PILOTed

We can’t continue to educate the same way and expect better results

What is Mindshifting or Sensemaking

We can radically improve the way we solve society’s problems, and it starts with empowering our students to think. Anyone can learn the skills to shift their mind to resourceful states, and educators are in the unique position to provide those skills to students.

Have you noticed that we don’t seem to be looking at problems in ways that lead to positive actions, and we are talking at each other not with each other. Some tragedy happens, and there is talk and blame, but nothing gets done. And then there is another disaster, another tragedy, and the cycle repeats, with angrier talk and still no action.

We see this play out in issue after issue: climate, guns, abortion, healthcare, education, taxes, school shootings, natural disasters, immigration, livable wages, voting, government programs, transportation, disease mitigation and prevention, social media, right to privacy, gender, pollution… and countless others.

Five years ago, I started on a journey. What did experts know about the way we make sense of situations, prepare to take action, interact, learn, and make decisions? Were there insights from different fields that could guide us?

Why aren’t we more effective?

The source of the problems is that we humans have evolved, and our societies have evolved, in ways that that worked most of the time, but are now driving us apart.

1. We naturally think that once we come up with a way to do something, that we need to convince others that they are wrong and should follow the same path.
2. We quickly react to situations, and then come up with rationalizations of why; and then cognitive biases don’t allow us to react to information that should be informing us to modify our actions.
3. Our most common problem solving mechanisms do not cope with ambiguity, unexpected events, complexity, or hidden assumptions and biases, and so we gravitate to actions and solutions that seem to avoid risk, appear easy, copy what others are doing, and/or follow old habits.

When the situation is novel and complex, these strategies don’t work well at all. Human beings, by nature, often don’t know that we don’t know, or worse, think we know when, if we were able to deeply question ourselves, would find out that we are just acting from fear or habit.

Can we and our students learn to be more effective?

I found that scientists and practitioners from a wide variety of fields had defined both the factors that were holding us back, and ways over, through, and around those obstacles.

1. We can learn to use our prefrontal cortex to recognize when our minds are in default mode.
2. There are ways to reset and control our own minds when they react in suboptimal ways.
3. There are ways to be resourceful and flexible in complex and rapidly changing situations.
4. There are ways to prepare for unexpected events and iteration so that each trial brings us closer to success.
5. There are ways to become more effective and efficient than anyone who opposes us.
6. There are ways to communicate and collaborate with people who oppose or disagree with us so that they are more likely to be allies than adversaries.
7. And there are ways that pull together groups of people to form a team or community in highly effective and flexible organizations.

As human beings we should be shifting our minds into these sensemaking frameworks.

How will this help our students?

As a society, we should be preparing students with these frameworks, primarily because these will make them much happier and effective adults, but also because they will make our teachers’ lives so much more productive.

Imagine if students knew how to control their minds to avoid disruptive or risky behaviors? Imagine if students had a helpful effective framework for evaluating news, articles, information, and communications, and could communicate more effectively as well. Imagine if students knew how to collaborate even when they disagreed. Imagine if students knew how to adapt to unexpected events so that they could persist and accomplish academic and personal goals.

Then imagine these students as adults. What couldn’t their generation accomplish?

The problem is that all that information is dispersed. There is no one place to find a unified prescription of how to shift our minds to match our current frenetic pace of change. So I decided to pull together all of these different aspects of decision-making, sense-making, perseverance, overcoming cognitive biases and communication and collaboration into a course.

For the last five years, I’ve curated, summarized, and operationalized research and insights from cognitive scientists, psychologists, neuro scientists, behavior economists, futurists, and educators. I’ve compiled this material into about 16 hours of course materials.

I’ve taught, rewritten, and retaught this course about 8 times. The feedback I’ve received is that this material presents a blueprint for how we all should be thinking, taking control of our minds, looking at problems and opportunities, preparing solutions, and eventually solving the issues we face.

How to teach students to be more effective thinkers and doers

You can take the Mindshifting Course this summer, one especially designed for educators with comprehensive course materials starting July 12. The cost of the course is $125. Each session will be recorded, so if you register but miss a session, or want to revisit any content, you can view the archive. Register and see the description here.

If you are curious, I have been invited by the RSA to conduct a 1-hour free Salon called Brainhacking which will introduce the topic, and cohosting with me will be Tammie Schrader who has attended the course and will be offering it again to Washington teachers in the Fall.

And on June 14 I will be conducting a role playing game that uses some of the decision making strategies of the course. You can register for Serious Play Conference here.

Insanity is doing the same think over and over again and expecting different results.

If we are to rise above strife and anxiety, we need a new paradigm for making sense of the world, and we and the next generation need to learn how to shift our minds to helpful frames. Please join me in the 11 sessions beginning on July 12.

Postscript: the quote about insanity is generally attributed to Albert Einstein, but with some sense making and research, you would find out that it was first used in Rita Mae Brown’s 1983 novel “Sudden Death.”

Is the News Media Making Us Angry?

The media has always filtered and distorted information. Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, cable news, news sites, social media, have never been impartial observers and reporters of all that’s happening locally and in the world. But something seems to have shifted in the last few years. What’s different about the media today?

