Wow - check out the Lego Church. [via Ian's Messy Desk] Other great Lego sites:

• The Brick Testament
• The Lego Desk and other sculptures
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Stegosaurus
• Legoland Watercolors
• All things Lego at LUGNUT

[The Shifted Librarian]

One advantage of having two boys is that I get to play with the LEGOs myself. Some other useful Lego sites:

• Pitsco LEGO Dacta
• LEGO Mindstorms Internals
• LEGO Machine Gun

3:59:43 PM •  • comment  

There is a large body of evidence on the need for reflection in the learning process. It allows the learner to assimilate the information, and to create connections to their own prior knowledge and experience.

Mortimer Adler. "You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think."

Now all I have to do is make a convincing argument that surfing/blogging is a more productive form of this kind of reflection. Hey McGee, got any help for making this one fly?

[gRadio]

This cuts to the heart of the management challenges surrounding today's knowledge work.

There's an old, probably apocryphal, story about Tom Watson at IBM. Taking another executive on a tour of one of IBM's facilties, Watson encountered a programmer at his desk (this was long enough ago that it was surely a he and he was surely wearing a white shirt and a tie) with his feet up on the desk doing "nothing." Watson's companion pointed out this egregious example of lost productivity and challenged Watson about what was going to be done. 

Watson's reply?

"Nothing. The last idea that fellow had saved us ten million dollars. I'm waiting for his next one."

Unfortunately, we don't have enough managers today with the wisdom that Watson displayed. Should any manager be fortunate enough to have someone on staff generate a ten million dollar idea, they would demand to see the next idea tomorrow.  We generally don't have a very useful picture of how new ideas get generated and the time and investment it takes to make the environment conducive to innovation.  We want to force fit innovation into a production model, generating such oxymorons as the "idea factory." How can you run a factory when you can't even begin to predict how long each step will take, much less be clear about what the steps ought to be?

While you can't create insight and innovation on demand, you can do things to increase the chances that they will occur. Instead of trying to engineer the process, you focus on improving the environment. It's in that context that tools like weblogs add value. A weblog coupled with a news aggregator like Radio's can increase the flow of new ideas into the organization and offers the additional advantage of juxtaposing those ideas in interesting ways, which can spark new combinations. Moreover, trying to respond and react to that incoming flow in writing forces you work out your ideas in a more concrete way than simply waving your hands in a brainstorming session.

11:26:45 AM •  • comment  

Clay Shirky on weblogs, community, and scale.

With such software (weblogs), the obvious question is "Can we get the best of both worlds? Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large audience, but also allows all the members of that audience to engage with one another like a single community?" The answer seems to be "No." ...the larger a group held together by communication grows, the more it must become like an audience -- largely disconnected and held together by communication traveling from center to edge -- because increasing the number of people in a group weakens communal connection.

...

However, weblogs change the equation.  Each contributor gets a space where they can express their ideas.  Their contributions aren't buried under the weight of the community's contributions in their personal space.  The central hub of a weblog community provides a way to find these personal spaces, with each personal space acting as a filter or proxy for thousands of other sources.  As the community scales the number of potential connections balloons.  It isn't a broadcast system with one source of content, it is decentralized system with millions of sources.  It is a marketplace for ideas and insight.  By subscribing to a particular weblog, I am opting to transact with their idea flow without the noise of other voices. 

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]

We're watching and participating in the creation of a new category of communications. It has many of the characteristics of a disruptive innovation as defined by Clay Christensen (see The Innovator's Dilemma). Weblogs combine several existing ideas and technologies into a new configuration with the potential to grow in ways that will likely come as a surprise to many of those currently at the top of the hill.

The generally dismissive analyses of weblogs in the mainstream media are much the same kinds of blindered thinking that accompanied the arrival of the personal computer and other innovations that opened up markets that were "too small" to be interesting to the BigCos. I would interpret these as more evidence qualifying weblogs as a disruptive innovation.

9:31:56 AM •  • comment