"I am more and more convinced that our thinking in education should move away from improving learning to an imperative to respect the rights of children and young people, combat all forms of discrimination and violence against them, and rethink how we organize life and work. 1/

Not that improving learning is not important, but regardless of how we define and measure it, it is secondary to the well-being and status of children and young people in our societies. 2/

As matter of justice, educational results should not be used to justify, normalize and maintain inequality in income and status. Regardless of our education, all human beings are entitled to a life with dignity and to be regarded as equals. 3/

As a matter of justice, educational results should not be used as an excuse to deny a voice to those deemed as uneducated in the matters affecting their lives. 4/

As a matter of justice, education should not be used to normalize the practice of denying consent to those deemed as uneducated and to all marginalized populations in the matters affecting their lives. 5/

As a matter of justice, we must acknowledge that poverty has not much to do with education and much to do with power imbalances and structures of protection and access to land and other resources. 6/

And we must acknowledge that in order to maintain all forms of inequality and violence, they must first be learnt and normalized through the treatment of children at home and at schools.

If you want to learn more about this, you can follow @TobyRollo. 7/

Learning is important, no doubt about it, but it is not everything. At the end of the day, what we need more is about being more humane. Our priorities should be clear. 8/
https://www.holocaustandhumanity.org/about-us/educational-philosophy/

Can we do both? Absolutely, but ultimately, we should be willing to respect the full equality, dignity and consent of those choosing not to learn what we deem as important they should learn. 9/

We should also be willing to respect the full equality, dignity and consent of what kids choose to learn according to their own purposes, interests, rhythms and talents. 10/

And this may seem too far out, but let's think about what this means in terms of how neurodiversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, and disabilities are crushed and disrespected on a routine basis. 11/

Let's think about how interests, needs, rhythms and expressions falling outside of what school requires are punished routinely. 12/

Some people argue that by respecting the consent of children, we risk having them not learn what they need. But this is a slippery slope.... 13/

Once we accept that we can violate the right of children to consent and a differential treatment on an arbitrary basis, we normalize and facilitate the violation of their rights in other scenarios and with the use of arbitrary norms. 14/

Finally, if we are serious about moving away from the abuse of standardized tests and about decoupling education from the needs of markets.... 15/

We must be willing to stop defining accountability in terms of learning measurements and instead define it in terms of how students are treated and the resources and opportunities that are made available to them in order to learn according to their own purposes and needs. 16/

Currently, schools are not accountable to students, families and communities. Students are accountable to teachers and administrators, and teachers and administrators are accountable to authorities and big power brokers who don't have the best interests of students in mind. 17/

In order to transform the world outside school, we must rethink education. Alternatively, in order to rethink education, we must think about how we want to transform the world outside school. Both visions should match. Both visions should be adequate. 18/

And because in the world outside school, poverty is more a result of rights denied, power imbalances, structures of protection and access to land and other resources, and how we organize life and work... 19/

The treatment of children should prioritize the respect of their rights, granting them power, their access to resources, their access to learning according to alternative ways of organizing life and work, etc... 20/

And of course, this is especially important in the case of marginalized population whose oppression is based on the denial of power and resources. Teaching them that poverty is defined by lack of education is abusing and gaslighting them. 21/

A few more things, I almost missed... 22/

If we are serious about decoupling education from the needs of markets, learning should be about no other reason than for our own fun and pleasure as much as it should be about what we need to survive. 23/

And in this sense, the right to an education should be defined in terms of access to resources and opportunities to learn what individuals want and/or deem important according to their own purposes, and not in terms of forcing them to learn according to someone else's agenda. 24/

The erasure of what is not quantifiable and what is deemed as not important by conventional schools serves to maintain the lower status attached to activities performed by those considered as less educated. 25/

Such activities are performed disproportionately by women and marginalized populations. In many cases, within the domestic realm, these activities are not remunerated. 26/

But if we were all regarded as equals, all truly useful activities would be held in a similar status and acknowledged as what makes possible everyone else's jobs. So then again, there's no reason income differences should be so dramatic and justified by education. 27/

And it is the exploitation, discrimination and exclusion of many, that we should be centering in our thinking about education in connection to how we organize life and work. 28/

Enjoying being able to work with our hands and bodies, and enjoying being able to take care of others, should be regarded as a right, not as a sacrifice or as a punishment for losing in the game of school. 29/

Likewise, enjoying working in a science, technology, or in the arts, should also be regarded as a right, as perhaps a lifelong learning opportunity, and not as a reward for eliminating others in the game of school. 30/

Rights within communities where people collaborate and take care of each other, knowledge thought as a public good, not something privatized and individualized... 31/

Individual failures and accomplishments as belonging to the entire community, not rewards and punishments according to a competition where many are excluded, diversity, not standardization.

The end. 32/"

"It is common for organizations to offer awards to motivate individual behavior, yet few empirical studies evaluate their effectiveness in the field. We report a randomized field experiment (N = 15,329) that tests the impact of two types of symbolic awards on student attendance: pre-announced awards (prospective) and surprise awards (retrospective). Contrary to our pre-registered hypotheses, prospective awards had no impact while the retrospective awards decreased subsequent attendance. Survey studies provide evidence suggesting that receiving retrospective awards may demotivate the behavior being awarded by inadvertently signaling (a) that recipients have performed the behavior more than their peers have; and (b) that recipients have performed the behavior to a greater degree than was organizationally expected. A school leaders survey shows that awards for attendance are common, and that the organizational leaders who offer these awards are unaware of their potential demotivating impact."

"That's when I understood: when you watch a child who is focused on learning, and you let them know you’re watching, and you let them know your opinion as though your opinion matters, you just took that thing away from them. You just made it yours. Your smell is all over it now.

The evaluative gaze does the greatest harm, of course, to the kids who live under a biased eye; the ones who enter school with a test score or a disciplinary record or a skin color that shades the gaze against them. Once an assessment of a child's ability has been made, positive or negative, that child will feel it; if you think you can conceal it from them, you're wrong. They know. They always know. Studies have shown that even lab rats learn more slowly if their researchers believe that they aren't smart rats. The kids who grow up under a negative gaze, the ones who day after day, year after year, feel themselves appraised and found wanting –– these kids pay the greatest price, their psyches permanently damaged by it, their futures irrevocably harmed. (The fact that our appraisals are shown again and again to be wrong never seems to discourage us from making them.) But even the kids who get the good grades, the high scores, the perfect "10's" –– even they are subtly blighted by it. They've won the prize, and lost their power.

Why is it clear to us that it's degrading and objectifying to measure and rank a girl’s physical body on a numeric scale, but we think it’s perfectly okay to measure and rank her mind that way?

Over the years I've watched the many ways that children try to cope with the evaluative gaze of school. (The gaze, of course, can come from parents, too; just ask my kids.) Some children eagerly display themselves for it; some try to make themselves invisible to it. They fight, they flee, they freeze; like prey animals they let their bodies go limp and passive before it. Some defy it by laughing in its face, by acting up, clowning around, refusing to attend or engage, refusing to try so you can never say they failed. Some master the art of holding back that last 10%, of giving just enough of themselves to "succeed," but holding back enough that the gaze can't define them (they don't yet know that this strategy will define and limit their lives.) Some make themselves sick trying to meet or exceed the "standards" that it sets for them. Some simply vanish into those standards until they don't know who they would have been had the standards not been set.

But the power of the gaze goes beyond the numbers and letters used to quantify it. It exists in looks and tones and body language, in words and in the spaces between words. It is a way of looking at another human being, of confronting another human life; it is a philosophical stance, an emotional stance, a political stance, an exercise of power. As philosopher Martin Buber might have put it, the stance of true relationship says to the other, "I–Thou;" the evaluative gaze says "I–It." It says, "I am the subject; you are the object. I know what you are, I know what you should be, I know what 'standards' you must meet." It is a god-like stance, which is actually a big deal even if you think you are a fair and friendly god.

