Mathemagenic

From e-mail discussion about reflection techniques, by Christian Rangen:

I believe debriefing to be a personal characteristic far more than anything that can be learned by anyone. The techniques, of course, can be learned, but what is far more important is:

• The natural curiosity that leads up to a debrief
• The desire to learn (from ones own mistakes in order to improve)
• The desire to help others learn (by learning from their mistakes and helping them focus on their strengths)
• By enabling group processes and group learning through debrief sessions.

For my part, I’ve (unconsciously) been running debriefs for years prior to joining KMG. While still in school, we often sat down and asked;

• What was supposed to happen?
• What happened?
• What can we do to improve the next time?

Debrief is one of the ultimate learning tools, but require a natural thirst for learning.

I'm not so sure, but there is something true in it. At least I tend to ask a lot of questions along this "nature vs. nurture" dilemma, for example:

• Do weblogs develop reflective skills or just fit well with reflective people?
• Is being well-connected node in social network is a function of personality or environment?

Paolo Valdemarin in To innovate or not to innovate:

It's interesting to read some of the comments to my post about free weblogs.

I'm seeing the same trend also here in Italy where the most popular provider of free weblogging tools does not provide some basic features such as ping to weblogs.com, RSS feed or trackback.

People is asking "Why should we care? We don't even understand what you are talking about!". New features are often perceived as unnecessary "bells and whistles".

I think that there's still plenty of room to improve todays' tools, but with the audience growing every day at a steady pace and consequently having a lower average technical culture, it becomes very important to effectively communicate what these improvements are about and why they are needed. We must be able to explain why something is important (if it is).

Otherwise we can all sit back, relax, move to a free blogging app and wait for the next wave because this game is over.

I couldn't agree more.

I strongly believe that having RSS feed enables social processes around weblogs (there are other things next to RSS of course). For me these social processes are the core value of blogging. Introducing weblogs without introducing good ways to read other weblogs (=RSS) makes it more difficult for a new blogger to establish "blogging social network" and there is a risk that the networking value of blogging will be never discovered.

Next to it, RSS enables a lot of smart add-ons (think of k-collector or edu_RSS) to process and aggregate weblogs content, and I guess it plays a great role in enabling tracking tools (I guess some of them subscribe to RSS feeds instead of crawling web-pages). So, newcomers who use free tools without RSS will not be visible in a "easy to digest ways" for others.

Back to Paolo's words, I believe that providing only easy weblpublishing tools is not good enough to surf this wave and we'll have to wait for another one.

[Related posts: a weblog without an RSS feed..., Beyond 'blogs = easy webpublishing' , How selection of blogging tool functionalities influences specific uses of blogs?]

James Robertson posts on Fubini's Law:

1. People initially use technology to do what they do now - but faster.

2. Then they gradually begin to use technology to do new things.

3. The new things change life-styles and work-styles.

4. The new life-styles and work-styles change society

... and eventually change technology.

I loved it, did Google search on it to find the original, but found mainly posts in blogs. I'd like to know the story behind it.

And this one (via John Robb and Martin Roell)

First we build the tools, then they build us (Marshall McLuhan)

Martin Roell cites unknown author:

To think outside the box, you can't look inside the box for instructions.