If you've caught me in my many roles as "Dr. Nikki" or the fashion model for "What Not to Wear on the Web" you know I like to role-play.
Today, I play the role of .eduGuru guest blogger. Check out my guest post. While you're there, read the other guest posts and the regular bloggers as well. All good stuff!
The Learning Design Summer Camp Welcome from Allan Gyorke had me thinking, as I'm sure it did a lot of people. To many people who had not yet considered the use of Twitter, they may have written the tool off as a silly waste of time. But then, they realized they had been missing out. That was not what I was thinking about.
What I began thinking about is something I've been interested in for a long time. How do you get people engaged, so engaged that you can get large groups to embrace change and spread a new idea or a new tool into mass adoption?
For those of you interested in some great resources on the topic (I promised Allan I'd give up my sources for my crazy ideas):
You might consider me a social engineer of sorts. In high school as a practical joke, my friend and I decided to make up a fictitious holiday, Adopt-a-Leaf Day, where we tried to get high school students (appearance-conscious as they are) to wear fall leaves on their clothing.
In the morning, most people shunned the leaves and thought them silly; but as they day went on and we got a few people to wear them, people began asking for leaves. People wore them without even knowing why. One student assumed it was environmental. Some teachers asked if these were "gang-related". (I should mention my high school had about 2000 students, so they feared any mass uprising.) By the end of the day, we couldn't walk down the hall without seeing a number of students wearing leaves. Those few who knew where is started even wanted us to continue the "holiday" the following year and into college.
Since those days, I've been a part of a number of social experiments. These include both serious work-related endeavors, like getting people to adopt wikis and planning traveling mini-conferences, and more trickster antics, like Twitter alter egos and secret societies of impropriety.
At first glance, you may think my trickster stunts have nothing to do with my work-related activities, but activities like calling me "Doctor Nikki" as I present basic IT topics and turning the Web Conference into a fashion show straddle the line between educational and entertainment. They are a means to engage and convert large numbers of people in introductory-level topics with silly, somewhat gimmicky extended metaphors.
In Mavericks at Work, engagement begins with an engaging cause, a mission. If I can't motivate myself, and a core group of champions (5% of my target audience, according to the flock article, if you buy it), how will I build the momentum needed to engage others? Turn Web Authoring into a fashion show? People will buy in to it. Get some friends to ratify "Articles of Impropriety" as a work-unrelated gag? Yeah, we'll do that.
Now we come to the snowball effect of engagement. First, you have the snowball effect in terms of ideas. Yesterday, Allan talked about the Twitter enthusiasts who had created avatars, stickers, and contributed to ideas for LDSC. When you add some fun, you also have the added bonus of breaking down barriers of entry to technology and language. Side projects allow you to meet new people socially first, then feel comfortable asking questions and collaborating on ideas later.
The second snowball effect of engagement is the number of people. I saw this with LDSC yesterday. People who had created Twitter
accounts and abandoned them returned. People who had not considered
Twitter created accounts for the first time. My Twitter was flooded with new participants. As champions adopt and show enthusiasm, people who were neutral start adopting. Eventually, the people against your cause become the minority. They have the choice of missing out and being conspicuous or joining the group as the snowball becomes an avalanche making its way toward them...
Once again my personal world and professional worlds have overlapped in a very meaningful way. This time in the form of a science fiction television series for children.
I'm happy my kids would rather watch The Sarah Jane Adventures than Hannah Montana for many reasons, but this is not the blog for me to list all of them. Let me instead focus on one particular episode, "The Lost Boy, Part II", when the show's computer, Mr. Smith, bent on destroying the Earth is given a new directive, and is restarted.
We all cling to our projects, our directives, especially if they are the bulk of what defines our position, or a whole department's identity. But what if that directive, like Mr. Smith's, was outdated, was in the way of progress, or harmful? Would you continue on course or would you question it?
There's a lot of force behind a large project, time, people, money, training. How can one person stop that kind of momentum? So one person doesn't speak up. Not one person. Even if everyone thinks the same thing.
I dedicate this post to the rare and wonderful event when the stars align we are brave enough to change course. This post is in honor of terminated projects everywhere! (If you've been on one and put your life into it, you may feel grief at its passing, but you know it's for the best.)
Today I had every intention of blogging one thing but then the Mavericks at Work post today (which reminded me of an earlier Penelope Trunk post) changed my mind. Both of which reminded me of my preservice teaching experiences over a decade ago.
When I was a student teacher, I remember my student teacher supervisor using the aphorism, "Success breeds success. Failure breeds failure." No, he wasn't trying to stereotype children based on their parentage; he we trying to tell us that if we provided opportunities for our students to be successful they would want to keep succeeding. Conversely, if the system were set up for early failure, they would repeatedly fail.
Okay, so there are a lot of articles out there about Gen Y and even about their Boomer parents. The thing is, being a Gen Xer, I can't help but feel like a middle child left out of the discussion...
So here I am a thirtysomething in the workforce. I'm not entirely a digital native. (Ready for my secret confession: I don't text.) Still I get somewhat irked by unitask activities and processes that could be rethought and replaced with newer more efficient means of getting things done.
Some want change to happen fast and don't stop to ask the important questions like: Why change? How will this be useful? How to we get people to embrace change? What will we be losing by adopting this change? Others dig in their heels and refuse to take any risk, forgetting that stagnation in a changing world can in itself be a risk.
I'm dying to see us use proven collaborative tools do what they do best, but we have a tough struggle ahead of us. I'm okay with that. What bothers me is when those resistant to change make it personal with the seven words I detest: When-you-get-to-be-my-age.
Are they implying that our desire to improve the organization is reckless and immature? Does a desire to make my organization efficient make me naive or childish?
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