The evaluative gaze of school is so constant a presence, so all-pervasive an eye, that many people have come to believe that children would actually not grow and develop without it. They believe that without their "feedback," without their constant "assessment," a child's development would literally slow or even stop. They believe that children would not learn from the things they experience and do and see and hear and make and read and imagine unless they have an adult to "assess" them (or unless the adult teaches them to "self-assess," which generally means teaching them to internalize the adult gaze.) For people whose experience is with children inside the school system, it may seem self-evident that this is true. For people whose experience is with children outside the school system, it may seem like believing that an acorn would not grow into an oak tree unless you measure it and give it your opinion. Because an oak tree does not actually require your opinion, and believe it or not, 90% of the time, neither does a child.

A pot boils whether you watch it or not. It just needs water and fire.

There are ever-increasing numbers of people raising their kids outside this Panopticon of constant evaluation and measurement and feedback, and what they find is simply this: they grow and develop very much like other kids. Like other kids, they don't all conform to the same "standards;" like other kids, they are individual and diverse. Like other kids, they have triumphs, and struggles, and doldrums, and passions, and frustrations, and joys. "Assessment," or the lack of it, seems to have remarkably little to do with it. Because what an oak tree actually needs is not your opinion but soil and water and light and air, and what a child needs is love and stories and tools and conversation and support and guidance and access to nature and culture and the world. If a kid asks for your feedback, by all means you can give it; it would be impolite not to. But what we should be measuring and comparing is not our children but the quality of the learning environments we provide for them. "

"The University of Oregon Accessible Education Center and AccessABILITY Student Union present renowned speaker, neuro-diversity activist and author Jonathan Mooney.

Mooney vividly, humorously and passionately brings to life the world of neuro-diversity: the research behind it, the people who live in it and the lessons it has for all of us who care about the future of education. Jonathan explains the latest theories and provides concrete examples of how to prepare students and implement frameworks that best support their academic and professional pursuits. He blends research and human interest stories with concrete tips that parents, students, teachers and administrators can follow to transform learning environments and create a world that truly celebrates cognitive diversity."

"Why discipline ed-tech?

I cannot help but think here of Michel Foucault and his Surveiller et punir, translated into English, of course, as Discipline and Punish. The book is certainly best known for the theory of Panopticism, Foucault’s history of the development of a disciplinary society through specific mechanisms, movements, technologies, and processes of surveillance. But this disciplinary society isn’t simply a function of an architectural or technological Panopticon. This is always for Foucault about knowledge and power. And importantly, in Discipline and Punish, he traces the rise of academic disciplines in the 18th century alongside the establishment of the modern prison – they share the practices of investigation, intervention, examination, interrogation, control. “The disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate.”

Education technology is already a discipline; education technology is already disciplinary. That is its history; that is its design; that is its function.

Education is replete with technologies of discipline. It has been, Foucault argues, since it was formalized in the late eighteenth century. By ranking students, for example, by assigning students to rows, these disciplinary technologies and practices “made the educational space function like a learning machine, but also as a machine for supervising, hierarchizing, rewarding” [emphasis mine].

Can a discipline of education technology challenge or undo or even see its own disciplinary practices, mechanisms, technologies?

Weller suggests that a discipline “creates a body against which criticism can push.” But I’m not sure that that’s the case. It seems more likely that the almost utter lack of criticality in education technology is because of how disciplined the field already is. It works quite hard to re-inscribe its own relevance, its own power – that's what all disciplines do, no doubt; it forecloses contrary ideas – most importantly, the idea that these technologies might not be necessary, that they might in fact be so tightly bound up in practices of surveillance and control that they forestall teaching and learning as practices of freedom and liberation.

The very last thing that education technology needs right now is to become more disciplinary. We need, as I said last week in my keynote at DeL, a radical blasphemy, a greater willingness for undisciplining."

"It has been just over three years since I moved back home. It was, I have come to realize recently, a colossal mistake — an evasion, a cowering, an attempt to put a stop on the forward march of time.

Yet, for the surfeit of things I have to regret, it is something small and emblematic about this most recent of my many errors that sticks out in my mind. Over the last few years, I have often, in a sudden rush of optimism, told myself that on either this or the next morning I will, instead of my usual cup of tea, start the day with the perfect cup of coffee: freshly brewed, with freshly ground beans, perhaps with a slice or two of a freshly-bought, buttered baguette. And each time I have come up to this possibility, I have turned away from this most utterly mundane of things, instead making my normal cup of tea. As the opportunity presents itself, there is a voice that whispers at the back of my mind: no, it’s too indulgent; you don’t deserve it yet.

I am, just to be clear, talking about having a fucking cup of coffee.

What makes some people feel entitled to pleasure — and others so prone to self-denial? Why is that some people don’t give a second thought to that most ordinary, human of impulses — right now, I am going to do what I want to do — while others march on to their deaths, heads cowed and hearts empty?

As I’ve been rolling over that question for the past couple of months, here is what I have realized. Most of my adult life has been the product of a series of “no’s.” I have, over and over again, said no: to love, to sex, to work, to friends, to money, to challenge, to fear, to risk, to reward.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that for me, pleasure has always been intimately tied to guilt. It is as if in my mind pleasure has a price, and the only way to earn enough currency to acquire it is through work, effort, and self-abnegation. No work, no suffering, or no achievement, and pleasure seems undeserved, unwarranted, even unfair. What, I often feel, in those dark, dense knots of my subconscious, have I done to merit this reward?

In the abstract, pleasure is about saying yes. It is an expression of an affirmative yearning, not the filling in of a lack, but a kind of positivity with no corollary in an inverse negation. Pleasure is Deleuzian: a force of outwardness and wanting that erupts from itself.

Or at least, that’s what I think in theory. In reality, pleasure to me is in fact part of a delicate balance of binary relations set upon a crisscrossed network of orthogonal axes: of work and play; of effort and reward; of indulgence and denial; of guilt and entitlement. Pleasure is not a thing for itself, but the opposite pole of a series of responsibilities. It is a not only a thing to be earned, but a thing to be indulged in if and only when enough labour has been expended, and enjoyment sufficiently deferred.

When one has spent a lifetime saying no, year after year spent in fear, pleasure begins to seem like a thing for other people, for those who’ve earned it, and those who thus deserve it. A couple of summers ago, as we were making plans for a Friday night, a friend said to me, defiantly, “I’ve worked hard all week and now I want to enjoy myself.” It was a sense of entitlement to pleasure borne of effort — the energy of work now transmogrified into justification for enjoyment. It was utterly foreign to me.

One could say a number of things at this point, though in particular, it seems worth commenting on how certain types of guilt and neuroses are fed by the structures and strictures of capitalism — that wage labour under a general rubric of the Protestant work ethic produce reward and pleasure as transactional. There is, of course, also the post-Marxist turn to this critique: that when pleasure — and, of course, the consumption of representations of others’ and one’s own pleasure through social media — becomes the core of the consumer economy, things will inevitably get more messy. It is less a question of “come and play, come and play, forget about the movement” than consumption becoming the movement itself.

But for all the possible structural theorizing, what seems more important is to challenge the notion of pleasure and negation as an oppositional pairing. To say that enjoyment is fair for those who have put in the effort is to miss part of the equation: that pleasure is not simply a reward for denial, but is itself a productive irruption made of an outward movement — that it is energy made from energy, a byproduct of an omnivorous and insatiable tumbling forward. It is, to put it more plainly, an answer in the affirmative to the call “will you?” It is a yes to the demand “say yes.”

The trouble with pleasure is that it is not a reward at all, but an outcome of itself — pleasure as performative instantiation of pleasure. It is, to now arrive at the ultimately self-help vocabulary I have been deliberately avoiding, a thing to be done, not a thing to be experienced. The question then is this: from where does the courage to say yes arise, when bravery, too, can only ever emerge from the act of bravery itself?"

"This is a powerful statement for young people, and badges are a useful system that is one part incentive, one part reward, and one part portfolio to display skills that are not easily demonstrated through a report card or grade.

There are two big opportunities for badges to change the trajectory of learning for young people. First, for creative, 21st century learning that is not easily measured by a test or grade, badges are a clear way to assign value to skills. Young people can learn skills in focused portions, then string skills together in an order they dictate. Because the learning is personalized and acknowledged visibly, it is more meaningful and more easily connected to higher learning or career paths. Secondly, earning badges creates bite-size incremental successes to engage and continually motivate students who have not had equal access to this type of learning."