If we understand the media’s role in how we receive information and perceive the world, and if we can teach the next generation, maybe we can make better decisions and we don’t have to be so angry and so despondent about the future.

The following branches from the article News in the Age of Abundance, by David Perell. There’s more to the article than what is contained here.

To understand how and why the media conveys news, follow the money. Marketing and advertising drive media and social platforms. The nature of advertising has changed over the last two decades, from brand advertising to performance advertising, and that changes the way media creates news coverage and the way we see news.

Brand advertising is designed to promote a product or service (brand) to people who may not care and who are mostly unlikely to be in the market to buy right now. If you are mass advertising (using traditional media), you have little control of whom you reach, most of the audience is not interested in your message, so the role of advertising is getting the brand in their heads so that when they are ready to buy, the brand is what comes to mind. You may not be thirsty right now, but when you are, what soda brands pop into your mind?

Performance advertising is reaching people who are already in the researching or buying process and bringing them to the next step in the buying cycle. If you are interested in looking at restaurants, there is a pretty good chance you are interested in making a reservation somewhere. Effective performance advertising became possible due to personalized advertising techniques based on large-scale data collection.

The change in advertising triggered a change in media. Reporters and entertainers used to focus on improving their craft. Now the key skill (in terms of employability and pay) is their ability to attract, keep, and grow a loyal audience of potential customers. Research and objectivity are less valued than finding and keeping sponsors and having an engaged audience. Research shows audiences are mostly engaged through memorable headlines and memes.

How do media and reporters use headlines and memes to attract viewers?

Bertrand Russel defined Russell Conjugations in 1948, showing how changing just one synonym can make sentences that were factually equivalent evoke strikingly different emotional reactions. Many words have a factual meaning and an emotional effect. Writers can change the entire meaning of a sentence by replacing a key word with a synonym that has the opposite connotation. For example:

1. I am firm
2. You are obstinate
3. They are pigheaded

Most of us regard the first examples positively, the second one neutrally or slightly negatively, and strongly negatively on the third example. The same below:

1. Based on new evidence, I have revised my conclusion.
2. You changed your mind.
3. They are flipflopping.
4. He has gone back on his word.

It’s admirable for Alan Dershowitz to revise his conclusion based on new evidence. It may or may not be okay for him to change his mind. But for him to flip flop or go back on his word merely to support a paying client? Unforgivable! Definitionally, all four sentences are equivalent, but the reporter can attract and appeal to different audiences, evoking different responses by changing just a few words.

Many people support undocumented workers who are providing needed services while trying to provide for their family, but are against illegal aliens taking jobs and using resources that rightfully belong to Americans.

 The changing nature of media rewards the more extreme forms, as they are more likely to spread and attract more eyeballs. We see that both in what attracts our attention and in the way information spreads.

The ease with which we can choose our information sources reinforces polarization.

The wide choices in media, especially seen in television, have meant people have more chance to select news that they agree with. The result is that media has become more polarizing and also more focused on entertainment than information. When people choose media that aligns with their beliefs, they are nudged further away from information sources that offer other points of view, and they then harden those differences to negative emotions which then draw those people back to reinforce those differences. It’s an escalating cycle.

As David Perell notes in the article, “People who read the Gettysburg Address when it was written focused on the texture of Lincoln’s prose, not the fashion of his top-hat.” Today, we spend more time getting riled up about the optics of Nancy Pelosi ripping up the State of the Union or Rush Limbaugh getting a medal during the State of the Union than on the content of the speech. The drive for media to engage means that form rises above content, glamor over truth, and emotion over rationality. Today’s political leaders understand the reality of rallying their audience with snappy slogans and emotion-filled speeches, just as today’s information sources and media rely on sensational stories and click-bait headlines to grow audiences for their advertisers.

The media, and media news, engages viewers by entertaining them, and when the information being conveyed isn’t entertaining or provoking enough, media needs to spice it up. News can be spiced up through pseudo-events (like awards shows or annual celebrations), adding color to existing stories (for example, using Russell Conjugations), or emphasizing false urgency (the Democrats are going to take away your guns, or the Republicans are going to take away your healthcare and social security).

Media companies (including the platforms) survive and grow by their ability to attract advertising dollars, which depend on large numbers of viewers. Attracting viewers is often a process of gaming media algorithms, composing misleading headlines, and spinning stories

If the most read content is polarizing or emotionally jarring, over time what does that do to carefully constructed accurate reporting? Low quality content tends to drive out high quality content.

Celebrities (or politicians) capitalize on this trend by “publishing daily distractions under the glitzy guise of informing the public.” News of declining world poverty rates or improving global health aren’t entertaining, they do not attract views, but linking the latest storm to earth threating global warning can fire up high engagement. Stories about the 725,000 people who die annually from mosquitoes are less engaging than a cataclysmic story about one of the 10 people killed by sharks each year. Homicide and terrorism account for less than one percent of American deaths each year, yet those are the stories that attract readers, not stories on cancer or heart disease, which together account for greater than 50% of deaths.

What can we do as consumers (or as teachers)?

