www.nickhodge.com

Uncle Dave, with his new found power of record­ing his own Pod­casts, invited me to yab­ber on about my week so far.

We sub­ver­ted the Uncle Mike hier­archy, and had a good show.  Thanks Uncle Dave.

On ABC-TV’s Dif­fer­ence of Opin­ion: The Way We Work, there is an excel­lent view on the world of mod­ern “work”.  The world of work has changed from a mere 5 years ago, let alone 10 or 15 years.

IM (instant mes­saging), blogs, RSS feeds, live cal­en­dars etc all dra­mat­ic­ally change the imme­di­acy of inform­a­tion and access to people. Thank­fully, I have yet to get a cor­por­ate mobile phone and my desk phone num­ber isn’t widely known out­side the internal phonel­ist. Email, blog­ging and RSS are my main outputs/inputs.

This week has been an inter­est­ing week “at work.” Being locked in a room, laptops off, being ‘induc­ted’ into Microsoft after some 4 weeks in the organ­isa­tion. I am con­stantly inspired by my new work col­legues, my boss; there is no short­age of inform­a­tion and toys to play with. So, it sorta seems induc­tion is a little late for me. Any­way, it’s required so into a room for 3 days.

There has been an inter­est­ing reac­tion of people I know to my new employer. Many are happy I am doing what I love: tech­no­logy and cus­tom­ers. Some ques­tion “what is your title again, and what exactly are you doing?” Other, more Mac-a-philes are sur­prised and ask a few more ques­tions. My ana­lysis is that Microsoft people are just like nor­mal people: friendly, help­ful but smarter than the aver­age bear.  Explain­ing your title as “pro­fes­sional geek” gets smiles and starts a conversation.

So, stuck in a laptops-off meet­ing, you have to do more “second shift” work to keep up with the RSS feeds (to know what your boss is doing) and emails.  Feel­ing guilty about not keep­ing up drives to bad on-the-lap work beha­viour. Fil­ter­ing, sort­ing, delet­ing, reply­ing. Blogging.

If you think this all sounds very “web 2.0 social net­work­ing blognor­ati” — guess what? This is how your kids are learn­ing and col­lab­or­at­ing now. IM, email, Power­points, short bursty just-in-time learn­ing. Watch and ask ‘em. I bet their “pro­duc­tion” applic­a­tion is not Excel or Out­look. It’s Messenger.

Uncle Mike warned me about keep­ing my email load down. In an attempt to be sub­vers­ive, I retain this goal. Also break­ing the rule about blog­ging when tired. Yep, doing that too. Hence the rambling.

The inner Munge Brother comes alive!

I had com­pletely for­got­ten about the Munge His­tory of video pro­duc­tion.

In the early 1990s, when Adobe Premiere was a new thing, and Quick­time over­shad­owed any­thing Microsoft had until at least 1995 — we cre­ated this video.

Star­ring Uncle Mike, Uncle Paul, Uncle Peter (Peter Har­ris) and myself — the DOSBOX (ori­ginal Munge Car) and Mike’s pas­sion for wind­surf­ing inter­sec­ted my pas­sion for the New­ton PDA. We cre­ated this little advert­is­ment as an advert­ise­ment for Ran­dom Access Con­sult­ing; or the Munge Brothers.

Spent yes­ter­day at the Education.au con­fer­ence “So What’s New”, I asked myself — so exactly what is new? I must admit to slight symp­toms of intel­lec­tual stock­holm syn­drome. Agree­ing with all points of view and res­ult­ing in a mush of thoughts, and no opinion.

Is Web2.0 new? Rel­at­ively. Is the Web new? Is TCP/IP new? Are com­puters new? Is technology-augmented learn­ing new? On the short bus ride home, all I could answer is “no”. The demands on the next gen­er­a­tion is new. The gen­er­a­tion that is going to replace the Baby-boomers and Generation-X are enter­ing into an envir­on­ment and com­munity where pure “know­ledge” or rote learn­ing can eas­ily be out­classed by any­one with a mobile phone to “google” an answer. Child­hood Obesity is a furphy. It’s about Child­hood Apathy.

It isn’t about teach­ers, cur­riculum, ped­agogy, cent­ral­ised test­ing, digital divides, politi­cians or depart­ments. Formal learn­ing about indi­vidual teach­ers and how they engage with their stu­dents. Enga­ging teach­ers leave a long emo­tional memory that has long term impact. Learn­ing Mentor Apathy Breeds Child­hood Apathy.

As the token lay­man at the con­fer­ence, I kept quiet and listened and learnt. The chal­lenges for par­ents and teach­ers is very sim­ilar for man­agers of small teams: enga­ging the minds of people is no easy task.

Phil­lip Adams was the key­note, fam­ous speaker. His feel­ings in rela­tion to the dot­age of mass-media and the rising of unme­di­ated media is inter­est­ing; and the impact the web and imme­di­ate com­mu­nic­a­tion have on the oncom­ing gen­er­a­tion seems in tune with the cur­rent mood of the internet.

James Farmer: post-punk decon­struc­tion­ist (icon­o­clastic edu­ca­tion, incor­por­ated sub­ver­sion) using web2; or more import­antly, using more advanced web tech­no­lo­gies in and out of the classroom. In a multi-dimensional, non-mediated media this seems the cur­rent norm.

Annika Small: the future learner, future learn­ing of the envir­on­ment. Future­Lab in UK. Not quite sure where this present­a­tion was on about; show­ing off Xerox Parc or MIT Labs-like videos of learn­ing scen­arios in the UK. Any of these could have been cre­ated with pure paper tech­no­logy and an enthu­si­astic teacher.