…

"What does all this mean for my Camp H girls? For your daughter or son? For your 5th grade students? The power of badges is simple and human: earning and displaying the things we learn makes us both proud of what we’ve done and excited to keep discovering what else we can do. And the potential for badges within a creative endeavor like design is vast: design is a great equalizer, and badges allow us to carve our own path. Badges are a way to “choose your own adventure.” For young people whose demographics or parents’ education levels or geography or socioemotional challenges make linear learning tough, the self-direction and incremental reward of badges is a motivating pathway that leads to life-long learning.

More than anything, a physical badge worn visibly, affords a young person with a sense of confidence and agency. “This is what I know how to do,” they can say to the world. I know this to be true because my camp girls say it better than I ever could. And, as is the case with Camp H, badges are earned collectively, through collaboration: “we learn together, and we earn together,” we say. At Camp H, every girl earns her badges because of her own grit, helped along by the support of her campmates.

A few weeks ago, I hosted a Welding and Wine workshop for adult women, in which four of my Camp H girls led the welding instruction. These ten-year-old girls explained the science of how a weld works “like a lightning bolt,” “using an electrical current,” and “fuses the work metal together… not like soldering or a glue gun.” In this moment of cross-generational sisterhood, my young camper girls were leaders and the bearers of knowledge. Teah, an alumna camper who has earned 8 of her 11 skill badges, told me she was excited to earn her 9th badge, Leadership, for her instructional role at the adult workshop. She said how toting her badge-clad Camp H messenger bag to school each day makes her feel.

With one sassy hand on her hip, she told me, “I use it every day. My friends and teachers ask me about the badges and I tell them, ‘Those are all the awesome things I know how to do.’”"

"The film and online project brings together international philosophers, scientists and artists to give description and analysis to the contemporary moment as defined by computational tools and networks.

It states that networks are not new and have been forever with us in the evolution of our cities, trade, communications and sciences, in our relations as businesses and nation states, in the circulation of money, food, arms and our shared ecology.

Yet something has deeply changed in our experience of time, work, community, the global. Empires looks deeply to unravel how we speak to the realities of the individual and the notion of the public and public 'good' in this new world at the confluence of money, cities, computation, politics and science."

[Film website: http://www.revolutionofthepresent.org/ ]

[Trailer: https://vimeo.com/34852940 ]
[First cut (2:45:05): https://vimeo.com/32734201 ]

[YouTube (1:21:47): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaTw5epW_QI ]

"Join the conversation at http://www.revolutionofthepresent.org

Summary: The hope was that network technology would bring us together, create a "global village," make our political desires more coherent. But what's happened is that our desires have become distributed, exploded into images and over screens our eyes relentlessly drop to view.

REVOLUTION OF THE PRESENT examines the strange effects — on cities, economies, people — of what we might call accelerated capitalism. Set against a visually striking array of sounds and images, 15 international thinkers speak to the complexity and oddity of this contemporary moment as they discuss what is and what can be.

Documentary Synopsis:
Humanity seems to be stuck in the perpetual now that is our networked world. More countries are witnessing people taking to the streets in search of answers. Revolution of the Present, the film, features interviews with thought leaders designed to give meaning to our present and precarious condition. This historic journey allows us to us re-think our presumptions and narratives about the individual and society, the local and global, our politics and technology. This documentary analyzes why the opportunity to augment the scope of human action has become so atomized and diminished. Revolution of the Present is an invitation to join the conversation and help contribute to our collective understanding.

As Saskia Sassen, the renowned sociologist, states at the outset of the film, 'we live in a time of unsettlement, so much so that we are even questioning the notion of the global, which is healthy.' One could say that our film raises more questions than it answers, but this is our goal. Asking the right questions and going back to beginnings may be the very thing we need to do to understand the present, and to move forward from it with a healthy skepticism.

Revolution of the Present is structured as an engaging dinner conversation, there is no narrator telling you what to think, it is not a film of fear of the end time or accusation, it is an invitation to sit at the table and join an in depth conversation about our diverse and plural world."

[See also: http://hilariousbookbinder.blogspot.com/2014/09/rethinking-internet-networks-capitalism.html ]

[Previously:
https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ec1d3463d74b
https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9f60604ec3b3 ]

"How do our designs change when we start emphasizing people and community and not just the things they do for us? Over the next year of my research, I'm exploring acknowledgment and gratitude, basic parts of online relationships that designers often set aside to focus on the tasks people do online.

In May of last year, Wikipedia added a "thanks" feature to its history page, enabling readers to thank contributors for helpful edits on a topic:

[image]

The Wikipedia thanks button signals a profound change that's been in the making for years: After designing elaborate social practices and mechanisms to delete spam and maintain high quality content, Wikipedia noticed that they, like other wikis, were becoming oligarchic (pdf) and that their defense systems were turning people away. Realizing, this Wikipedia has been changing how they work, adding systems like "thanks" to welcome participation and encourage belonging in their community.

Thanks is just one small example of community-building at Wikimedia, who know that you can't create a welcoming culture simply by adding a "thanks" button. Some forms of appreciation can even foster very unhealthy relationships. In this post, I consider the role of gratitude in communities. I also describe social technologies designed for gratitude. This post is part of my ongoing research on designing acknowledgment for the web, acknowledging people's contributions in collaborations and creating media to support community and learning.

Why does Gratitude Matter?

People who invest time in others and support their communities describe their lives through a lens of gratitude. Dan McAdams at Northwestern University studies "generativity," the prosocial tendency of some people to see themselves as a person who supports their community: donating money, making something, fixing something, caring for the environment, writing a letter to the editor, donating blood, or mentoring someone. After asking them to take a survey, McAdams asks them to tell the story of their lives. Highly generative people often describe their lives through a lens of gratitude. People who give back to their community or pay it forward often think of things in exactly those terms: talking about the people, institutions, or religious figures who gave them advantages and helped them turn difficult times into positive experiences (read one of McAdams's studies in this pdf).

Gratitude that becomes part of our life story builds up over time. It's the kind of general gratitude we might direct toward a deity, an institution, or a supportive community. McAdams argues that this gratitude is an important part of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are: the person who loses his job and reimagines this tragedy positively as more time for family. A thankful perspective has also been linked to higher well being, mental health, and post-traumatic resilience (Wood, Froh, Geraghty, 2010 PDF)

Can we cultivate gratitude? Aside from my personal religious practice, I'm most often reminded to be grateful by Facebook posts from Liz Lawley, a professor at RIT who participates in the #365grateful movement. Every day in 2014, Liz has posted a photo of something she's grateful for. It's part of a larger participatory movement started by Hailey Bartholomew in 2011 to foster gratitude on social media:

[video: "365grateful.com" https://vimeo.com/22100389 ]

…

The Economy of Thanks

… signals an understanding …

Expressions of gratitude can dramatically increase the recipient's pro-social behaviour…

Expressions of gratitude are a significant factor in successful long-term, collaborative relationships.…

…the link between reciprocity and thanks…

…commercial employee recognition technology for managers…

… expressions of thanks are signals of exchange within a relationship…

…

The Dark Side of Thanks

Gratitude or its absence can influence relationships in harmful ways by encouraging paternalism, supporting favoritism, or papering over structural injustices. Since the focus of my thesis is cooperation across diversity, I'm paying close attention to these dark patterns:

Presumption of thanks misguides us into paternalism…

… gratitude can support favoritism. …

Gratitude sometimes offers a moral facade to injustice.…

…

Mechanisms of Gratitude and Acknowledgment

In design, gratitude and thanks are often painted over systems for reputation, reward, and exchange. The Kudos system offers a perfect example of these overlaps, showing how a simple "thank you" can become freighted with implications for someone's job security, promotion, and financial future. As I study further, here are my working definitions for acts in the economy of gratitude:

Appreciation: when you praise someone for something they have done, even if their work wasn't directed personally to you. This could be a "like" on Facebook, the "thanks" button on Wikipedia, or the private "thanks" message on the content platform hi.co

[image]

Thanks: when you thank another person for something they have done for you personally. This is the core interaction on the Kudos system, as well as the system I'm studying with Emma and Andrés.