We, and our students, have the power to choose what information we follow and the respect we give that information. We can focus our efforts and act on the things we can control. We can make a difference by taking action on often local issues instead of harping on national or global ones where we can, at best, rail to audiences who are already inclined to agree.

Just as the healthiest people control their diet and restrict their intake of empty calories, we can put effort into our information health. We can restrict our intake of the dramatic that is automatically served up by media, seek our own trusted curators, and vary points of view to see an issue from multiple vantage points.

As Perell concludes:

On the Internet, your rate of learning is limited not by access to information, but by the discipline to ignore distractions. The people you follow online is a leading indicator for your success, your health, and your happiness. Follow the right people, drink their recommendations deeply, and ditch the sugary cereal.

The 8 Agents of Chaos that can destroy any business

This is from a session at the Serious Play Conference led by Andrew Gassen. Andrew coaches executives and entrepreneurs to achieve their desired outcomes.

 

Agent know it all 

Attributes: you’re really smart and you can solve all of these hard problems that other people have not solved, but you can do it.

Rides previous successes, relies on previous anecdotal experience, no or little customer research, reality distortion field

Impact on the team: greenshifting, skip customer discovery and validation, build software because I said so, use excuses like our direction ran counter to the market, knowledge silos.: (we lost our customers and our costs went down grenshifting to we have reduced costs).

Wrong approach: think harder, try to convince the customer that they are wrong, fire people who disagree 

How does that work: lack of customers, competitors overtook us, reputation build by market

What to do: 

1. focus team on outcomes, reframe knowledge as testable hypotheses (instead of "this is true" use "we think this is the case and here is how we will measure to see if it really is",
2. agree on the indicators of success and progress,
3. do work, measure progress as quickly as possible, revisit, reflect,
4. reframe, and refocus
5. Let yourself believe you are right, but frame it as a hypothesis and find a way to frame it and measure it, following Paul Saffo's strong opinions weakly held paradigm. (Example: Clickable prototypes, test different concepts out on the people who will be using your product)

 

Agent Feature Factory

Attribute: Once we build the next thing our product will be ready

It’s a mindset it’s not about the next feature

Signs that this applies: All these programs do X, we have to also; I met with a prospect and they said they  would be interested if we did Y, we really need that featuer.

If your product is not getting traction, it’s easier to say we will add more stuff than to say some of our assumptions might be wrong.

Impact on team: build mindset that more = better ( better = better, not more), : too many projects so work is half-assed, chasing the competition, lost sight of actual outcomes trying to deliver.

What not to do: set milestones from the top (and then move them, causes things not to get in the hands of real users), build what other people are building but a little different, build sales expectations to match the cost.

How to solve: don’t overstuff with features, practice continuous deliver, build an outcomes based roadmap with the team, understand what your value is, adopt lean startup principles (reframe to these are the problems we are going to solve, not these are the feature we are going to provide), use the roadmap and adjust where necessary,  do half as much, not half-assed

Table stakes, you have to have these features, it doesn’t matter how good, you never get happy users.

Performers: the better you do these, the better people like you

Delighted, just by having those you make people really happy even if it’s not fully completed (that is what fuels market domination)

 

Agent Old School

Attribute: If it worked 30 years ago, it will work now

Causes: previous successes, outdated education, being out of the game for a while, lack of real-world/domain experience

Impact on the team: doing things that contradict modern best practices, unjustified confidence, just enough progress to keep going and not question it, being passed by competitors

What not to do:nothing, start uprising/mutiny, talk about transformation

How did that work: everybody dug their heels in, team trust eroded, ppl left, decisions made based on allegiance, not value

How to tackle: get a baseline on how things work today, identify the top 1-3 areas needing tweaking, collaborate and align on shared success indicators, get little wins, one by one

If you are the one who wants to make the change, you have to compromise first  need to arrive at that measure together, not dictated by top 

How not to tackle: you hired me to fix things, let me fix things, get rid of all this that you did before and do it my way, burn bridges

Example: Dick’s Sporting Goods (human centered principles, competing with Amazon)

Wrong: waterfall development

 

 

Agent Value Line

Attributes: Resume driven development: people who focus on those below the line, because those are the things to build their resume, tons of priorities, more time gets spent on projects that help internally than that help the customer.

Examples: what project management tool, instead of what new features or what bug fixes affect the customer.

The things above the line drive value to your users, the ones below are things they don’t care about

The way to refocus the organization: Acknowledge that those things are the most important to work on, but it doesn’t matter unless you do the things things on top too 

Wrong: focus on making decision based on technology not customer use, and focus on buzzword bingo

Impact on the team: everyone is super busy and working hard, really neat internal tech demonstrations, actual progress seems really slow, with small incremental improvement like "That thing that took 25 minutes before took 22 minutes, let me show you how I did that. Tech complexity went through the roof, every new hire wiped out substantial parts of the code base. We delivered so many tasks on the backlog but not making progress on the goals.

This runs rampant to all tech companies. 

What to do: use user stories: as a teacher I want to do xxxx so that yyy. Or job stories based on the task, and prioritize the backlog ruthlessly “how does this get us to our desired outcome for the user". Establish a culture where whoever finishes first go grab the next thing on the priority list they can do. The person in charge of project management is more important than the Project Management tool.

