A joyful culture produces stories the world is yearning to hear. Capturing those stories and retelling them often reinforces your culture, as the outside world will want to come peek inside, ask probing questions, and walk away inspired to pursue their own joyful journey.
A joyful culture draws in people from outside the company, including clients, the local community, and the press.
...when asked, the majority of our team self-identify as introverts. This makes sense to me for several reasons: Introversion supports the deep thinking needed to solve complex problems. Introverts prefer fewer, deeper relationships. Introverts are often better, active listeners.
If everyone is tired and stressed, and also allowed to close his or her door or block out the world with earbuds, the chances of overhearing others' ideas just won't occur.
If change is to stick, you must quickly replace the old rewards with new rewards of equal or greater value (and remember, most treasured rewards are not monetary). Failure to establish new rewards will cause the team to revert to old forms and old rewards the first chance they get.Not sure I adequately provided new rewards.
Mechanistic - "Learning is treated as a series of steps to be mastered..."Reminds me of the distinction between training and learning, but it goes deeper than just this simple dichotomy. Cultures equipped with the digital networked infrastructure are more susceptible to influence and change. They welcome newness and wish well those who move along to other cultures. I wonder if we are increasingly defining ourselves by ever smaller culture groups? Is it meaningful to know I am a white American who lived in China? Is it more meaningful to know that I am a gardener and Wordpress enthusiast (I know I am posting on Blogger - I like Blogger too)?
Learning Environments - "...where the context in which learning happens, the boundaries that define it, and the students, teachers, and information within it all coexist and shape each other in a mutually reinforcing way."
"In communities, people learn in order to belong. In a collective, people belong in order to learn. Communities derive their strength from creating a sense of belonging, while collectives derive theirs from participation."For a while now, the community building practices of online courses (aka the discussion forum) have fallen short of expectations. I find this collective-community distinction inspiring and worthy of thought. And it will take thought to discover just how such a distinction could play out in any given learning environment.
"They experiment with what they already know how to do and modify it to meet new challenges and contexts. In a world where things are constantly changing, focusing exclusively on the explicit dimension is no longer a viable model of education"Software training can't just be about step 1, 2, 3 -- a mindset must be established within the user that encourages their own trial and error. What would the designer/programmer want me to do at this point? At the same time drill and practice is a necessary part of learning, the fundamentals must be accessible -- a desktop computer will not function if not plugged in. "Exclusively" is an important word in the above quote and also begs the question of appropriate proportions.
"Here is the fix for your issue," I might say.I do feel an internal struggle to know ALL the reasons, but also understand that knowing in that sense, at that level of explicit knowledge of zeros and ones, is not going to help this person. They really just need the fix.
"What caused that issue?" they ask.
"Well, some incompatibility in your browser... but specifically, I'm not sure."
"Oh, that's not reassuring to hear from technical support."
Implementing change in education must include changing teachers’ practices a beliefs. This does not mean abandoning beliefs but gradually replacing them with more relevant beliefs shaped by experiences in an altered context. And it is this altered context that may make the difference.Teacher Beliefs and Practices Part I: Patterns of Change
Technological determinists often seem to be trying to account for almost everything in terms of technology: a perspective which we may call technocentrism. To such writers we are first and foremost Homo faber - tool-makers and tool-users. The American Benjamin Franklin apparently first coined the phrase that 'man is a tool-using animal'. Thomas Carlyle echoed this in 1841, adding that 'without tools he is nothing; with them he is all.'
As the social critic Lewis Mumford has noted, one reductionist tendency is the identification of technology with tools and machines. This is merely, as he put it, 'to substitute a part for the whole' (in Pursell 1994, p. 26), because technology includes the whole of our material culture, not only tools and machines. It is also worth noting (as Carroll Pursell observes), that this reductionist interpretation involves a masculinization of technology. Just as the penis is sometimes referred to as a tool, so tools can be seen as symbolically phallic. Such symbolism has generated profound cultural reverberations.
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| Form Element Guys (click for a larger image) |
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| Doodle from Distance Learning Conference. Madison, WI (Click the image for a larger view) |