Acknowledgment: when you make a person visible for things they've done. This is closely connected to Attribution, when you acknowledge a person's role in something they helped create. I've already written about acknowledgment and designed new interfaces for displaying acknowledgment and attribution. I see acknowledgment as something focused on relationships and community, while attribution is more focused on a person's moral rights and legal relationships with the things they create, as they are discussed and shared.

Credit: when you attribute someone with the possibility or expectation of reward. Most research on acknowledgment focuses on credit, either its role in shaping careers or its implications in copyright law.

Reward: when you give a person something for what they have done. For example, the Wikipedia Barnstars program offers rewards of social status for especially notable contributions to Wikipedia. Peer bonus and micro-bonus systems such as Bonus.ly add financial rewards to expressions of thanks, inviting people to add even more bonuses toward the most popular recipients.

[video: "Bonus.ly: Peer-to-peer employee recognition made easy" https://vimeo.com/87399314 ]

Review: when you describe a person, hoping to influence other people's decisions about that person. Reviews on "reputation economy" sites like Couchsurfing are often expressed in the language of thanks, even though they have two audiences: the person reviewed as well as others who might interact with the subject of your review. In 2011, I blogged about research by Lada Adamic on reviews in the Couchsurfing community.

Designing for Gratitude, Thanks, and Acknowledgment

Gratitude is a basic part of any strong community. Thanks are the visible signal of a rich economy of favors and obligations, a building block in relationship formation and maintenance. Gratitude is common in the life stories of people who give back to their community, and it's the hallmark of the most successful long-term collaborative relationships. Despite the importance of gratitude, processes for collaboration and crowdsourcing much more frequently focus on rewards, reviews, and other short-term incentives for participation. Gratitude does have a dark side when it overrules consent, fosters favoritism, and even hides systemic injustices.

If we're going to design for community (civic technologies, I'm looking at you), we need to focus on relationships, not just the faceless outputs we want from "human computation." Across the academic year, I'll be posting more about the role of acknowledgment in cooperation, civic life, learning, and creativity, accompanied by more in-depth data analysis. I'll also write more about Wikipedia's initiatives for online collaboration that aim for greater inclusivivity."

[Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TymwLDcrpYYJ:civic.mit.edu/blog/natematias/gratitude-and-its-dangers-in-social-technologies+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us ]

[Response by David T. Hickey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IaB8N6P4lc ]

"This model is an accurate one in descriptive terms, but a terrible one in normative terms. So let me propose a highly prejudiced contrarian reading of what Csikszentmihalyi is describing.

What we have here is a closed boundary defined by a symbolic domain (rather than raw, unmediated reality), within which there are awestruck beginners and awe-inspiring experts. Expert performance is primarily a beautiful feeling that is derived not from the effects of the performance itself, but from the integration of metacognition and cognition into an internal superego. An inner [Tiger-] parental spectator that supervises performance according to an external standard of error-free perfection, and rewards you psychologically to the extent that you meet that standard. The performance is necessarily an incremental push beyond the edge, where received standards of performance and aesthetics can be reliably extrapolated. You cannot apply standards of violin performance if you suddenly decide to use your violin as a bat in an improvised game of softball (a profane use of a violin that is nevertheless physically possible).

In short, this is sustaining innovation driven by groupthink, divorced from reality by an internal language of symbols, and limited to what doesn’t violate sacred standards of quality or prevailing aesthetic sensibilities. As determined by honored retirees whose expertise is beyond doubt.

The reward for such metacognition is in fact the subjective state of flow: a regime of behavioral sacredness that is valued for its own sake rather than for its effects, and which is rewarded in social ways.

Disruptive Metacognition: Finding Ugly Awkwardness

It’s easy to get to the broader notion of deliberate practice. The base layer is still the same. You’re still practicing the skill for 10,000 hours.

It’s the metacognition that is different. Instead of finding creative flow, you seek out ugly awkwardness that nevertheless intrigues and tempts you. You figure out what feels uncomfortable and “wrong” in some sense, but also alluring, and figure out why. There are no judges to tell you if you’re right. There are no aesthetic standards to internalize. There are no performance standards other than what you’ve yourself done before or the behaviors of people you choose to imitate because you can’t think of anything yourself.

And most importantly, there is no clear understanding of whether variation from your own past behavior or others’ behaviors should be considered error or innovation."

…

"So disruptive metacognition is irreverent and transgressive. It does not respect received sacred/profane distinctions. It does not justify extended practice on the basis of “pay your dues” but as a means of exploration. It does not seek flow as an end in itself, divorced from the effects of performance. While sustaining metacognition can be whimsical in an approved way, it cannot be offensively playful in the sense of irreverently crossing the boundary separating sacred and profane. Only disruptive metacognition can do that.

If the reward for effective sustaining metacognition is a sense of your own inner sacredness, experienced as flow, the reward for effective disruptive metacognition is a sense of snowballing absurdity and paradox that miraculously does not unravel. Effective awkwardness that inspires irreverent laughter rather than reverent awe. Instead of approval from honored figures, you get the slightly vicious pleasures of desecration.

While it is possible to do this all this in closed worlds of performance, it takes a kind of sociopathy to ignore expert tastes (or refined customer/audience tastes) and willingness to suffer being punished for being genuinely innovative (customers of cultural products punish straying performers much more than other kinds of customers). This is why early rockers shocked classical musical purists by burning or smashing guitars. Of course, you can also shock aging rockers’ sense of the sacred by not being outrageous (“kids today, they have no rebellion in them!”)."

…

"The bad news is that success still depends on repeating some skilled behavior in roughly the 10,000 hour range, at “good enough” levels, before you’ll start stumbling across mutations that are both good and haven’t been spotted and explored before. This is why “good ideas” that beginners come up with, even if actually good, aren’t worth much. They lack the behavioral base to actually go down the bunny trail opened up by the idea. The have the idea, but not the idea maze. The genetic mutation without the protein synthesis machinery.

But if you do have the disruptive deliberate practice under your belt you can, well, be disruptive.

If you know the basics of disruption theory, you know it involves attacking a market from a marginal niche. I won’t rehash that. But I will state what might be a new point. What’s disruptive about disruption is that it violates a prevailing sense of the sacred with irreverent profanity.

A disruptor attacks a saintly mindset rather than a market. A mindset that holds certain performance standards and aesthetic considerations to be sacred, and is blind to the potential of what it considers profane. The disruptor wins by being mediocre where it is a sacred duty to be exceptional, and embracing profanity where saints are blinded by their own taboos."

"Why are white people so eager to advocate for the sort of schools to which they would never send their own children?

Reader: more and more white people agree that strict, “no excuses” style charter schools provide an ideal learning environment for poor minority kids. As proof of this surging enthusiasm I give you exhibit A: a glowing report about Harlem’s Democracy Prep charter school featured in the current issue of the New Yorker, one of America’s whitest magazines. (Full disclosure: I am white and also a New Yorker subscriber). Which brings us to today’s fiercely urgent question: why are white people so eager to advocate for the sort of schools to which they would never send their own children?

Through the Gauntlet

The New Yorker piece, by writer Ian Frazier, is subtitled ‘Up Life’s Ladder’—but ’gauntlet’ might be a more accurate metaphor. Frazier is dazzled by the spectacle of the 44 members of Democracy Prep’s first graduating class, on stage at the Apollo Theater in their school-bus-yellow robes, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on hand to fete them. But more than three quarters of Democracy Prep’s students—23% each year—never made it onto the stage. If Frazier is aware of the school’s attrition rate, among the highest in New York City, he doesn’t mention it. Nor does Frazier have anything to say about the school’s strict “no excuses” disciplinary policy. Instead, he seems excited by the fact that students at the school are required to take Korean, the only foreign language offered. Best of all, Frazier likes the fact that 100% of the remaining graduates are headed to a four-year college.