1. Align on why we exist and key outcomes
2. Map out the activities the team, not individuals engage in
3. Estimate the time each activity takes
4. Prioritize areas where that time can be reduced
5. Empower people to make the changes

The double agent

Attributes: Here is how we did it, so you need to make your software (workflow, selling process, whatever) work like this too. 

Examples: someone from a different industry who comes in, partner agreements where one partner has the preponderance of power, someone who was successful 10+ years ago and is still riding that reputation.  For example someone who had success at a textbook publisher ( A textbook doesn’t get released until it’s done, software can be ready to deploy in three weeks.)

Impact: doing things we don’t agree with, devalues our expertise, people working in unintentional stealth mode, turning down user feedback, partnership devolves to nothing productive, competitors pass you, the value proposition that made you special doesn't get delivered.

What not to do: do the minimum required to meet the contract, when partner wanted something it went to the top of the backlog.

What do to:

1. Align on outcomes not features
2. Be explicit about who owns what in the relationship
3. Be the expert in the areas of your expertise
4. Regularly check-in on progress toward diet success indicators

You don’t have to roll over just because they are bigger. If you are already in a bad relationship, get everyone to anonymously contribute: 

1. Drop: what do we need to stop doing what's not working,
2. Add: what do we need to add,
3. Keep: what should we keep,
4. Improve: what should we do to improve (keep things anonymous. (Drop, add, keep, improve)

 

Agent Hollywood

Attributes: Look at those great awards and metrics, indicators that make you look successful even if you are not. Happens when you have internal competition for resources, and when there is low trust

Impact: people feel incentivized to stretch the truth to the point where it still kind of looks true in order to "win". Wasted time and effort on vanity indicators ( we have 50,000 people on our landing page ), people choose sides, false sense of security.

What not to do: show the other side is wrong, one up, win as many awards as possible 

What to do: 

1. align on the outcomes you are trying to achieve (otherwise you will fall into this trap.
2. measure what matters (ultimate indicator of our company’s health)
3. Don't measure too many things, you are not better off by measuring everything than measuring nothing

 

Agent tug of war

Atributes: Teammates disappear on pet projects, us vs them, frequent changes in the team, team spread too thin to do good work, 

Atomic unit for progress is a team all moving in the same direction, not the individuals

What to do: do less but all in the same direction eventually to happy customer.

 

Agent viability

Attributes: stuff gets done and it gets done to spec but projects don't move the company forward.

Fork was a product that was done to spec and on time but ultimately useless.

Peer pressure and hubris, silly expenses, time to market is too long, and no sales

Focus on fundraising not delivering user value (I will build this this week, now my focus changed)

What happens:say yes to anything with dollars possibility associated, constant pivots, shut the business down.

What to do:

1. Metrics on what matters
2. Understand cost model
3. How will you make money
4. Focus on your unfair advantages
5. Follow the shortage path to revenue

Bottom Line

If your organization does not understand what good look likes you can’t rally people around anything. You need a North Star metric.

McKinsey on Design

We are increasingly calling for teaching design in schools. Why is design important?

McKinsey Consulting recently reported that companies with good design processes (top quartile) outperformed their industry by about 2:1: higher revenue growth, larger return to stockholders, and better financial performance.

It’s not just design for designers, McKinsey outlined four characteristics of these organizations that outperform their peers:

The leadership/design connection

Those companies made design a top management issue. Yes, there are people tasked with design, but designers and top management worked together to analytically choose the designs that would have the most impactful effect on the organizations. Design decisions were not relegated to middle management, and top management did not just make decisions based on gut-feel. Top management were well versed in the ramifications of different design decisions so could make objective decisions based on the impact of the designs on their customers.

Design as UX

Design isn’t just about a product, users and customers are making their own decisions based on a total experience. The best organizations consider (and measure) how design affects the customer journey, and also consider how alternative design can affect aspects of the customer experience that are outside of just using the product.

Cross functional design

While there may be a design department, it is working hand in glove with the other functional departments in the organization, sharing responsibility for the design. Design in these organizations is about the user, and however different departments touch the user experience, they need to be part of the process. Isolationist tendencies (or silos) can be hard to overcome and resist, yet the best organizations figure out a way to do it. And designers should be spending their time and efforts touching all departments to enhance products and services for customers, not on creating slide shows or presentations or marketing materials.

Continuous Iteration

The best organizations don’t just design a product, service, or operation and then move on. Ongoing learning, testing, iterating, and measuring with users is critical. The best organizations prototype early, share prototypes with potential users, and use that feedback to inform design modifications. And monitoring externalities like actions of competitors, emerging technologies, and psychometric trends are all blended into the functions of all departments and funneled into the design process.

Organizations that are strong in design outperform other organizations. McKinsey concludes that design excellence is within the grasp of very organization, and depends on design being integrated in all four areas. We should be building that framework into student learning.

By the way at the end of the McKinsey article there is an organization survey. How does your organization stack up?

And if you feel like you would like to take action to improve your organization’s performance or impact, please contact us at [email protected] 

The future of jobs, World Economic Forum

How can we avoid a future of technology advancement leading to rising inequality, mass unemployment, and talent shortages? How do we move toward technology advancement leading to an age of good work, good jobs, and improved quality of life for all?

