Mathemagenic

It's always funny to see synchronicity. Yesterday I borrowed The Dance of Change, so now I open it in the middle and see this piece (p.328):

The most effective local leaders seem to be those who learn to "live in two worlds" -- the world of their innovative subculture and the world of the mainstream culture of the larger organisation. They realise that innovative practices need "incubators" to develop and that, to some degree, these new practices must be protected. But they also value the knowledge developed through experience that resides in the mainstream culture. They seek to cultivate both, and they do so by developing their own abilities to be effective in both environments.

In a sense they become "bicultural", just like someone who lives in two countries with very different cultures. They become adept at crossing the numerous, often subtle, cultural divides between the two worlds. [...] Perhaps most important, they continually develop their awareness of the boundaries between these different worlds, knowing when they are in which domain and what it requires of them.

One more comes from browsing Blogs and education: Factors Inhibiting Change. I'd like to comment on it, but I should go and pack my suitcase to get ready to my flight tomorrow morning.

But it's really funny: once you ask a question it seems that the whole universe is busy to give you answers.

Just to make sure that this one is captured: Innovative Measures [via SynapShots]

Sebastian Fiedler and Pam Pritchard are discussing why blogs are not implemented yet in every classroom. The discussion goes around the need to change learning and teaching cultures, resistance of teachers to "leave their comfort zone" and luck of funding for the new technology.

At the same time Sebastian Fiedler and me are discussing about selection of blogging tools for Quaerere group (choosing blogging software, blog pilot, and e-mail).

I believe that both are change management problems (known as diffusion of innovations in educational domain): we have a new idea, we believe that it will improve our work and we are trying to get others joining us. We are not the first there :)))

I want to have your attention for two pieces. The first one (source) refers to Rogers' Diffusion of innovations book that describes the characteristics of innovations that are more likely to be adopted:

Relative advantage - potential adopters need to see an advantage for adopting the innovation

Compatibility - innovations need to fit in with potential adopters' current practices and values

Complexity - innovations' ease of use will lead to more rapid adoption

Trialability - potential adopters want the availability of "testing" before adopting

Observability - potential adopters want to see observable results of an innovation

The second one is by Diane Dormant (1997, p.144). She writes about different stages of acceptance of innovation and suggests that strategies for each of them:

My experience from previous "practitioner" life is: if people are at awareness stage it's useless to push them using new things. I'm trying to follow these ideas with Quaerere blog pilot. I want to start small and simple, so people can try it out and see if there is something for them. And only after we could talk about hosting, costs and other things.

It seems that I'm getting the topic to write about for BlogTalk :) Anyone to join?

Dormant, D. (1997) Planning change: past, present, future. In R. Kaufman, S. Thiagarajan, and P. MacGillis (eds.), The guidebook for performance improvement: woring with individuals and organizations. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

I'm not 100% sure if I can reproduce it here, so please let me know if I can't.

Yahoogroups RSS [via Seblogging News]

It's a trivial hack but I created a web page that will help you create URLs for RSS feeds from Yahoo Groups mailing lists.

It's hosted over on the archive at: http://feeds.archive.org/misc/yahoogroups/

The RSS generation feature of Yahoo Groups requires that the list's archives be publicly readable. If the archives aren't publicly readable then you can't get RSS from them without some cookie juggling.["Bill Kearney"]

Great! I can continue getting rid of my maillist subscriptions. Yahoo! Groups: klogs is the first one to move to my news aggregator.