Whatever it Takes

I’m guessing that it’s not the fault of the New Yorker’s legendarily “no excuses” fact-checking department that these less inspiring (not to mention less democratic) details about Democracy Prep didn’t make it into the magazine. Instead, the writer is merely reflecting a growing consensus among elites that a certain kind of schooling is necessary to propel poor minority students along the steep uphill climb to college. This formula for success, the “special sauce,” is long and hard and requires the sort of militaristic discipline that I doubt any writer for the New Yorker would tolerate for his or her children for a day, let alone the four years, eight years, even 12-year-long slog that is supposed to end in a mythical place called “college.”

• Doing time

The school day at Democracy Prep starts at 7:45AM and lasts until 4:15PM, but students routinely stay until six for tutoring. A nine, ten or 11 hour school day would no doubt strike middle class parents as excessive (what about Skyler’s soccer practice, or Emma’s beekeeping camp?) but even within this endless school day there is no time to lose. Democracy Prep, like many urban “no excuses” schools, uses a countdown during transitions from one class or activity to the next so that students don’t waste a second of learning time.

• Living the DREAM

Democracy Prep relies upon a monetary-based system of rewards that is common in the “no excuses” world. Students earn and lose DREAM Dollars (the acronym stands for the school’s values: Discipline, Respect, Enthusiasm, Accountability and Maturity) based on behavior and academic performance. In addition to providing an important regulator of behavior, the DREAM dollars also prep the students for their ultimate destination beyond even college: work.

• Broken windows

A “no excuses” school embodies a philosophy that might best be understood as the educational equivalent of the broken windows theory. Small disruptions are seen as leading to the kind of unruliness and disorder that stands in between poor minority kids and college-bound success. Hence the straight, silent lines in which students transition from one class to another might be seen as leading straight to college.

• SLANT

Suburban parents are likely unfamiliar with SLANT, the KIPP-informed mantra that shapes “no excuses” teaching. The behavior management technique instructs students to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track the teacher. Younger students, who tend to be naturally disruptive, may also be instructed to fold their hands or “make a bubble,” pursing their lips and filling their cheeks with air so as to keep them from talking.

• Time and Punishment

The elaborate architecture of rewards and punishments that undergirds the “no excuses” approach must have consequences, of course. Suspensions at these schools tend to be extremely high, even though suspending students has long been linked to worsening academic outcomes and higher drop out rates. The recent revelations about the high number of kindergartners suspended by the charter school chain “Achievement First” in Connecticut may have caused some initial discomfort among suburban advocates of these schools (little Haley, suspended???). But amid the rising certitude that we must do “whatever it takes” to propel poor minority students to college, that discomfort was soon forgotten."

"Toca Tea Party is also a multiplayer, interactive experience: you can sit three kids around the iPad, and each one gets a drink and a plate, a chance to pour, spill, and wipe up. In Hanna Rosin’s recent Atlantic cover story, “The Touch-Screen Generation,” she describes the iPad as functioning “like a tea table without legs.” At the end, when the last doughnut is eaten (tap, tap, tap on the plate), a basin of water pops up and everyone can put their dishes in the sink. “We got feedback saying, ‘We want to do more dishes!,’ ” Jeffery says. “No adult has said that ever. Kids just want to participate, and housework is an environment they are familiar with.” Toca House offers much more virtual cleaning: mopping, laundry, dishwashing, and (my personal favorite) ironing that never ends in scorching or ironed-in wrinkles. Jeffery says they have gotten a lot of response from parents of children with autism on Toca House, which they can use to practice everyday tasks—without real-world frustration.

Although the praise from the autism community was unexpected, a frictionless play environment was part of Toca Boca’s mission from the start. Toca Boca apps have no levels, no rewards, no beginning, middle, and end. They also have almost no words, because much of their target market can’t read. Why frustrate the kids with written instructions? And why pay to have those instructions translated into the languages of the hundred and forty-six countries where the apps are sold?

“If you look at what’s available in the App Store, almost everything is in the learning category, only books and games,” says Jeffery. “That’s how adults play. Read a book, play Angry Birds on your phone. But you would rarely pick up a doll… which is a shame.” What Toca Boca is trying to do is open up the digital experience, let kids make mistakes, figure it out as they go along—without getting eaten by a zombie, or pigeonholed as a princess."

"The trick, apparently, is to *learn* from failure. Only then is failure worth risking. That way the 'innovation' has a point even if it doesn't deliver immediate value. I'd argue, however, that we don't always have to learn from failure, and that sometimes making the same mistakes over and over again might even be part of the innovation (or rather the *invention*) process.

I've worked on lots of failed projects. I'm quite proud of it (in a way). I worked on a project recently, in fact, that was pretty much a failure. (Such a failure that it recently came *second* in an innovation contest - LOL.)"

…

"So for my money, this leaves 'innovation' as the poor second-cousin of genuine 'invention'. I'd also like to claim that invention can and does often happen in a bubble, and doesn't have to relate to anything that came before. *And* I'd also want to suggest that failure doesn't necessarily need to have a learning point or any value.

We can just noodle about and experiment and repeat and fail again and again and again without any obvious point. Many great artists have done this. It is allowed - and may even be a more natural way to get to truly great new things than enforcing a programme of 'innovation'.

Two cheers, then, for Tom Uglow for being brave enough to face the consequences of our failure and admit that the benefits and value of the #dream40 experiment are to a large extent 'unknown'. As he writes:

"Artistic projects like this do not fit one-size-fits all metrics; and I’m not sure what those metrics are anyway – though I do know that targets breed strategies to hit targets, so you’ll forgive us for ignoring them. Hitting targets reward organizations not audiences, or artists, or culture. This was a disruptive experiment and a hugely successful one if judged simply on what we learnt and where we now move forward from. We hope you understand why we did this and that you enjoyed and continue to enjoy it."

"

[via: http://proboscis.org.uk/5383/thoughts-on-failure/ ]

"As I’m sure others who’ve launched kickstarter projects have experienced, I received a number of messages offering me advice and professional services to enhance the campaign. Essentially all the advice boiled down to a simple nugget, that the only way to succeed was to already have a significant “fanbase” who could be “activated” or motivated to pledge support and then amplify it by sharing the fact they’d supported the project to their friends and social circles. If I’ve learnt anything then its probably that Proboscis doesn’t have a fanbase as such to activate.

The irony, too, was not lost on me of trying to raise funding for a project about free play and improvisation without rules, winners or rewards on a crowdfunding platform entirely structured around rewards and goals – where there are only winners (those who reach or surpass their goal) and losers. Could there be more to this than just irony? Could it be that the conceptual nature of the PlayCubes (indeed of my whole practice) is just so diametrically opposite to the way in which kickstarter and the communities which form around it operate that it was always unlikely to succeed? Tim’s post also quotes Tom Uglow writing about a project they collaborated on, #dream40"

[See also (linked within): http://timwright.typepad.com/main/2013/10/some-thoughts-about-innovation-and-failure.html ]

"Mother 2 feels like the team took a look back at Mother, kept the structure, looked for more than the skeleton of a plot that game had to run through the journey. It sticks around because it’s a kind of personal growth ritual or, rather, a ritual themed around personal growth. This is why it’s about reassembling forgotten memories. It maps onto my own experiences of probing back into childhood and adolescence, especially periods I had repressed to some degree, and seeing there the links of causality that, from my perspective as a child, I could not fully understand. Giygas is something you don’t want to remember, don’t know how to deal with. From around him, the color has been drained. Bodily sensations disappeared. Clanking robot bodies. Faceless bodies without identity. Giygas isn’t Ness’ fight, he’s yours. Only you can beat him. When you do, the TV shuts itself off. You’re done.

Then it fucking turns itself back on. Then, as a prize, it says: good job completing this journey with us, now stay in your fake bullshit pop art nostalgia theme park forever. I have spent a lot of time in fake nostalgia theme parks. I spent a lot of years trying to be Absolutely Safe because it felt like I couldn’t become an adult and that it would kill me to try. Sometimes I’ve gone back to old nostalgia bubbles because I could deal with them better than grappling with memories of what my life was actually like during those times. This was a coping strategy.