What does the business world think?

The World Economic Forum surveyed executives at over 300 of the largest companies in the world. Here is what they expect.

When asked to list their top concerns for determining where to locate, 74% of companies listed the availability of skilled local talent, and 64% report cost of labor. All other concerns were of significantly lower importance.

Companies expect employees to adopt a mindset of agile learning, to take control of their own learning.

Based on the 15 million employees in the companies surveyed, 7.5% of those jobs will be eliminated in the next 4 years, while there will be a 12% increase based on new jobs (a net 4.5% increase). Half of the companies expect to employ a smaller workforce in four years, and those new jobs will require additional skills that current workers are not likely to currently possess.

By 2022, 54% of all employees will require significant re- and upskilling of at least 6 months. Two-thirds of companies expect this retraining primarily to be the responsibility of the employees themselves except for high-value employees, expecting that they can either find people, automate or augment existing work, or use temporary services instead of reskilling the bulk of their employees.

Workers with in-demand skills that can help companies augment (increase productivity through person-machine interfaces) tasks could see an increase in their value.

Roles that are expected to increase:

• Data Analysts and Scientists
• AI and Machine Learning Specialists
• General and Operations Managers
• Big Data Specialists
• Digital Transformation Specialists
• Sales and Marketing Professionals
• New Technology Specialists
• Organizational Development Specialists
• Software and Applications Developers and
• Analysts
• Information Technology Services
• Process Automation Specialists
• Innovation Professionals
• Information Security Analysts
• Ecommerce and Social Media Specialists
• User Experience and Human-Machine
• Interaction Designers
• Training and Development Specialists
• Robotics Specialists and Engineers
• People and Culture Specialists
• Client Information and Customer Service
• Workers
• Service and Solutions Designers
• Digital Marketing and Strategy Specialists

Roles that are expected to decrease:

• Data Entry Clerks
• Accounting, Bookkeeping and Payroll Clerks
• Administrative and Executive Secretaries
• Assembly and Factory Workers
• Client Information and Customer Service Workers
• Business Services and Administration Managers
• Accountants and Auditors
• Material-Recording and Stock-Keeping Clerks
• General and Operations Managers
• Postal Service Clerks
• Financial Analysts
• Cashiers and Ticket Clerks
• Mechanics and Machinery Repairers
• Telemarketers
• Electronics and Telecommunications Installers and Repairers
• Bank Tellers and Related Clerks
• Car, Van and Motorcycle Drivers
• Sales and Purchasing Agents and Brokers
• Door-To-Door Sales Workers, News and Street Vendors, and Related Workers
• Statistical, Finance and Insurance Clerks
• Lawyers

Skoolbo Discussion

I had a very thought-provoking conversation with Colin Brown of Skoolbo last Friday.

Skoolbo is a free resource for teachers, parents, and kids worldwide that contains short learning games. They are used by over 50,000 schools (about 300,000 students ages 5-9) around the world with about half of all users coming from the US. There is a premium version for schools with enhanced ways of tracking student progress and assigning work to students.

The conversation centered around learning research an d a new partnership with ChuChu TV. If you haven’t heard of ChuChu TV, you really need to learn about them.

The Research

The Skoolbo platform responsibly (based on their student privacy and child safety policies) tracks student performance and activity, and makes the research available to researchers. Lamar University correlated the data with itegs (International Test of Early grade Skills) for Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the US. In these early grades, the US did surprisingly well, showing the greatest improvement in reading and numeracy skills in the lowest quartile of students, especially compared to the UK and New Zealand, which are both seeing increasing gaps between higher and lower performers. And, if you don’t look too closely at the number of countries included, you will be relieved to know the US never ranked lower than 6^th.

In general, top performers at age 5-6 are more advanced than lower (bottom 25%) performers of children three years older, ages 8-9. It would be interesting to find out if those gaps increase even further as the children grow up. Boys are about 3 months more advanced than girls in numeracy skills, while girls are about 3 months ahead of boys in reading skills. These trends go across all countries.

One surprising outcome was the incredible lead of Hong Kong in numeracy skills. Even at age 5.5, Hong Kong students are three grades ahead of students from the other countries. And these weren’t “privileged” Hong Kong students, the students were poor, with no Internet access at home and whose first language is Chinese. One big cultural difference is the importance of Math in the culture in Hong Kong; there is a firm belief that Math will take you anywhere, and that it’s simply not acceptable to be bad at Math, it would be as foreign as saying, “I am bad at breathing, so I won’t breathe.”

Colin said that Skoolbo is committed to making the data available free to researchers.

ChuChu TV

ChuChu TV runs Youtube channels of educational videos for children ages 0-6. Colin said that for the last 5 years, their prime channel has ranked in the top 20 of all Youtube channels, with about 500 million views a month, and is the number 1 preschool channel worldwide. SocialBlade currently rates them 21st (with 10.5 billion views), which is still nothing to sneeze at.

While I hadn’t heard of ChuChu before the conversation, I did check with relatives that have young children, and they used these videos with their kids.

ChuChu employs about 230 animators who churn out videos with musical educational content.

