Getting to know you
Draw a picture (or map or diagram) of cyberspace.
Even though this is a mostly paper-less course, I am going to
hand out large sheets of paper and give you a choice of colored crayons and
pencils. Please work in pairs with a neighbor. After ten minutes, I am
going to collect the sheets. In June, during the final night of MBA 604, I will
ask you to draw another picture of cyberspace. Then I will return these first
sheets. The differences between your drawings will form the basis of our
discussion that night.
Answer the five questions below.
While I will learn about you when I analyze the results, you
will learn about each other, too, because the results will be public at a new
feature of Ricci Street called In
the Loop, part of the Research Lab at Gizmos, Inc.
In a couple of weeks, review these questions with your
teammates. How do your responses compare to theirs, both individually and
collectively? My goal here is to help you anticipate and reduce unproductive
conflicts and to increase the likelihood that you will work well as a team.
Question 1 | Teamwork
It's Dilbert
time, now. Who here is a team player? If this were a job interview, what would
your answer be?
In theory, the perfect team is daunting: psychologically complex
behavior by a group of people working toward a common goal at the peak of their
collective abilities on the premise that the group is smarter and more
productive and creative than any individual in it.
In practice, few teams work anywhere near their theoretical
peaks and many are downright dysfunctional. Still, our organizations are full of
teams, to say nothing of their impotent cousins the committees and, yikes!,
committee meetings, where Dilbert's boss is too often presiding.
Many highly productive teams find it useful to talk about the
members' personalities in metaphorical terms. Will you work better on a team
with deep thinkers or grand planners or practical problem-solvers or hands-on
doers?
If you were part of a team building a house, would you
prefer to be the physicist, the architect, the engineer, or the carpenter?
Get In the Loop.
Question 2| Risk-taking
Yesterday in the park, six first-graders showed up next to an
empty paved area. All of them knew how to ice skate but none of them knew how to
roller skate. They were all given a pair of roller skates and left to their own
devices.
Fifteen minutes later, two of them were watching the
others.
Two others were up on their roller skates but still holding on
to each other. Were they holding each other up? Or holding each other back?
The final two were out there skating away, awkwardly and
inefficiently. A video of them run in slow motion would show that they were
constantly in imminent danger of falling. Yet of the six, they were the only
ones making noise and the only ones who appeared to be having fun. They were
also the only ones who fell down.
When it comes to learning new things on the computer, which
pair of kids do you belong to? Those watching on the sidelines, those holding
each other back, or those falling down and having fun?
Get In the Loop.
Question 3 | Chronicity
According to Edward T. Hall's The
Silent Language (a book that's almost as old as I am), at times we are
very monochronic. We like to do one thing at a time, in order. We're very
linear and single-minded. We get a lot done that way.
At other times, we are polychronic. That's more than
being able to do several things at once. It also means tending several different
timelines, cycles, schedules, and speeds of activity as we go along. Not only
that, these timelines have qualitatively different priorities, relationships and
values. A successful waiter in a busy restaurant is probably polychronic.
You may well find a tension between your monochronic and
polychronic tendencies when you're working under pressure, like on a team
project for school that's due next week (if not tomorrow).
When working under pressure are you very monochronic, more
monochronic than polychronic, more polychronic than monochronic, or very
polychronic?
Get In the Loop.
Question 4 | Learning style
By offering only three styles -- aural, visual, kinesthetic --
I'm oversimplifying. We all learn with a combination of them. However, we all
have preferences. Taking your learning as a whole, not just in a formal
classroom, are you more comfortable with aural, visual, or kinesthetic learning?
In other words:
In order to remember something or learn something, do you
most need to hear it, see it, or do it?
Get In the Loop.
Question 5 | Geek factor
Having taught this course several times before, I have come to
see a pattern. At the beginning, many of you fear that you don't know enough
about computers. At the end, you're surprised that even the ones who appeared to
know a lot learned plenty, too.
In a couple of weeks, we'll have the aggregate results from the basic skills form. Tonight, let's
just get a rough look.
How geeky are you? Could you teach at ExecuTrain? Do you know more than
almost everyone else at work? Are you confidently able to do everything you need
to? Are you pretty far behind but catching up? Are you worried that you're
getting left behind?
Get In the Loop.