In real life, reassembling memories to understand them and fix your shit is hard. You don’t powerlevel through it. It’s untying knots in razorwire with the hope that you’ll come out the other end changed for the better and it’s slow and there aren’t carefully paced, escalating rewards throughout. You don’t know if there’ll be a reward at all. You do it because you can’t do anything else. Video Games were what I always did, compulsively, when I knew I had untying to do but I just couldn’t, so I needed someplace else to live for about twenty years.

Mother 3’s ending feels like a sigh. The whole game feels like a sigh. The whole game feels like an expression of puzzlement at making or playing these things. It says what it has to say about its predecessors and it turns itself off. Unlike last time, it stays off—it recreates Mother 2’s decadent ending in the form of a black screen where characters talk to you but you can’t see yourself or them or anything and it’s anticlimactic and then it’s over and you turn off the emulator and you’re alone in your room again and you might think: “that’s about the most lovingly crafted ‘fuck you’ to someone’s own creation I’ve ever seen.”"

"

Dozens of psychological studies have consistently shown that giving expected extrinsic rewards for an activity (e.g. “If you do x, I will give you y amount of cash/points/…”) often reduces intrinsic motivation of people to do it. The first reason is that people feel controlled by the person giving the rewards, reducing their sense of autonomy… Secondly, giving a reward for an activity sends a strong social signal that you don’t consider the activity worth doing for its own sake.

—Sebastian Deterding, Don’t Play Games With Me! Promises and Pitfalls of Gameful Design (via maxistentialist)

This is one of the reasons Story War doesn’t really reward players for winning battles other than keeping track of how many battles they’ve won.

(via bradofarrell)

Gamification sucks (except when it doesn’t.)

I used to talk with Chris Poole about how the genius of 4chan is that it was built on a system of intrinsic motivation.

Because everything is posted anonymously, you feel safe in posting your ideas/thoughts/creative work. If it gets rejected, nbd because nobody knows it’s you. If it gets praise, only you know who is responsible for it. So you cache that praise, that feeling, that reward internally and your relationship to the space grows from that.

I would argue that despite their notes and upvotes, social equity is built on Tumblr and reddit in a very similar way.

This concept is central to the work I do designing fanspace which is a name I just made up for “building rules and operations for fan communities.”

It’s also central to Tricia Wang’s understanding of the way that we build identity and relationships online."

"Hey, the dev team gets all these cool visual analytics, code metrics, version control, revision tagging, configuration management, continuous integration ... and the UX design team just passes around Photoshop files?

Taking clues from DevOps and Lean UX, "DesignOps" advocates more detailed and durable terminology about the cycle of user research, design and production. DesignOps seeks to first reduce the number of design artifacts, to eliminate the pain of prolonged design decisions. DesignOps assumes that the remaining design artifacts aren't actionable until they are reasonably archived and linked in a coherent way that serves the entire development team.

This talk will introduce the idea of DesignOps with the assumption that the audience has experience with a basic user research cycle — iterative development with any kind of user feedback.

DesignOps is a general approach, intended to help with a broad array of questions from usability testing issues, documentation archiving, production-time stress, and general confusion on your team:

What are the general strategies for managing the UX design process?
How do you incorporate feedback without huge cost?
What happened to that usability test result from last year?
How much space goes between form elements?
Why does the design cycle make me want to drink bleach?
WTF why does our website look like THIS?
* Features turnkey full-stack (Vagrant ) installation of ubuntu with drupal 7 install profile utilizing both php and ruby development tools, with all examples configured for live css compilation"

[Now paywalled, so read here: http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/11/economic-personalities-for-our-grandchildren/ ]

"Lebowitz relates…she loved to write as a young woman, but developed crippling writers’ block once she began to get paid to write…posits that she is “so resistant to authority, that I am even resistant to my own authority.”

"It’s people like this that I’m thinking of when I say that with reductions in working time & something like a generous Universal Basic Income, we would begin to discover what work people will continue to do whether or not they get paid for it. That’s not to say that all work can be taken care of this way… But we can at least start asking why we don’t make an effort to restrict wage labor to areas where it actually incentivizes something."

"I ultimately have a lot of optimism about what people are capable of, and I believe a socialist future would, among other things, bring us more music and literature from the Chris Cornells and Fran Lebowitzes than does the system we live in now."

"There is growing support that money spent on experiential items increases an individual's happiness. However, there is minimal research on the causes and long-term consequences of the tendency to make experiential purchases. Given the importance of experiential buying for improving well-being, an understanding of the preference for experiential purchasing is imperative. Thus, we developed the Experiential Buying Tendency Scale (EBTS) to measure habitual experiential purchasing. Across eight samples (n = 9634), the EBTS was developed, and shown to be reliable, valid, and predictive of consumer behavior and psychological well-being. An experiential purchasing tendency was related to higher extraversion, openness, empathic concern, and reward seeking. Further, non-materialistic values predicted a preference for experiential purchasing, which led to increased psychological need satisfaction, and, ultimately, increased subjective well-being. The discussion proposes that experiential…"

"Lehrer … isn’t an artist or scientist, but a skillful journalist, and while he’s never pretended otherwise, there’s often a secondhand feel to much of his work. Lehrer has always had trouble discussing the process behind specific acts of creativity—as in his rather confused discussion of Bob Dylan in Imagine, which Isaac Chotiner of The New Republic has ruthlessly picked apart—and the fact that he returns so often to the same examples reflects the fact that he doesn’t yet have the deep well of insight that comes only after years of creative endeavor.

The real irony is that the sort of career that Lehrer is building for himself makes it especially hard to achieve this kind of knowledge. Creative work tends to be solitary, pursued without an audience or any clear reward, and rarely happens on schedule. It has little to do, in short, with the life of a pundit, blogger, and public intellectual…"

[Via: http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/27009303981/lehrer-isnt-an-artist-or-scientist-but-a ]

"When we develop educational technologies & activities…we explicitly try to avoid anything that might be perceived as a reward…Instead, we're constantly looking for ways to help young people build on their own interests, & providing them w/ opportunities to take on new roles. In Scratch online community…members can become curators or moderators. These roles are different from badges or rewards, since they are associated w/ specific responsibilities in the community. People take on these roles because they want to contribute meaningfully to the community.

Will badges always, necessarily be perceived as rewards…crowd out other sources of motivation, undermining opportunities for learners to develop sustained engagement w/ the underlying ideas & activities? Perhaps not. But, at minimum…it’s critical for badge designers to think carefully about motivational consequences (sometimes unintended) of badges…take steps to reduce likelihood that badges will become central focus of motivation."

"At first we would modify them, as almost all players did – dropping the ones that weren’t fun. But eventually we abandoned the rules entirely, shifting to what used to be known as “freeform” gaming – something more like interactive storytelling…

The implication of this is that once you have people who are confident with what they’re doing and enjoy it, there may be something to be gained by degamifying their environments – handing over more responsibility and autonomy to the players, dialing down the rewards and rules structures you’ve put in place…

This is the challenge for people using engagement-based “gamification” in research, I think - particularly for idea or insight generation. If the point of the exercise is creativity, are we getting the best results by framing it in the context of rewards or competitions instead?"

[via: http://liftlab.com/think/nova/2011/11/13/degamification-as-a-design-tactic/ ]

"Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt."

"In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills."

"we’re trying something new: What if we invited people to come to campus and just to do something they love doing?

[Examples]…

This is a different kind of teaching in that it’s spontaneously responding to a student’s curiosity in the moment. This is the kind of activity that enriches the school environment.

* * *

Will these new ideas work? I don’t know. But we’re going to find out.

There are two things we’re not going to. We’re not going to force students to participate in a battery of required activities, then use punishments and rewards to ensure compliance.

And, we’re not going to sit around watching Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” TED talk, lament the sad state of education in this country, & daydream about what it would be like if school was different.

As a society, we have to stop daydreaming about this."

"I was angry, because I wanted to know how this teacher could possibly have thought that this was an OK way to teach. Who could possibly think that kids could learn that way?

And I thought of a point I've made in dozens of presentations - "Put a good person in a bad system & the system wins too often." What created a system where an adult thought that sitting in front of students & lecturing in a monotone voice about any topic could possibly inspire a child to learn? To care?

