YakShaving

There’s an ocean of a difference between an app and a transcendent experience. A few years ago, I won a design contest for Microsoft for some concepts around creating apps that business users would love.

I saw this piece by Stephen Anderson on O’Reilly Radar and thought it prescient. Customer and user loyalty matters more than ever, but emotional engagement and personality in the customer-product relationship is essential to delivering transcendent experiences that people continue using and actually *want* to share with friends. I believe this involves iteration, organic content creation, picking a narrow focus and conveying this focus in emotive ways.

From Stephen’s talk at Web2.0:

So that’s really where I’m keeping an eye out for web apps that engage people in an emotional way. If you look at a company like MailChimp, for example, I think they’re doing that — it’s a mail management system, a business app — but I laugh every time their mascot has a little quote or does something. They’re engaging me in an emotional way, and I think there are very few sites or businesses doing that.

I think that’s really the next thing we’re looking forward to — apps that people still use after three, four, five, or 10 years that they still love, enjoy, talk about, and share with others.

While these tenets are important in any consumer internet startup, they’re particularly vital in the area of education and learning. When there are a gazillion different options for apps, content (in its various media forms) for a learner to choose from, striking an emotional connection that persists over time is of paramount importance.

Peacetime CEO / Wartime CEO

It’s amazing how a simple conversation with a really amazing mentor combined with a timely article can put you in a whole new frame of mind about how to operate on a day to day basis.

Woz, of Apple cofounder fame talks about schools and education in this interview. I feel like we can learn a lot from a guy who creates world changing companies AND was a public school educator for over 8 years.

The learning cycle between what is taught and when a student is tested on it is far too short, he proclaimed. Short learning-testing cycles, Wozniak said, are nothing like the projects that technology innovators are afforded in real life.

A really innovative person is known for something that usually took an awful lot of thinking, maybe even over years, and a lot of development in a laboratory putting it together and getting it to work. And it’s new and it’s different. And it’s not something you read about in a book.

The greatest innovation projects Woz participated in at Apple almost always involved technology he was unfamiliar with. But, he said, when you want something for yourself “you work hard to learn it.”

Woz talked about judging student performance by giving “students one long project that spurs innovative thinking at the beginning of a semester and graded on their results.”

“The value of these big projects is you learn diligence, lot of repetition. A lot of hard work results in something that’s your own. Your own. You built it. You have personal pride,” he said. “Personal pride is the strongest motivating force there is.”

It never ceases to amaze me to hear about the amount of money that spent (wasted, really) on advertising, year after year.

Don’t get me wrong, advertising is great in that it supports amazing companies like Google that truly want to democratize information, but do people really think that it’s a good use of their money? I’ve quoted Wanamaker ad nauseam here before: “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

We’re convinced that number is a lot higher on the web. There seems to be this meme that resurfaces in the world of content on the web, year after year. Advertising in most cases is a complete waste, it’s a lot better to underwrite the creation of nutritious, relevant content that relates to people and helps them explore a particular interest they have.

And yet, here we sit in 2011, more than a decade after the creation of the web, with warehouses filled with monkeys on typewriters (ok that was harsh) content farms that squeak out this crappy content just so that advertisers have something to put next to that content when a weary search engine user “stumbles upon” some page on a whim.

If we haven’t learned anything from Cluetrain Manifesto, any of the 17 Seth Godin books, and if common sense fails too, we might learn from Felicia Day’s SXSW interactive panel:

“Why pay $300,000 for an ad that people are going to avoid watching?” she said, referring to technologies such as Tivo that allow people to bypass television ads. Why not, Day said, spend half that or a quarter of that to fund a Web series, which will provide quality content that people care about, and has the potential to expand to other media? (The Guild has expanded with a comic book deal from Dark Horse).

It’s apocryphal that established companies who have spent years cultivating their brand do not have knowledge they could impart in order to make the world a better place. Then again, maybe the proper channel/medium hasn’t existed until today.

This post on “getting to genius” made it to hackernews and I found a few of the ideas fascinating.

At Xerox PARC Alan Kay was known for saying, “A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

I’ve heard this similar idea about “perspective” from successful angel investors and VCs:

Genius is the extreme form of insight. It’s really not a measure of IQ, although a high IQ helps. I like to think of genius in terms of perspective and thus measure it by how rare and valuable a perspective is.

Getting to a rare perspective is usually a product of building up a mental framework and then seeing patterns in- and making associations or connections among disparate ideas. True genius is seeing associations among things previously unseen.

I think it’s this one that interested me the most, Richard Feynman’s advice on being a genius:

You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!

