Techfoot

Creating Passionate Users: The myth of “keeping up”

Kathy Sierra, who blogs at Creating Passionate Users, has written a nice reminder of the dangers of the “myth of keeping up.” As Gardner points out in a recent comment, you know you’re engaged in an exercise in futility when your “books I have to get list” is longer than your open loops list:

I need to get that GTD book, but my “get that book” list is even longer than my open loop list … some days it really does feel like a never-ending downward spiral.

The first step (sound familiar) is to acknowledge that no one really keeps up:

So… it’s time to let that go. You’re not keeping up. I’m not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything. Sure, you’ll find the guy who is absolutely cutting-edge up to date on some technology, software upgrade, language beta, whatever. But when you start feeling inferior about it, just think to yourself, “Yeah, but I bet he thinks Weezer is still a cool new band…

There are some specific suggestions for beginning professionally responsible and still getting out from under pressures of feeling that you have to keep up with everything.

• Find the best aggregators
• Get summaries
• Cut the redundancy!
• Unsubscribe to as many things as possible
• Recognize that gossip and celebrity entertainment are black holes, including Slashdot and the Guardian.
• Pick the categories you want for a balanced perspective, and include some from outside your main field of interest
• Find a real living breathing person who help you sort out what you need to know from what’s nice to know and what exists only on the edge cases.

The Creating Passionate Users bloggers are all authors of Head First books (http://www.wickedlysmart.com), a “brain-friendly” set of programming books from O’Reilly. According to the web site, “they’re all passionate about the brain and metacognition, most especially–how the brain works and how to exploit it for better learning and memory.”

Link to: NPR : Finding Happiness in a Harvard Classroom

Interesting NPR piece on Harvard’s most popular course–Psychology 1504: Positive Psychology. Over 900 students take the course which is offered in a Harvard theater. While some question the “fluffiness” of the course, and its appropriateness as a full credit offering at Harvard, others see a unique role for courses like it. One student noted:

The work is about personal transformation not about the quantity of reading. It’s the one class that I feel like I’m achieving growth in a way that no other class does.

Similar courses are offered at over 100 colleges, and the syllabus, lecture videos and readings for this course are freely shared. Seems to me that it might be a good idea to be reminded a couple of times a week of some things that might make the college experience happier and healther.

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Link to: EDUCAUSE REVIEW | January/February 2006, Volume 41, Number 1

Educause President Brian Hawkins has an article in the latest Review in which he outlines 12 skills that he sees as essential to becoming successful and effective IT professionals in higher education. In the introduction, he makes the key point that there are two processes at work here: having the skill and then building the habits of integrating the use of that skill into daily practice. Imagining the integration piece is the hard when you look at some of the habits he highlights.

They Avoid the Unconscious Conspiracy… of drowning in the tidal waves of minutia, mundane details, and dailiness associated with their jobs, which take all of their time and energy…

Many of his suggestions have more applicability to CIO’s than the mere mortals in the IT world:

• They Are Cautious When Speaking Publicly
• They Cultivate Their Advisory Committees

Others seem have more universal applicability:

• They Don’t Whine
• They Redefine Themselves

I’ve collected lots of lists like this over the years, and they make intesting reading and engaging conference presentations. They all suffer from one problem, however, that is central to “professional development” in IT and every other field. How does the average IT staff member actually put these prescriptions into practice? How do we create–dare I say it–learning environments where busy staff understand the importance of continuing to learn and their organizations routinely allow the space required to learn the new skills and the support to make it habitual to use them. That space is hard to come by in organizations beset with security problems, never-ending demands of administrative systems users and lack of a clear vision for the importance of technology to the core mission of our institution.