How was this teacher educated? Did a teacher ever inspire her? What has this teacher's experience in the classroom been? Was there a time where she cared & had that care disrespected?

Was there a principal who said, "Just follow the curriculum?" Was there someone to mentor her who was able to offer profound advice, not merely survival tips?

Was/is there space for her to continue to be a learner?

Was there a specific moment when she just got tired? When she gave up? When it became "just a job?"…"

"Executives, like most other people, have long believed that human beings are interested only in advancing their material interests.

However, recent research in evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, political science, and experimental economics suggests that people behave far less selfishly than most assume. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists have even found neural and, possibly, genetic evidence of a human predisposition to cooperate.

These findings suggest that instead of using controls or carrots and sticks to motivate people, companies should use systems that rely on engagement and a sense of common purpose.

Several levers can help executives build cooperative systems: encouraging communication, ensuring authentic framing, fostering empathy and solidarity, guaranteeing fairness and morality, using rewards and punishments that appeal to intrinsic motivations, relying on reputation and reciprocity, and ensuring flexibility."

"Question: What is the value of defying conventional thinking?

Nouriel Roubini:  Well you know usually critical thinking and not always accepting the conventional wisdom.  Having lateral thinking or contrarian thinking is useful in kind of any discipline. … if you have truly independent research, it’s more likely to get things right than research that is not really independent that has all the biases we know. … And then economists where are in academia are sometimes co-opted by mainstream views because it’s easier to succeed career-wise and otherwise by taking mainstream views rather than having lateral thinking as well, so there are systems of incentives and rewards that people have that lead to these kind of herding behavior both in the financial market and also into the collective thinking as well."

"1. Never read where your children can see you.
2. Put TV or computer in every room. Don’t neglect bedrooms & kitchen.
3. Correct your child every time she mispronounces a word.
4. Schedule activities every day after school so your child will never be bored.
5. Once your child can read independently, throw out picture books. They’re for babies…
7. Give little rewards for reading. Stickers & plastic toys are nice. Money is even better.
8. Don’t expect your children to enjoy reading. Kids’ books are for teaching vocabulary, proper study habits & good morals.
9. Buy only 40-watt bulbs.
10. Under no circumstances read your child the same book over & over. She heard it once & should remember it.
11. Never allow your child to listen to books on tape; that’s cheating.
12. Make sure your kids only read books that are “challenging.” Easy books are a complete waste of time. That goes double for comics & Mad mag.
13. Absolutely, positively no reading in bed."

"Mark Twain:

"As I have said before, I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters, and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling book has been a doubtful benevolence to us."

He leads up to this conclusion with a curious theory of orthographico-genetic determinism, illustrated from personal experience:

"The ability to spell is a natural gift. The person not born with it can never become perfect in it. I was always able to spell correctly. My wife, and her sister, Mrs. Crane, were always bad spellers. Once when Clara was a little chap, her mother was away from home for a few days, and Clara wrote her a small letter every day. When her mother returned, she praised Clara's letters. Then she said, "But in one of them, Clara, you spelled a word wrong.""

"When I finally finished speaking, I looked into the audience and saw a well-dressed boy of about 16 signaling me from the balcony. “You’re telling us not to just get in a race for the traditional rewards,” he said. “But what else is there?”

It takes a lot to render me speechless, but I stood on that stage clutching my microphone for a few moments and just stared. This was probably the most depressing question I have ever been asked. This young man was, I guessed, enviably successful by conventional standards, headed for even greater glories, and there was a large hole where his soul should have been. It was not a question to be answered (although I fumbled my way through a response) so much as an indictment of college prep and the resulting attenuation of values that was far more scathing than any argument I could have offered."

"BUT the problem is that we don’t have a word that does justice to those of us who believe in the generative power of the fourth quadrant. My hope is that the blurriness is only temporary, the strange disorientation one finds when new social and economic values are being formed.

The choice shouldn’t be between decentralized markets and command-and-control states. Over these last centuries, much of the history of innovation has lived in a less formal space between those two regimes: in the grad seminar and the coffeehouse and the hobbyist’s home lab and the digital bulletin board. The wonders of modern life did not emerge exclusively from the proprietary clash between private firms. They also emerged from open networks."

"Ainslie is probably right that procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era. The term itself (derived from a Latin word meaning “to put off for tomorrow”) entered the English language in the sixteenth century, and, by the eighteenth, Samuel Johnson was describing it as “one of the general weaknesses” that “prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind,” and lamenting the tendency in himself: “I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.” And the problem seems to be getting worse all the time. According to Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, the percentage of people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002. In that light, it’s possible to see procrastination as the quintessential modern problem."

[via: http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/1216615980/quantification-in-most-professions-is-being-used ]

A comment: "Quantification in most professions is being used to keep us from having to shoulder the messy burden of making human, intimate judgments, or explaining why we value what we value. They usually end up being the architectural equivalent of trying to build a cathedral without arches, stained glass, multiple sizes of stone, gargoyles or any other idiosyncratic part that deviates from the standard stone block used in a standard stone wall. …

A school that’s all about rewarding people who teach to the tests or who look good even on a robust, multivariable scale, is almost certainly going to overlook good teaching that misses the metric, teaching which a humane, sensitive supervisor might notice and reward.

Because we know that humane, sensitive supervisors are relatively rare, we look to the numbers as insurance against that rarity. I’d rather figure out how to make humane sensitivity the first requirement of institutional leadership."

"The best teachers, I find, spend at least some of their evenings smacking themselves on the forehead – figuratively, at least – as they reflect on something that happened during the day. “Why did I decide that, when I could have asked the kids?” &, thinking about some feature of the course yet to come: “Is this a choice I should be making for the students rather than w/ them?” One Washington, DC creative writing teacher was pleased w/ himself for announcing to students that it was up to them to decide how to create a literary magazine – until he realized later that he had incrementally reasserted control. “I had taken a potentially empowering project & turned it into a showcase of what [I] could do.” It takes insight & guts to catch oneself at what amounts to an exercise in pseudodemocracy. Keeping hold of power – overtly for traditionalists, perhaps more subtly for those of us who think of ourselves as enlightened progressives – is a hell of a lot easier than giving it away."

"Our lives are full of quests. Remember that birthday card, send that email, or drag ourselves to the gym on a regular basis.

Trouble is, sometimes we’re having too much fun doing other virtual stuff like hunting down rare items in WoW or leveling-up in Facebook games, to remember the stuff we’re supposed to be doing.

EpicWin is an iPhone app that puts the adventure back into your life. It’s a streamlined to-do list, to note down all your everday tasks, but with a role-playing spin.

Rather than just mentally ticking off your chores, completing each one improves & develops your character in an onging quest to level-up, gain riches, & develop skills.

By getting points for your chores it's easier to actually get things done. We all have good intentions but we need a bit of encouragement here and there. Doing the laundry is an epic feat of stamina so why not get stamina points for it?!

Watch as your avatars stats develop in ways to represent your own life."

"During his Seminar, Jesse Schell recommended a number of books and other resources that have informed his conception of the Gamepocalypse. Here’s a list of the books for the curious:

Authenticity, by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II; Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse; The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil; The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen; The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley; Good to Great, by Jim Collins; Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn"

Comment from John Spencer: "I use the word accountability in my class, but I define it as "mutual trust." We keep each other accountable by giving an account of what we're learning - conferences, portfolios, informal meetings.

"Tony Hsieh gets this. He realizes the worst thing you can do, in an organizational context, is constrain people by micromanaging their activities. In the same way a soccer manager would look ridiculous by attempting to control the game from the sidelines -- his work is largely done by the time the game starts, and the rest is up to the players -- a business CEO must know what shared structures, & what individual freedoms, are essential. ...

Why is such simple, powerful wisdom so absent from our current conversations about public education? Why are we so afraid to acknowledge that the learning process is, like a soccer match, more dependent on simple structures, improvisation, and freedom than it is on complex structures, standardization, and fear? And why do we think the best way to improve school cultures is by incentivizing behavior with financial rewards, when scores of leading voices in the business world know that such a strategy is fool's gold?"

