Today’s post strays into a briar patch where only rabbits feel comfortable: the sense that the noise of the net is drowning the inner signal that is trying to get out of ourselves, our voice.
Here are five short screencasts that don’t even begin to scratch the high pressure stream of data that is my Internet life.
Tweetdeck
Chrome Address Bars
Happy Friends
Vellum
Inoreader
And what about mobile apps and YouTube channels and Roku and Chromecast and…my question to you dear readers, “Is there any controlling this giant game of “Crack the Whip” or the feeling of being a wee child tethered on the end and losing his grip?
I hope you don’t listen and watch all of the vids above. Just scrub through them and let us think about what our tech hath wrought and what we might do about it if anything.
When I get confused I write poems. They help settle the silt in the muddy glass of water. Here is one. It helped me find the signal.
Dragonfly in a Bucket
A dragonfly
drowned
in the sheep’s
water bucket.
No,
wait…
It’s not dead.
I lift it
from the water
and hold it
up
to the sun.
I see.
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Well, you’ve certainly made my Friday afternoon pretty depressing.
I met with a man in Chicago yesterday, who has been successful in business, and has started one successful mentoring program and is launching a new one. As we talked and I described how we can show program design on web sites and educate potential donors and partners, he tuned me out saying “CEOs won’t take time to look at that. It’s one-on-one relationships and salesmanship that will generate their support.” Previous to that meeting I’d tuned into this conversation on Linked in, talking about how “conversation” with donors needs to replace the “Pitch, or elevator speech”. You can see my comments.
Then yesterday afternoon 3o-40 people were gathered at a meeting talking about building a “STEM program ecosystem” in Chicago. The person paid to facilitate the project spoke about goals and vision for about 30 minutes, and pointed to work being done to build similar ecosystems in other cities. She ended that part of her presentation, saying, “None of us has the time to dig into that web site, but it’s pretty informative” .
Instead of encouraging people to find time to dig through the information she pretty much said “don’t try”.
Thus, your illustrations of how much noise is flooding our on-line lives, just reinforces how difficult it is to build an on-line community of learners focused on solving difficult problems.
Thanks. Just to add to your clutter, here’s a blog article I posted earlier today focusing on building on-line communities. https://tutormentorexchange.wordpress.com/2016/06/24/supporting-communities-of-purpose/
It pretty much says, “I know it’s difficult, but if we don’t try we’ll never find a way.”
I’m overwhelmed that you can look at so much, and find time to create your videos and share them on your blog. I think you have a full time job, a farm, a family.
We still only have 24 hours in each day.
Keep adding your drops of observation into this ocean of ideas and distractions.
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Thank you, Daniel. I am sorry, Daniel. I didn’t mean to imply that I had given up the long struggle. I want to know how others deal with the problem. I have my algorithm and, unfortunately, it ain’t working for me. What’s worse, I make the problem worse for folks like you. I am struggling to find a way to make my online struggle to know make sense. I think that’s why I fall back on writing poetry when the signal/noise ratio goes south. Bless you for reading. I am so lucky to know you and have you around to keep me honest.
As for the link–not clutter but curation. In fact one of the best tools we all have is the filter of our friends. Amen to that.
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I am still taking in the amazing stories you tell here from folks in the field who appear to have given up the long haul. Sadly enlightening.
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love screencasts for making the learning more visible …
Kevin
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Part of me says that they also require more commitment from my readers and hence add real ‘friction’ to the reading process. I know I write these kinds of posts much more slowly but I also feel they enable greater nuance and encourage slow reading.