to know how to use computers and digital tools now and in the future. How they learn to do this most effectively we may still be trying to work out. All of the new tools available are also new for many teachers, meaning teachers and students are learning together. This side by side learning experience is different from the traditional sage on the stage method of teaching, and it makes many teachers uncomfortable, because they don’t feel like they have sole control of the knowledge in the classroom any more. But while that makes teachers feel threatened, I look at this as one of the best things to happen to education. It means education is becoming, mor ethan ever, an exploration of the unknown. Teachers can help model what it’s like not knowing, making mistakes, not being perfect, and help students accept their own imperfections and that the underlying point of education is exploring and learning. With learning changing from being a linear to a semantic process, I’m not sure educators have much of a choice in this, but they will have to be comfortable with not owning all the knowledge in the room.

5. School is still the best way to collaborate and learn with fewer real world consequences. While I think more schools need to do real and meaningful project-based learning projects which can help their communities, let’s wait on this for a moment. Students have accountability in the form of grades, but largely, their work in school does not support the family financially. The same pressures of “perform or be fired” that permeate the workplace doesn’t apply in school. As a result, students and teachers should be more free to explore boundaries, make mistakes and experiment. Even in research institutions, scientists have goals and benchmarks they must meet that aren’t always the same pressures kids have in school, where learning and playing can be more in sync. Teaching kids how to collaborate with others, work together with others strengths to come up with exciting, new ideas and ask more in depth questions about “what if” and “Could we?” should be a major part of school, because it’s a major part of life. We need to teach kids to have a hacker mentality and to solve novel problems, rather than just rework problems already solved by a generation of students beforehand, unless it’s in service of building fundamental skills, like the Pythagorean theorem example I gave above.

Jeff Jarvis gave a great TEDx NY ED talk I’ve included, talking about school and possible models for school. While I think aggregation of knowledge and best lectures are fantastic, I think the fundamental relationship between teacher and student, student and student, and the trust they need to develop in order to explore, learn, make mistakes, and try again are fundamental to learning. Teachers have it all over parents, in some ways, because a kid wants to please their parents so much, they often are afraid to be as open and honest about success and failure as they can be with a relative stranger. Likewise, they sometimes respect strangers and their expertise much more than that of parents. (Who hasn’t had a kid, as young as second grade, say “Mrs. XYZ knows more about this than you do, Mom.” despite the fact that we have lots of life experience, too…)
Schools should be incubators for our kids. Incubators of ideas, incubators of information, incubators of citizens, incubators of society. It should be a place where ideas nurture and grow, not where conformity rules. But we’re going to have to come to grips that we have to change alongside the change, and we don’t have time to wait for the data to come in. We have to look at the preliminary, short term data and the big picture of our beliefs to make the changes our kids need now, not 5 or 10 years from now, where catching up will be impossible.

We know we need to do it. It’s time to find the will to bite the bullet and make it happen. Now.

For example, Hoffman Digital Media has several arms.  One is consulting to a select group of businesses on a variety of subjects; one involves public speaking and community event production and management; the last involves writing, ranging from books to material to act as “take homes” from my presentations, to this blog.  All of these things make up the whole of the business, but when I think about marketing Hoffman Digital Media, I have to make sure I keep the 4 P’s in mind- product, price, place, and promotion.  When I decide to attend a conference or event, is it a place where I can promote any one of my “products”?  Does it align with my current goals or direction for the business?  Are my prices in line- or moreover, is what I’m doing profitable- do I know my current burn rate or cost of taking the work versus amount I get charge for doing it?  If I am going to an event in hopes of promoting my business, is this a place to meet customers, or to merely network with other industry professionals?  How do I want to promote myself?  Are business cards enough?  Do I want to speak at more events?  Do I need handouts, books or other things to act as a form of souvenir, so to speak?  (And, is this souvenir a product in and of itself?)  By thinking through these basics, you can have a much better idea of whether or not attending an event with its direct costs and its indirect costs of taking you out of the office are balanced by the trade off in benefit as measured against the 4 p’s.  This is something everyone, almost regardless of your vertical, should take into consideration when attending an event because you think “it will be good for business.”  How will it be good?  What do you need to get out of it to determine whether its successful?

Chris walks his readers through many of the white level issues you need to think about when addressing questions about online marketing and how you hope any aspect of it will benefit your business, and since it can be read easily on any computer or device that has a kindle app, it’s pretty much universally available.  I promise you, you won’t regret picking one up.

Sitting Alone in the Big Boy Chair

I love Entrepreneurs.  They are some of the most interesting, exciting folks around.  They often have a great idea, and they are actively involved every day with trying to make sure that dream or vision comes true.  Like the picture on the right, enterpreneurs get to sit in the “big boy chair” and make all the decisions, but it might take some time to grow into the role.

The problem entrepreneurs face is that often, you need outside help to make your vision come true.  You find out that there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything it takes to run a business and make a profit.  So that means you have to learn how to scale and how to trust others to make your dream come true.  That means sharing your dream, and sometimes it may mean making compromises as well.

Compromise can be pretty tough when your mission from the start was to see your vision come to life.