With their content free, ChuChu makes their money on Youtube ads.

What’s next?

Marshall McLuhan coined the terms “hot” and “cold” media in Understanding Media back in 1994. And while Youtube  is a 21^st century phenomenon, watching videos is still passive learning on cool media.

Colin is partnering with ChuChu to add learning content and analytics around the videos in a joint venture named Chu Chu School. Games, activities, curriculum, tracking, and reporting will be available in a school package in the next few months.

It will be very interesting, to watch this merger one of the most popular creators of children’s content and a widely used education games platform, to see if they can successfully use the mechanisms of Youtube tie-ins and freemium offerings to reach schools and parents and offer them subscriptions.

Slush 2017 Helsinki

I know I wasn’t the oldest person at Slush, because Al Gore was there and he’s 69 years old. But I was probably 35 years older than the median of the 20,000 tech heads from 130 countries attending the world’s largest startup event.

Some snippets of advice from some of the entrepreneurs and investors:

• You can’t change consumer behavior by persuading them, you have to give them an alternative that’s demonstrably better.
• It’s fantasy to expect masses of consumers (or customers) to switch to something more expensive.
• You’ve got to get your systems (production, marketing, sales, support) right in one market before you expand geographically. Avoid the VC trap; don’t expand too fast.
• You don’t make innovation spread. Innovation spreads, or it doesn’t.
• The only way to stay on top is to challenge and change what you are doing.
• You don’t build by focusing on what is going wrong, you expand from what is going right which also breeds excitement.
• The only way to secure data is not to gather it in the first place; the moment you start saving data, you are putting your customers and your company at risk.
• Storing your data under blockchain allows more choices for decentralization, mitigates risk, and reduces cost vs the traditional way of centralizing your data.
• The education system has to have both excellence AND equity, at scale. It's not neither, nor either, it has to have both.
• If teachers aren’t embracing the change (in education) you want to implement, the revolution collapses. And to do that, you have to trust teachers.

Will AI enhance our lives or obliterate the human race?

One series of talks were devoted to artificial intelligence and blockchain. The future belongs to decentralized (meaning blockchain) artificial intelligence. Current AI systems suffer from two missing ingredients: they can’t adapt to new situations without a great deal of human input (for example an AI system that can play the game of go cannot also drive a car), and they are not capable of rich models of objects and their interactions (for example, an AI system might be able to recognize faces, but it would not understand that the face was part of a human being and nor how to create a relationship with that person). It’s expected that the first gap will be solved in the next 3-5 years, which portends things like cars that under most circumstances will drive far better than humans, and the second in 15-20 years, which means machines may be able to learn to complete any task better than humans.

But don’t worry; 60% of AI experts say there is nothing to worry about, while only 40% maintain we are most likely on a collision course with destruction. Of course, speaking of experts, Ernest Rutherford, the founder of the atomic model, famously predicted that there would never be an atomic weapon, and that was just 12 hours before the first one was detonated. Would you get on a plane where only 40% of the experts were predicting it would crash?

Can we design a better person?

Another series of talks focused on human augmentation. Bionic devices are currently used primarily for disabled individuals. They can help people hear, walk, etc. Neuro technology (the interphase between neurons and devices) can work with bionic devices and provide feedback mechanisms. And gene editing already is used to alter crops and change animal cells to produce different chemicals (gene editing on pig cells growing in a lab enables those cells to produce human insulin). But these three technologies have even greater promise. Bionics will be able give people super human strength or other physical abilities (already most professional athletes get eye surgery in order to get vision twice as good as normal human vision). Neuro technology will soon allow brains to process faster, access more information, and control objects through thought. Gene editing will eliminate certain diseases while also offering the ability to create “designer children.”

Will we use human augmentation for the benefit of humanity, or will it further increase the gulf between the haves and the have nots? What do you think?

3DBear and TeacherGaming

Backing off these heavy thoughts a little, 3DBear reached top 10 startup status (out of 100 startup finalists) with Jussi Kajala’s riveting pitch startling the judges by crash landing a drone on the judges’ table. You can see at right how he used this to bring home the disruptive power of 3DBear to immerse kids in 3D design.

If you come to the SIIA Education Business Forum this week, or to FETC in late January, you’ll be able to meet Jussi and another Finnish EdTech star, Santeri Koivisto, whose TeacherGaming Desk is connecting curriculum and standard based lessons with popular video games to help teachers provide engaging lessons that promote deep learning.

Interesting online discussions on Edchat Interactive

And, please join us online in some exhilarating discussions:

• Shifting pedagogy from consumption to creation with Monica Burns
• Are your kids’ classes dangerously irrelevant with Scott McLeod

Just click on the links and register.

How To Tell Your Story

If you want to get an idea across, tell it in a story.

Do you want to instruct? Sell? Convince? Entertain? Motivate? Call to action?

We all know, tell it in a story.

But, here’s the hard truth, as inimitably presented by Steven Pressfield, “Nobody wants to read your shit.” Or hear about your shit. Or even cares about your shit.

Not even your mother, if we’re being honest about it.