"If you want to lose weight, find someone who will pay you to eat junk food. Start with ten bucks per Klondike Bar and fifteen dollars for a box of Thin Mints. The next week drop it to eight dollars and twelve dollars. Eventually, take the financial incentive away and you’ll decide that it’s just not worth it. Why eat crap if no one pays you for it?

"[we] assume there's continuum of reward for tasks. Or that it's additive. If we'll do Task A for free because it interests us, we'll do more if offered money. Not necessarily true. & adding money to mix profoundly changes our feelings about task...I suspect 'creating something personal, even of moderate quality' & letting people share it is going to be one of business models of next century. & one of social movements...even more interesting if we can squeeze convenience & scale of internet into other places…what you need to do - satisfy desire for autonomy, competence, generosity & sharing. Flickr does that…The easiest way to misunderstand Twitter & Facebook...take them as single type of network. Because there are celebrities on Twitter, w/ 100s of 1000s of followers, people assume that's what it's for...broadcast, celebrity, mass audience tool...[but] it's also small, personal, intimate one...I wonder...Whether public & personal existing w/in same channel/tool is sustainable"

"There have been countless other experiments that have been conducted since, that all prove the same thing. The reason to conduct so many experiments was that the results are so counter-intuitive, that they are hard to accept.

"Really disturbing piece about how to make someone dependent on you...i.e. "creating a sick system". Here are the four basic rules:

"1. Change is difficult for us. Staying as we are is often easier.

"Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us... This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace."

"This, I'm afraid, is how I do things. I learn by stating the obvious in public... [love that line, I think it describes me too and I hope that we allow learners like that to thrive at tcsnmy]

I suspect many of these mechanics are so popular with brands and marketing organisations because they fit with traditional assumptions about how you motivate people - give them rewards...And this isn't stupid, people do like keeping score of things and getting little badges, it scratches an atavistic itch...[but] there are lots of other things you can steal from games, many other aspects of gaming that people find appealing and some of them might be more easily and usefully extracted...

the wholesale export of games mechanics to the world might get a bit infuriating, the export of the cues about pretend identity might be more fruitful.

And it brings me back to toys again, because they do that very well."

"absence of a step-by-step solution to parenting challenges can be terribly frustrating to people who believe that “practical” advice entails exactly that...really ought to be skeptical about advisers who do offer such solutions...Besides, one-size-fits-all strategies usually just turn out to be ways of doing things to children – in other words, variant of rewards (“positive reinforcement”) or punishments (“consequences”). By contrast, there are countless “working with” approaches...need to be worked out in each family. [can offer]...broadly conceived guidelines rather than specific instructions...ten examples. 1. Reconsider your requests. 2. Put the relationship first. 3. Imagine how things look from your child’s perspective. 4. Be authentic. 5. Talk less, ask more. 6. “Attribute to children the best possible motive consistent with the facts.” 7. Try to say yes. 8. Don’t be rigid. 9. Give kids more say about their lives. 10. Love them unconditionally."

"I urge you to be vigilant against external rewards. Brush your teeth because it fights tooth decay, not because you get points for it. Read a book because it enriches your mind, not because your Kindle score goes up. Play a game because it's intellectually stimulating or relaxing or challenging or social, not because of your Xbox Live Achievement score. Jesse Schell's future is coming. How resistant are you to letting others manipulate you with hollow external rewards?"

[See also Ian Bogost: "when people act because incentives compel them toward particular choices, they cannot be said to be making choices at all": http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4294/persuasive_games_shell_games.php?page=2 ]

[Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20120531002102/http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2010/2/22/external-rewards-and-jesse-schells-amazing-lecture.html ]

"So what is being learnt when education is run and organised as a science? That your performances measure you – that you are quantifiable. You learn how to see yourself as a particular type of student/teacher, and grow to see this as ‘normal’ – the business of schools becomes normative measuring and pedagogy becomes sterile, limited, controlling and superficial. But gee it looks clean! ... Do you want to live in a world full of docile, easily managed consumers, uncritically bent on amassing wealth and lacking the capacity to perceive reality beyond the personal ambition “as long as they are OK”, the kind produced by schooling and rewards of (primarily) individual effort? We can’t value highly individualised effort and rewards (hey, the government wants me to rank students!) then, confusingly, expect the kids to be highly ‘collaborative’."

"So what about the child diagnosed with ADHD whose symptoms are worst with uninteresting (at least to the child) classroom work? Perhaps the rewards of socializing, dodgeball at recess, doodling a design for game, or designing a space ship out of legos are more rewarding (and deserving of focus and care) than Mad Math Minutes? Our prior blog post on fMRI activation patterns for money-induced incentives and ADHD now seem more compelling..."

"The influence of time spent on rewards and thus social status in MMORPGs has led to a curious reversal of how people regard time spent: In other forms of entertainment the time spent in the entertainment activity is a gain, in a MMORPG time spent is often considered a loss, a cost. If you paid $15 for a movie ticket, you'd be seriously annoyed if the movie lasted only 5 minutes, because you counted on having paid for something like 90 minutes of entertainment. In MMORPGs, if it would take 90 minutes of killing monsters to do a quest and get a reward instead of just 5 minutes, you'd complain about "the grind". Any time spent in a MMORPG in an activity that doesn't give a reward is considered pointless, and any addition of a reward even as silly as an "achievement" to a previously pointless activity will make players pursue it." [via: http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2009/11/kind-of-thing-to-keep-in-mind-if-you.html]

"Here's what both Pink and Kohn both tell me as an educator. If you want permanent, long-term learning or behavioral change, you won't do it with M&Ms, a special event for doing well on a test, or even saying "good job." In fact we've all known lots of kids who were plenty smart but just didn't give a damn about what little letters appeared on their report cards...Many kids, possibly a growing percentage, will only be reached through the heart, not the head. Only when they care about the topic and understand its relevance, interest and meaning to them or those they care about, will they engage...Unfortunately Arne Duncan or Barrak Obama don't understand this. At all. I'm guessing they were both "good" students for whom it was all about scores and stars."

"Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward."

"Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work."

"company went through a lot of soul-searching about compensation...recommend Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards for our thoughts on compensation...kept running into problems with traditional model of pay tied to performance reviews for all sorts of reasons...that model...only discourages teamwork....pool of money for raises is fixed so the only way to get more money than your coworkers is to make sure they perform worse than you...some people aren't motivated by money & so micromanaging their jobs by dangling financial carrots...only rewards those who are good at playing the system. We opted for a pretty straightforward chart...four pay grades & your pay is based on years of experience. New hires don't necessarily start at zero...lowest pay grade is actually above-market because we even though market would allow us to pay our low-level administrative staff less than we do, we don't feel that's right...most employee's salaries are public information w/in company, because of the chart."

"a 1982 study...showed that any task, no matter how enjoyable it once seemed, would be devalued if it were presented as a means rather than an end...when verbal feedback is experienced as controlling, the effect on motivation can be similar to that of payment. In a study of corporate employees...those who were told, "Good, you're doing as you should" were "significantly less intrinsically motivated than those who received feedback informationally." There's a difference...between saying, "I'm giving you this reward because I recognize the value of your work" & "You're getting this reward because you've lived up to my standards." A different but related set of problems exists in the case of creativity. Artists must make a living...but..."the negative impact on creativity of working for rewards can be minimized" by playing down the significance of these rewards & trying not to use them in a controlling way. Creative work...cannot be forced, but only allowed to happen."

"1. Professions...tempted by rewards...pressured by family, culture...cannot leave security of pre-defined track...unwilling to explore themselves enough to see individual course...for many there is no passion or purpose, no vision or meaning, no intuitive individual truth...soul-sucking 2. Smart people are good at school...tempted to stay...whole lives...get into spiral of irrelevance & isolation from rest of world 3. Politics...trap...in order to change world through politics, you must gain power...4. Critical thinking...spend all formative years getting rewarded for finding problems...focusing on negative...leave school thinking way to be useful & show smarts is to point out why things won’t work, rather than using smarts to find a way forward"

"for men, the secret of success lies in setting specific goals and focusing on the rewards you will get if you achieve them; for women, the best way to keep a resolution is to tell the world about it."