Whilst in these highly abstrac­ted circles, one should be extremely care­ful not to pro­ject your per­sonal life into a debate as import­ant as edu­ca­tion. As a par­ent of a teen age stu­dent, and not here to sell “stuff” to any­one. Just to listen, absorb — and sur­pris­ingly learn. Immersed into a world of instant-ness. Liam has cre­ated a digital learn­ing envir­on­ment based on strung-together tools. Cre­at­ing con­tent, and col­lab­or­at­ing with his class­mates to get work done.

The wis­dom of enthu­si­astic teach­ers is long remembered, les­sons from rote teach­ers is soon for­got­ten. Digital tech­no­logy will rarely aug­ment a bor­ing, non-engaging teacher. This concept is touched on by Judy O’Connell, a blog­ger at today’s con­fer­ence and rep­res­en­ted by Al Upton and Immanuel College’s Kevin Richardson.

A brave and far-sighted Edu­ca­tion Min­is­ter is going to have a dif­fi­cult time mov­ing the col­lect­ive wis­dom of rote learn­ing, exams, com­pet­it­ive effort and incre­mental res­ults into per­son­al­ised learn­ing and flex­ible meas­ure­ment. I wish them well. All chil­dren have a lat­ent thirst for learn­ing; and unlock­ing this should not be con­strained by short sighted populism

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The idea was to spend the day with the illus­tri­ous Uncle Mike. In a strange coin­cid­ence on the day, we both wore blue shirts. I was merely a calm­ing and super­flu­ous “num­ber 2″ gopher. Even more stra­tegic behind the scenes, earn­ing his stripes, was Munge Brother and Life Kludger No. 3, David Wal­lace. Wel­come to the Blue Shirt Bri­gade, and the Munge Broth­ers.

A good day out, and an excel­lent way to end the first week of doing something.

Chair­man Bill and CEO Steve have lost a valu­able mem­ber of staff in Uncle Mike. I have a dis­tinct feel­ing that product teams in Seattle will miss him more, if his­tory tells us any­thing. Nearly 9 years at Microsoft is an achieve­ment in these high velo­city career times.

Times like these trig­ger throughts and feel­ings requir­ing articulation:

• Accord­ing to Beth Wor­rall, Mike’s turn of phrase and gift of allit­er­a­tion hasn’t left him. “pro­cess is the colostomy bag of innov­a­tion” illus­trates both his off-centre (slightly black) but stark and illus­trat­ive phrase mak­ing skills. The Munge Broth­ers is dis­tinctly an Uncle Mike term, bor­rowed by mun­genet. These phrases have the abil­ity to per­fectly describe a situ­ation and cir­cum­stance that defies altern­ate char­ac­ter­isa­tion. Nam­ing your clapped-out, 1970’s era and rus­ted surf-boarding car­rier Holden sta­tion wagon DOSBOX replete with the per­son­al­ised num­ber plates sums up his sly sense of humour.
• Ad-hocery, or the lack of over-formalism and a fear of too-much pro­cess and meth­od­o­logy is an ana­thema to Mike. Throw­ing “stuff” together to solve a dif­fi­cult prob­lem is one of his strengths. “End user com­put­ing” and put­ting power into the hands of end users was his man­tra before he joined the small band at Ran­dom Access. Strict meth­od­o­lo­gists, or god-forbid, those how invent meth­od­o­lo­gies and Mike prob­ably wouldn’t get along that well. Watch out if you are in IT and don’t have a deep pas­sion for IT.
• Over ten years ago as a con­sult­ant, Mike’s phrase “a laptop and a mobile phone” clearly fore­told of today. One can work and be in touch vir­tu­ally any­where, and with a laptop be pro­duct­ive. There was a fam­ous piece of video made by the Munge Broth­ers that cap­tures this Fellini-like mood.
• A clear vis­ion of what is import­ant and what works. Some of the ori­ginal “turn­ing data into inform­a­tion” work the Munge Broth­ers presen­ted in 1991/2 and ad-hoc data retrieval meta­morphed into data-warehousing. This is an industry tech­no­logy that I use daily in my cur­rent, non-highly-technical man­age­ment job. I have no idea how I could do my job without this level of information.
• A love of art: be it music, video or still; that is off-kilter. It is dif­fi­cult to describe the imagery I’ve seen; and I think that Mike’s blog has a splat­ter­ing of these images. Sadly, it seems that its genetic as his son is now play­ing gui­tar at school.
• Friend­ship and loy­alty that spans many careers. Uncle Mike was my ref­eree for the job that lif­ted me from Adelaidian obscur­ity to Apple incubus. His loy­alty to his fam­ily in the midst of a tur­bu­lent work envir­on­ment is legendary — and he strike a har­mony that is unmatch­able. I’ve per­son­ally only seen this in one other per­son in my work­life; his name is also Michael.

Where next for the Fang? We might find him in the record­ing stu­dio as the micro-music media mogul of Adelaide or a gad­get heavy jack­aroo in out­back Aus­tralia. The fur­ther away he gets from this increas­ingly frac­tured IT industry the bet­ter. For those of us stuck on the inside, we are deadly envious.

I am up for it, Uncle Mike. Seems like the other Munge Broth­ers (Who are the Munge Broth­ers?) are up for it to. Only ques­tion is, when are you get­ting your ego-domain?

Inter­est­ingly enough, Mike’s son goes to Immanuel Col­lege — my old school. And plays in band, too. The world is an extremely small place these days.