The writer and the reader have a contract. The reader is willing to read what you write if you make it so compelling that it’s worth the time and effort to read it. Not what is valuable to you, what is valuable based on the needs of the reader.

So how do you tell your story so that people will read it, learn from it, be convinced by it, be entertained by it, be motivated by it, and/or act on it?

Here is how not to do it:

• Introduce the thesis
• Provide examples to support the thesis
• Recap and summarize

B-O-R-I-N-G

A good story has three elements.

1. Hook the reader, grab him or her so that he/she is compelled to go on. Every story has an inciting incident, the point where the story begins.
2. Build, escalate the tension, suspense, stakes, and excitement. What's the problem? What's its significance? This act belongs to the villain.
3. Pay off, bring it all home with a bang. What's going to really inspire the reader, learner, or customer? How do they win?

And when writing, begin the process of writing your story by determining that climax, first figure out where you want to finish, then figure out how you’re going to build tension and suspense and finally how you’re going to hook the reader.

You want to teach something? What’s a payoff in that lesson that your learners will embrace? Who or what is the villain, and how are you going to build tension or increase the stakes? What is going to hook the learners?

You want to describe or sell a product? How is your description or presentation going to climax? What is the ordeal that provides tension and excitement to the reader or listener? What is going to grab them?

Hook. Build. Payoff.

You’re going to find that a lot more effective than introduce, explain, recap.

Insights from Behavioral Science

Can Behavioral Science teach us anything we can use to improve in our classes?

Let’s see what we can learn from  studies that the US Department of Labor undertook. Their conclusion:

Behavioral insights involve the application of behavioral sciences, or understanding how people make and act on decisions, to improve the design of public policies and programs in ways that better reflect human nature.

Teachers want to nudge student behaviors so that they learn more. Administrators want to nudge teacher behaviors so that they act in ways that help their students learn more. District and state administrators want to nudge teacher and school administrator behaviors toward more effective schools. And publishers want more districts, schools, teachers, and students using their products to learn more.

Some of the types of problems where behavioral science can improve effectiveness:

Low take-up: Fewer people than expected participate.

Poor follow-through: People do not take all the steps needed to be effective.

False beliefs: People misunderstand aspects of a program and base their choices and actions on incorrect assumptions, resulting in implementations without integrity.

High attrition: people start but they do not finish.

If you’ve experienced these issues with administrators, teachers, or students (or even family members), perhaps you can start making changes in four areas:

Motivate People by

1. Invoking social norms (like peer pressure). Give people information about what others like them are doing and encourage them to join in what their peers are dong.
2. Reminding them of their values before acting. Studies show that when people first think of the goals or values they would achieve by acting, they are more likely to act in a manner to achieve them.
3. Considering the timing. People are more likely to start new things after certain landmarks, like the beginning of school, the start of the year, or even the beginning of a month or week.

Address Limited Attention by

1. Simplifying option. While everyone wants voice and choice, too many options overload our decision making ability; limit options to the most relevant choices, often fewer than five.
2. Providing a clear call to action. Make it clear what the next step is along with any relevant instructions, milestones, and deadlines.
3. Providing reminders in a way that will be perceived as helpful.

Streamline Operations and remove barriers to action by

1. Being specific with simple information on the benefits, and do not require people to seek out additional details.
2. Reducing hassles. Make it easy for them to start; for example set a time for the next meeting instead of asking them to request a time; provide an easy way for them to access instructions whenever they need them and wherever they are.
3. Changing the default. Make it require more effort for them to opt out than to opt in.

Make Communications More Impactful by

1. Making them easy to understand. Can the reader immediately understand the key points and follow-up points? Is the font easy to read and the format clear? Is the language simple to a casual reader, avoiding jargon or technical information?
2. Putting the most important information first. People often only read the first two paragraphs, then skim headings and bullet points. Make sure there is a clear single step or action that is communicated, although there can be multiple follow-up steps after that.
3. Personalizing the communications. Convey that you know and understand the recipient. Avoid generic greetings like “Dear Sir/Madam” and impersonalized signatures (like Curriculum Department).

The Department of Labor conducted trials using behavioral science to see if they could improve results in increasing retirement savings, improving OSHA compliance, and increasing participation of reemployment programs. These checklists came out of their successes. To access the reports and full communications, including a 38 page practitioners playbook, go to https://www.dol.gov/asp/evaluation/bistudy/

Can Behavioral Science teach us anything we can use to improve in our classes?

Yes. As the Chief Evaluation Officer for the DOL stated:

Behavioral science has shown that small changes to the ways we structure programs can have a large effect on their impact.

We Chose to Matter

By Mitch Weisburgh and Angela Maiers

Note, this originally appeared in a shorter form on the TES Blog.

Why do over 500,000 people follow Seth Godin on Twitter, read his blog, attend his courses, and buy his books? Because Seth Godin knows how to live a powerful life by helping others live powerful lives.

As educators, that’s what we all strive for as well.

The two of us were privileged to attend “Seth Godin live in NYC, a full day Q&A and tribal gathering” on Saturday, December 10, 2016. It was awesome, an awesome day. Personal coaches, entrepreneurs, educators, writers, people from all walks of life got up and asked, “Here is where I am stuck in my life, how do I move forward” while Seth used his genius and experience to provide direction.