The Hidden Curriculum
Every course has a "hidden" curriculum; perhaps
"implied" is a less-loaded word. For example, part of the hidden
curriculum in 1st grade is to sit quietly at your desk, keep your hands to
yourself, and don't bother your neighbor.
Ideally, all learning will build on prior learning. Learning
also implies change that persists over time so more learning can build upon it.
Some of those changes are explicit course
objectives. Other changes are implied by those objectives.
For example, to prosper in MBA 600, you will develop your
knowledge and skills in computers, graphic design, writing, and psychology even
though it is officially a business course. Note the special
requirements.
To get more specific about psychology, a further example is
teamwork. Just as on the job, in this course you have to work with other people.
These issues will arise:
fairness
time
management
disparities
of apparent emotional commitment
How will you deal with these issues? The carpenters know in
their weary bones that the site superintendent should be getting paid less, not
more. The hare wonders how the tortoise can be getting the same MBA.
A final example: one goal of this
course is to help you make the transition from the PC as a fancy book to the PC
as a fancy pencil. It's the transition from reading to writing. I'm not talking
about using a word processor or a spreadsheet. Those are just fancy typewriters
and adding machines. I'm talking about the transition to writing in the broader
sense of information design and visual design and publishing. To prosper in the
21st century organization, you must become a web maker.
Professional Standards
Your employer will have performance
standards as well as some expectations about your attitudes and some software and vocabulary that a
newly minted MBA should be able to use comfortably.
This is a good time to again note the required self-assessment.
Online Research
What happens in a library? You remember libraries, those big
rooms full of lots of books. You probably remember books, too. Convenient but
fairly useless. Ink squirted on dead trees that are so acidic they're slowing
burning as you hold them. Long before they burn up, they mildew or you toss
them. Their biggest problem is that they can only be in one place at a time.
Their next biggest problem is that their production and distribution systems are
inefficient and unnecessary. And doomed.
Remember what you did in a library? You found a book or article,
copied the citation (publisher, date, etc.) by hand, copied a short quotation by
hand, and xeroxed pages that you want to reread. Eventually you had to re-type
the citations and quotations and proofread them for errors.
Instead, in this course you're going to keep a Web log and post it to your web site as you go along.
It's the same thing as library research except the Web is much larger and the
harvesting process is more accurate, efficient, and useful.
The
Web the Way It Was
by Leander Kahney
Wired News, February 23, 2000
A weblog, or blog, is a regularly updated list of links and
commentary to interesting material on the Web. Because the majority are
self-published, precise numbers are difficult to gauge. Observers, however,
agree that weblogging is growing like never before.
If you want to see what other folks' web logs look like, UberSearch will take your keywords
and return only web logs. (Click << Go >> on the left to go to the
one you choose.) For example, I entered "copyright" (without the
quotation marks) and got hundreds of returns, among them the web log of Dan Bricklin, who
"invented" the spreadsheet twenty years ago. By the way, I think that
the UberSearch page has a very attractive visual design.
How to Harvest Information
Your research is a process of exploring and discovering on the
Internet. Everything you look at can go into one of three groups: useless,
useful, and not sure. Harvest everything in the latter two groups.
When I'm pressed for time, which is often, I harvest whatever
interests me and drop it into a folder on my desktop.
If I want the whole web page, I pull down Internet
Explorer's File menu and choose Save As ... Then I navigate to the folder where
it makes sense to me to keep it, and I save the page. Sometimes I rename the
file to help me remember why I saved it.
If I want an image, I right-click on it and choose Save Picture
As .., navigate to the appropriate folder and save it there.
If I want only part of a page, I do some variation of a
three-step process:
Step 1: Open a text editor such as NotePad or NoteTab.
Step 2: In the browser, copy (highlight; CTRL C) the URL.
Step 3: In the text editor, paste (place cursor; CTRL V) the URL into a text
file.
Repeat for an excerpt.
You might also add a note. See the detailed
example below. Much of the course material on Ricci Street is like this,
sometimes called annotated links.
Of course, there's a Step 4: Save the file. That's the tricky
part. You have to answer two questions: what are you going to call it and where
are you going to save it?
How to Manage Files
Along with the questions What do you name the files? and Where
do they go?, let's ask another: How do you find them again?
Your answers will reveal your file management system.