SlashDot, the great tech news blog, featured a great interview with Jonathan Coulton this morning.  The part that struck me most was this excerpt:

Jonathan: Up till this new album I’ve recorded everything at my home studio, really just a room in my apartment. …  Like most people, I’d imagine, my ears and skills are a bigger problem than the weaknesses of whatever gear I’m using – if you don’t know how to mix (guilty!) then the fidelity of your monitor speakers is the least of your worries. …

This new album is a completely different experience – there’s a producer (John Flansburgh from They Might Be Giants) and an engineer (Pat Dillett) and I’m paying for studio time and hiring professional players to play on it. I’m doing this because I’m tired of my imagination being beyond what I’m able to make happen, and I’m in the fortunate position of being able to pay for it myself. Obviously it’s going to mean a smaller profit for me at the end of the day, but it feels great to be collaborating, and making things in a way where I don’t have to compromise because I’m not personally good at something. I wanted to see what that was like (it’s great). [emphasis added]

Like many entrepreneurs, JoCo has gotten to the point where his ability to execute his dreams goes beyond his skill set, and he has to rely on the skills and advice of others to make his dreams come true.  This is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength.  In order to grow and become more sophisticated as an artist, he has to share his vision with others who can help him make it become a reality, bringing their skills and experience into the mix.  In the end, everyone wins in this equation, even if JoCo has had to bear the expense of adding extra folks into the dream, and had to share his vision with them, making it more public.  The end product will be better for the collaboration, even if it seemed more laborious to deal with others rather than just compose music and record tracks as he has time or interest in his bedroom.

Entrepreneurship is awesome.  It brings new, creative ideas into the world.  But execution is a team sport and requires an additional set of skills all together.  We may all be capable of writing the next great american novel, yet if we never have the guts to let others read it, comment on it, and help us refine it, it will never be more than a pile of pages or word files sittin around in a proverbial drawer somewhere.  This is why phrases like “Good ideas are a dime a dozen” are popular- ideas are cheap- execution and teamwork are where the gold resides.

Why?  Because as much as we want to, we can’t scale as individuals.  There will never be more than 24 hours in a day, and even an hourly employee knows that if you don’t show up to work, you don’t get paid.  Solos and freelancers are at the mercy of their own good health and good fortune.  If they get sick, go on vacation, or simply have a bad day or personal crisis, that effects their ability to pay rent, eat, or do anything else in the future.  That can be fun and exciting for a time, but in the long run, it starts to wear people out.

Businesses form and hire folks so they can scale, but also so there’s backup and everyone can share the burden.  That means they share the benefits as well as the burdens of work.  In the end, it means if you are going to be a really good business person and entrepreneur, you have to go back to those simple “kindergarten rules” written down by Robert Fulghum:

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.

These are the things I learned:

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don’t hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush.
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
• Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all – the whole world – had cookies and milk at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Source: “ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN” by Robert Fulghum.  See his web site at http://www.robertfulghum.com/

The more we try to make things sophisticated and esoteric, the more it comes right back to the basics.  Even in business and entrepreneurship, we need to be reminded that sharing and playing well with others is as important as anything else we do.  And sometimes, it really is all about watching out for traffic, holding hands and sticking together.  Even if it means we have to share the glory at the end.  And surprisingly, sharing the glory with those closest to us and those that helped in big and small ways to make it possible is what really makes the journey worth making in the first place.

Education is the hot topic these days.  Whether it’s questioning the economic value of higher education, or making assumptions about whether our schools are failing, everyone seems to have a strong opinion on education.  The bottom line in this debate is that education is all about developing children into productive citizens.

At one time, we used public schools to develop a well educated work force to work in an economy with a manufacturing focus.  We were good at it.  Then we changed our focus to try to ensure every kid, not just the privileged few, could go to college and be employed in service sector jobs.  Now, we’re faced with preparing kids for jobs that may not yet exist, an economy that constantly seems to be shifting, and schools that are forced to guess at what technologies to implement to best prepare kids for a world where their futures are less clear than before.  Will we need to resume manufacturing things here rather than abroad?  What types of workers will we need?  What will the workplace itself look like?  I think some people have a guess (I know I do) but no one can guarantee that they’re right.

In a world where the future is uncertain, teaching kids how to use Word and Excel may have limited value, as it applies to those specific programs themselves.  Likely, these programs will be radically different or totally replaced by the time our kids enter the workplace.  However, knowing how (and why) people use spreadsheets, power points, and the like, or how to communicate information clearly in writing- those are important skills.

What we need is to figure out what kids need to learn, and why.  Often, the truth is that they need to learn how to learn and how to study, analyze information, and report the results to others in different ways to make their ideas understood.  Many times this is learning about history and science, literature, and math, but having the knowledge come together in a project where kids can really apply what they’re learning and make it a real, tangible experience.  We have to change things so kids feel the time they are spending in school is valuable, and that the things they learn from the teacher and other students in the classroom is more eye-opening than just reading a book about the subject or seeing a short you-tube video.    The more we can get teachers to even work together and create cross disciplinary projects, the more kids will see how the different subjects in school overlap and relate to each other.  This is the very essence of learning and making meaning, and it’s what we need to do more of in schools at all levels.

By changing the way we assess kids and their “performance” in school towards project based learning, the more kids will have tangible experiences in figuring things out on their own or in groups.  This is what we have to do when we get older, whether you have an office job, fix cars, or simply have to negotiate endless relationships with family members and service people.  We need to let kids find creative solutions to problems and prompts, because problem solving is at the heart of what we need to do every day, along with communicating our insights cogently to others.

There really aren’t many guaranteed jobs for life like there often were for my parent’s generation.  People my age are finding the job market less secure and often pigeon holing, effectively reducing their prospects at finding replacement work rather than broadening their prospects through their experience.  I don’t see this changing any time soon.  And this is why, as much as possible, we’re trying to give our kids experience, either by helping us at home, or through summer camp, or however else we can, in doing real, meaningful stuff.  It means coaching them through different projects, letting them experiment, fail and then retry, changing what they did and moving towards success.  Sometimes it’s about figuring out when to throw in the towel, and when to start from the beginning, no matter how tedious.

Each of these experiences builds in resilience and a willingness to try, even if you aren’t guaranteed results, but looking at the process as an opprtunity to learn something new.

And that’s the real life skill that we need kids to have in order to bounce back and adapt to any situation the future brings.