There was a little bit of all of us in every question, and here are five lessons we can all learn from.

You need to destroy the perfect before you create the impossible

The record industry was perfect. Composers wrote. Artists performed and recorded. Publishers published. Radio stations played. Distributors distributed. Record stores sold. Consumers bought. If you wanted to listen to a particular song, you either bought the album or borrowed it from a friend. Everyone knew their role, and everyone played along. There wasn’t much you could do to improve the system.

Music is still being composed, recorded, published, played, distributed, and purchased today, but that old system is completely destroyed. Now, you can listen to virtually any song that’s ever been recorded. You don’t have to buy an entire album to listen to a song.

There are many cases where you can’t improve things at the margin; you have to make a complete break with what has been working in order to create something that is better. Sometimes you need to change a rule that everyone assumes can’t be changed.

What are the things in your lives that can be incrementally improved, and what are the things that need a break from the past?

Reassurance is futile

The problem with “you’re doing a great job” is that you never get enough. We hear it, but then, we start questioning, “did she really mean that?”, “why didn’t he say something more forcefully?”, “why did she only say that once?”

You can’t go into anything meaningful expecting positive reinforcement externally, and if you do, you’re probably not going to stick with it long enough to succeed. If what you want to do would get you applause from the beginning, it would have been done already. Solving problems, making changes, is hard.

For you. And if you’re an educator, for your students as well.

What works? Accept that whatever you’re trying to do is not going to work. But do it anyhow. Learn. And then do something else that’s not going to work. Repeat until something works.

There are no answers to nontrivial problems. Answers can only be seen in hindsight. Something worked, therefore it was the answer.

Educators mold students every day. Do we give students the mental toughness to forge on knowing that what they are trying to do will probably fail? Each of us can create safe-to-fail environments in our classrooms and schools.

People want to do what people like them are doing

Peer pressure is for kids. And it’s for all of us.

You want to inspire a group of people to help you solve a problem? You want students to want to learn? You want students to do well on a test? You want people to read your book, blog, or follow you on social media?

You need to develop stories that others can and want to repeat. And the subject of the story needs to be people like us do things like this.

The story is the way we communicate to make things happen. People repeat stories that resonate. When Oklahoma teacher Sharon Ricks has her students make stories about elves, and then comes in to class dressed like an elf, what do you think her students will be talking about to their friends and parents? When eduvangelist Kevin Honeycutt talks about the ornament that he is wearing that was designed and 3D printed by one of his students, what do you think people go home talking about? People like us do things like this.

How are your stories inspiring others to tell others that people like us do things like this.

Your brand is not a logo

Who are you to yourself and others?

You don’t start with a look and then try to build a tribe of followers. You start with a promise that you keep. A brand is a promise that you make so that when people see it they know what to expect.

A look or a logo is just a shorthand way for people to remember the promise. Are you the teacher that makes the French Revolution come alive? Do you bring challenging fun challenges to class? Are you the person who takes a special interest in others and makes them feel special? Do you help teachers find fun, instructive challenging activities for their students? That’s your real brand.

When you take a stand to matter, and you back it up with your actions, and you develop stories about your stand and your actions, and others tell those stories, you’ve established your brand,  you’ve found your tribe and you’ve allowed your tribe to find you. Then you can move the world.

What’s the promise that students see when they see you? What’s the promise that other educators see when they see you?

People don’t underperform, they’re just not enrolled

People do things because they tell themselves that people like them do things like that.

Students aren’t completing their homework? Students aren’t learning the material? Teachers aren’t adopting the new technology the district bought? You have to overcome the inertia of people continuing to do the same things they always have.

People tell themselves stories all the time: of what they deserve, how hard they work, what they can accomplish. They are not underperforming, they are enrolled in different scripts. You can’t modify those stories by fiat. There are so many different things vying for the attention of your students and colleagues, you’re just one more.

You have to get their attention. You have to invite them to trust you, and they have to enroll themselves in working for your shared goals.

Create purple cows; get their attention. It would have been much more straightforward for us to say that you should get their attention by being remarkable, but none of you would remember that. But a purple cow? That stands out, it grabs attention, it starts a discussion, it’s memorable.

Here are two questions to ask yourself as you enroll others to outperform:

1. What purple cows are you using to make yourself memorable?
2. How do you engage once you have attention so that students or colleagues are enrolled in your stories and vision?

In closing

Seth Godin’s closing statement was inspiring.:

We can’t just choose to fit in
We can’t just choose to be better, faster, bigger
We must choose to matter

Most of us chose education because we wanted to make a difference. We chose to matter. We hope that this short article has given you a few techniques that you can take back to your lives, your schools, and your students to make the difference you aspire to. Please share your thoughts and suggestions with the #Choose2Matter hashtag.

About the authors

Mitch Weisburgh advises EdTech companies on strategies to reach more students at Academic Business Advisors, and helps educators to share practices that work at Edchat Interactive.

Angela Maiers inspires students and educators to make a difference through Choose2Matter. She has spent more than 20 years working in elementary, middle, and university settings as a teacher, reading specialist, coach, special programs facilitator, and university professor