Some people take the path of least resistance and save everything into their My
Documents folder. Others put everything on their desktop. Your file management
system is probably as personal and characteristic of you as is the system by
which you sort, store, and retrieve paper in your physical office. I'm most
concerned that your system works for you rather than working against you. Or
worse, that you are working for it.
I'm convinced that one of the main causes of problems is
people's understanding of what's going on inside their computers. Most people
have great difficulty trying to explain that in words. However, how they name,
store, and manage files reveals much of their mental model. When I do a
BuddyHelp session, I'm always interested in what I see and how people get around
and where they put things. Most people do far more clicking than they need to
and are far too passive about personalizing their PC's. That's what the P in PC
stands for, after all.
On the other hand, when I look at how experienced users manage their files, I'm
struck by how individual that process is. For example, my son is the webmaster
at SUNY Plattsburgh. When David comes
home, he can't find anything on my PC. He's always saying, "Where do you
put ... ?" or "How do you have this set up?" And I don't even try
to sit down at his PC. I'd be asking for nothing but frustration and trouble.
When I'm looking at students' systems via BuddyHelp, I point out things that
seem counter-productive and self-defeating. Mostly, what I'm trying to do is
make you aware of how much control you have over the PC and how much you can
make your life easier with some basic file management.
Doug's File Management System
On my desktop PC, I have a mirror of Ricci Street so that
I can work on it off-line. The folder (also called a directory) is named
riccistreet. Within it are more folders (subdirectories) called dwares, gizmos,
cybersea, port80, and riccigreen, mirroring the online structure.
Even if I'm online, I use that mirror to make changes. When a
new page or revised page is ready, I FTP it to the Web site. (Sometimes it's not
ready, but class is going to start in half an hour and I FTP it anyway.)
On my desktop PC's desktop -- how's that for a mixed metaphor?
-- I also have a separate folder called rsthoods for Ricci Street neighborhoods.
The folder structure mirrors the online web, but the content doesn't. The
subdirectories are full of my harvested information:
notes, saved Web pages, images, etc. I use those resources when I'm revising
pages and making new ones. I discard much of it; what sounded interesting turns
out to be less so.
Within the rsthoods folder are five folders I use so often that
I keep shortcuts to them on my desktop. During a typical working day, I
process dozens of email in both directions, I harvest a couple dozen things off
the Web, and I write several new chunks of text.
Collaboration
Three folders correspond to the people I work most closely with:
30-some students, half a dozen faculty members, and the proprietors of
ClearLightStudio.com.
The Parkside Plaza folder has within it a folder
for each of my students. All the email you send me, including the forms,
goes in there along with my replies.
The Lantern Lane folder has a folder for each of
the courses I'm teaching or helping other faculty develop.
The Arts Alley folder for Clear Light Studio,
which you'll learn more about in MBA 604, is full of images.
Research
Two folders hold information about my main interests, webmaking
and what's happening to our organizations and society.
The Gizmos, Inc., Toolkit folder, which I
renamed webkit.
This folder is Geek Central. It goes into more depth than the
Toolkit on Ricci Street. Most of the information won't be relevant until the MBA
program develops a concentration in e-commerce or information design. However, I
need it to make Ricci Street work.
The Port 80 folder, which I renamed newthinking.
In this folder, I save things that help guide my thinking and
that I will want to re-read and probably quote in email to my colleagues. These
tend to be big-picture ideas and ways of thinking about what's driving and
restraining the changes wrought by the Internet. For example, this morning, I
saved into that folder a page about a research project at MIT called the New Economy
Value Research Lab, "a fundamental rethinking of how economic value is
created." The implications for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are
profound.
Clutter
Finally, three other folders on my desktop hold special
information.
downloaded .exe files
In addition to the software toolkit I'm asking
you to add to your communications center and workshop, I download utilities and
demos and various other goodies that tempt me. Some of it is usable as is. Some
has to be unzipped and installed. But the original downloads all go here where I
can find them again.
harvest
I put must-read-now! stuff on the desktop. It often sits
there for a long time before I get to it. When the desktop gets too cluttered, I
drop it all into the harvest folder to get it out of my sight.
logs
Every month, the server logs that I use to compile the traffic report come to
anywhere from 50 - 70 megabytes. They have to get sorted and sliced and diced
and posted and analyzed. In the new economy, server logs are a management metric
you must learn more about.
Tip | These desktop folders can be searched for text.