I find that many personal projects and “interests” operate in much the same way. Sometimes I’m actively pursuing them (whatever “pursuing” might mean… whether researching, implementation, or improving).  Sometimes they are dormant and I need to passively reflect upon them before they can move forward.

I often wonder how I could extrude that certain state of mind out into the world. What if people could see my nascent and possibly dormant projects and help contribute to them?

Over the past few years, we’ve developed a “slow hunch” as Steven Johnson might call it: The tools and mechanisms that social systems like Facebook, Twitter, and Quora have “discovered” (notice I didn’t use the word invented) might be incredibly useful to improve humanity and help more people “get to genius”.

{there is nothing NSFW about this post, but now that I have your attention…}

In the past five years, much of our domestic discourse regarding education and education reform has revolved around STEM training, so that the US can manufacture more scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians. For a long time, I agreed with this predominant position because it made lots of sense on face value.

After completing degrees in both technology and “math” (computer science and an mba), and what could also be called an “art” degree (design), I find myself disagreeing with the emphasis on STEM learning in a vacuum. As automation accelerates and makes our lives filled with less repetitive work, the need for more creativity and innovation in our day-to-day careers will only increase. While there will always be a need for liberal arts majors to help communicate and express new ideas, that’s not exactly what I’m referring to here. It’s universally necessary to be able to think creatively and solve problems more than ever (Even for “nerds” with STEMmy backgrounds like computer science). Maybe training in the arts and other similar creative domains can contribute more organic growth to the economy and advances in the sciences and technology than we’ve ever thought before.

I didn’t come up with the acronym “STEAM“. I’m not entirely sure who did, but the idea of focusing on the arts has been discussed before by many before me, including John Tarnoff in this Huffington Post article. Here’s a short clip:

“A” skills in the 21st century actually apply to a larger, broader segment of the workforce than STEM skills. America’s competitiveness is equally distinguished by its creative industry productivity and exports, from movies, TV and games (traditionally the highest-ratio export business in the nation) to architecture (Bilbao Guggenheim, anyone?) to the myriad of leading writers, designers, graphic artists and others who use their imagination to create new products and services — and the infrastructure of creative enterprise managers (producers, editors, financiers, marketers) that support and run their businesses. This cadre, that sociologist Richard Florida defined in 2002 as the Creative Class, represents approximately 30 percent of the United States workforce. In contrast, a quick look at NSF statistics indicates that science and engineering makes up approximately 10 to12 percent of the United States workforce.

A large portion of the budget for Teach for America comes from a Federal funding “earmark”. Congress has equated “earmarks” with only its negative connotations (wasteful and pork barrel spending) and none of its positive ones (providing needed support to an organization that contributes to education in badly needed areas of the country).

George Will from the Washington Post reports:

Speaking of leadership, someone in Congress should invest some on TFA’s behalf. Government funding – federal, state, local – is just 30 percent of TFA’s budget. Last year’s federal allocation, $21 million, would be a rounding error in the General Motors bailout. And Kopp says that every federal dollar leverages six non-federal dollars. All that money might, however, be lost because even when Washington does something right, it does it wrong.

It has obtusely defined “earmark” to include “any named program,” so TFA has been declared an earmark and sentenced to death. If Congress cannot understand how nonsensical this is, it should be sent back to school for remedial instruction from some of TFA’s exemplary young people.

The combined wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (over time) cost the US over $320M a day. A DAY. During the early part of the Iraq war, that number was $720M a day. We can’t find $21M for a program that helps schools find world-class teachers?

There was a good post on hackernews this morning about choosing who you collaborate with in order to help you get faster at something. Working with people who are waaaaay better than you at something is completely inspirational and exciting. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why that is.. and I think I finally got it. Having an interest net and other people who are as excited/motivated about learning stuff as you are is the fastest way to get into a “flow” state, which we know is essential to optimal learning.

In our time doing primary and secondary research in BettrAt, we’ve looked at the social facilitation effect, and coaction — which seems to strike a perfect balance of collaboration and competition.

While I “knew” this idea academically, I didn’t start realizing this so much personally until I pair programmed (more like started watching people code that were way better than I am). Interest networking is all about connecting with people who have a different perspective and set of abilities than you do.

At BettrAt, We’re excited about taking the very best of the graduate school experience– Finding an amazing peer interest network and working through challenging problems on a continuous basis, and extending the experience to schools, member organizations, and companies.

“Why?”, you ask.. Surely, graduate school isn’t for everyone… It’s only for highly motivated, curious people.
I don’t buy it. Getting better at self-selected interests is a universal human trait. Facebook has proved that socializing and connecting is a universal human need, but barely scratches the surface of what’s possible in the world of interest networking and learning.

There are innumerable signs pointing to the great disruption that’s about to take place in education. Bill Gates has said that the best schools will be delivered via an online platform.

Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.
- Bill Gates

iPad apps that have amazing user experiences are able to deliver a bar course at a premium over books, but a huge discount over in-place learning. We’ll continue this trajectory. The argument over scaling hybrid learning will ebb and flow. Now more than ever, we’re able to create mechanisms that improve hybrid learning environments and encompass digital media. This was all possible before, but now learners are becoming more attuned to the social layer that is the web today, and using a variety of tools to consume and create information (mobile, tablet, web). Facebooking, Tweeting, BetterAting will all be part of an ecosystem of socializing, publishing, and learning on the web.

Recently, I visited a school near the south side of Seattle, WA. I immediately recognized the capacity for transformation that the learning tools we’re building could bring to a segment of the population that’s not particularly digitally accessible. While the school didn’t have wifi access, some students actually bought Clear 4G wifi cards from home just so they could connect to the internet to learn. The appetite and demand is certainly there… but importantly, the needs are coming from the individuals.

I thought about those kids and I wondered where they would go after they graduated high school. Many of them didn’t have access to post K-12 education. In many schools across the US, the problem is much greater. There’s no inherent desire to continue going to school because students are jaded and apathetic about learning.

We think that will change soon.

So. Good.

“We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.”
Walt Disney

(via redcact.us, via daringfireball.net)

If someone came to me this second and asked me what the two most important books to read are in creating new software services, I would easily and emphatically state two books by Fred Brooks.

Our professor in undergraduate senior design class, Elliot Soloway, made us read “The Mythical Man Month,” and the “Cathedral and the Bazaar” despite the fact that the MMM was already over a decade old at the time… yet still hyper relevant (and still is today).

Now, Fred Brooks gives us another super practical book in The Design of Design.  This is one of the most useful books for developer/designers to read… I have no idea why I waited so long to check it out.  I admit I didn’t read cover to cover, but did skim its entirety and read certain chapters which intrigued me and thought would help me the most.  As many virtual sticky notes as another favorite of mine, “Founders at Work“.

Channeling my Jon Stewart, here are the “zen” moments:

The typical dynamics of two-person design collaboration seem different from those of multi-person design and solo design. Two people will interchange ideas rapidly and informally, with neither a protocol as to who has the floor nor domination by one partner. Each holds the floor for short bursts. The process switches rapidly among micro-sessions of proposal, review and critique, counterproposal, synthesis, and resolution. There is typically a single thread of idea development, without the maintenance of separate individual threads of thought as in multi-person discussions.

Two pencils may move over the same paper with neither collision nor contradiction. “As iron sharpens iron,” each stimulates the other to more active thought than might occur in solo design. Perhaps the very need to articulate one’s thinking—to state why as well as what— causes quicker perception of one’s own fallacies and quicker recognition of other viable design alternatives

…In retrospect, many of the case studies have a striking common attribute: the boldest design decisions, whoever made them, have accounted for a high fraction of the goodness of the outcome. These bold decisions were made due sometimes to vision, sometimes to desperation. They were always gambles, requiring extra investment in hopes of getting a much better result.

This one is particularly appropriate to people working on startups in the software world:

Even if the goal were fixed and known, all the desiderata enumerated, the design tree known precisely, and the goodness function precisely defined, design would still be iterative, because the constraints keep changing.

Moreover, clean interfaces enhance the joy of the work. Designing is fun; ironing out misunderstandings with peers is usually not. When designing, one feels progress happening; when resolving interface misunderstandings, one feels slippage. Clean interfaces give multiple designers each the joy of ownership, of the privilege of signing a piece of work. They also facilitate sequential ownership, as small components flow together into recognizable larger subsystems.

I enjoy how the book seems to resolve Descartes’ view of the world (Rationalist) vs Locke’s (Empiricist) — There’s a lot here that’s being established in the canons of “lean startup” methodology over the past 2 years that could benefit from an understanding between the two schools of thought.

I realize the value in what Turner Whitted calls “progressive truthfulness”.

One of the things that I love the most about this book is the quotes at the beginning of every chapter.  There are some really well curated ones in here.  This one is my favorite… for obvious reasons:

Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first, from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.

EDWARD GIBBON [1789], MEMOIRS OF MY LIFE AND WRITINGS

A designer makes things. … Typically his making process is complex. There are more variables—kinds of possible moves, norms, and interrelationships of these—than can be represented in a finite model.

Donald A Schön, The Reflective Practitioner

Understanding how people learn (and improve skill level) is complex.

Designing elegant stuff is also complex.

Put them together, and you basically get a cluster@#$.   Fun stuff, if it doesn’t make you literally go insane in the process.