If you can remember a keyword, go to Start | Find | Files or Folders and enter
the keyword in the Containing text: box.
What should you do?
If you were to use a similar system, you would have a mirror of
your Parkside Plaza web that you work on via FrontPage. You would also have a
harvest folder where you stash stuff that is relevant but hasn't made its way
onto a page yet. As you start to develop your web, you'll find some natural
divisions. I suggest one below, dividing your web into a school section and a
personal section.
Within the school section, you'll find things piling up. Should
you organize it by project? By week? By topic?
Tip | Think organic growth. Don't try to conceive of
your web before you make it. Let it grow and find its own shape.
Web log example
Let's say I am researching gizmos for the office of the future.
I run across a site that's selling a nifty computerized highlighter. I open
NoteTab to a new page. Into it, I copy and paste (select passage, CTRL-C,
CTRL-V) the largest words on the page (in yellow below but not in NoteTab). Then
from the browser's address or location window, I copy and paste the URL (in green). The most interesting short
paragraph summarizes the whole page, so I copy and paste that (in blue), adding quotation marks. Finally,
I make a couple of personal notes (in gray).
The C-Pen: How does
it work?
www.cpen.com/product/cpen.shtml
"This is how C-Pen works. You hold
it in your hand like a highlighter and mark the text you want to save. The
digital camera then captures the text and saves it in C-Pen's memory. The text
is transferred to your PC using infrared (IR) communication technique. Place
C-Pen close to the infrared (IR) receiver of your PC, utilizing C-Pen as a
normal drive. Cordless, with only a few buttons and a straightforward menu,
C-Pen is simple to use."
note: Good pix on this page of
CPen in action. Some material on the page also applies to category 4. Also, I
don't like the page's background color.
Then I pull down the File menu and choose Save As .. I navigate
to the directory file:///c:/Windows/Desktop/rsthoods/gizmos/office/. I name the
NoteTab text file highlighter.txt. Then I click save and return to the Web to
look for more interesting things to harvest.
If you want to harvest in a more organized manner and have your
web log always available on a web page, check out Blogger (short for Weblogger).
Professional Web Site
Remember when you got your first email address? How many do you
have now? One for work, one for home, and then your Hotmail account?
If you don't already, you will soon have several web sites and
pages that you are either solely, primarily, or cooperatively responsible for.
For purposes of this course, you should take sole responsibility
for a web site at Ricci Street's Parkside Plaza.
Its address will be:
http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/plaza/yourlastname/
Please note that this address is case-sensitive after the first
single slash, the one after .net. When anyone types that address into their
browser, they'll get your default home page
http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/plaza/yourlastname/index.html
I have taken the liberty of posting an index.html page in each
of your directories. On the course reports page,
you'll find a link to yours.
I would like you to post some of your homework there -- your
resume, your research, and your rough drafts, for starters. In addition, your
contribution to your team's project will be there. Organizing and styling the
pages are up to your professional judgment. You will continue to use this web in
other courses, especially MBA 604, so keep expansion in mind when you're
designing it.
Even though I want to prepare you for a professional web site,
on this one you should also feel free to create a personal section that you can
use for expressing yourself or experimenting. Or just generally have fun and
impress your family.
Baby pictures are cool.
Next week, you will learn how to transfer files from
your computer to the server via WS_FTP. Feel free to read ahead.
Newsletters
At these web sites, you should sign up by submitting your email
address.
Wired magazine's Wired News; sign up in the "free
delivery" box on the left
Jack Teems' Neat
Net Tricks
Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz
They will send email newsletters on a regular schedule. You can
send an email to the editor, but you can't add anything to the next issue on
your own.
Webmonster's Web Design
You'll be able to listen in while the top web designers discuss
their craft. At first, most of the topics will seem like geek speak, but please
persevere. You'll gradually catch on. It will help if you follow some of the
URLs in the messages and especially those in the contributors' sigs.
Tip | Sign up for the digest version.
The Webmonster discussion list is very active; you'll receive a
long email digest at least once a day. It has all the messages that have
come in from readers sorted by threads. By following the posting instructions,
you can add your voice to the discussion.
After you begin receiving these newsletters, forward a copy to
me so I can give you homework credit on the reports
page.
Slogans and Mantras
the network is the computer
hyperlinks subvert hierarchy
Professional Expectations
