How not to Fly

I thought I should share this story with the world (or at least someone who would by mistake step into my blog instead of the other 100million+ blogs out there).

It was a workshop in Shellefteå about a two hour bus ride form Umeå, Sweden. It was the session after evening fika (coffee break). Ah.. so it was a speaker form US, Wayne Hodgins, a gray haired person on this big screen. Ok, so it will be a video conference, or rather video talk. The talk was on Web 2.0. Gosh! another repetition of Web 2.0? "This is going to be boring!" and "How can it be fun to watch someone yap yap yap.. on a big-screen" were the thoughts rumbling in my head.

Well YES it was another talk about Web 2.0, the exact topic "Wassup with Web 2.0" and YES it was a a gray haired someone yapping on a big-screen. But 2 minutes into the talk, whoosh! like magic the boredom ended. No more was this someone on a big-screen and yapping about "this is what make up Web 2.0...", he was among us and tweaking our brain cells. Yes it was true that he was still in US and we were in Sweden, but he had made contact and the barrier was broken. Wow! can a speaker be this good, I thought to myself? It was so so so GOOD!

He was talking about concepts behind Web 2.0 and not how Web 2.0 could be used for education, which everybody talks about. In fact most of his examples were related to business and entertainment. It was these concepts that made it so interesting. It was a lot of concepts to be exact but each of them made sense and each of them were an eye opener.

Besnier, 1678. source: Dept. of Psychology, Misssippy State University
This image was one of my favorites of all the concepts he talked about. "Many of man's first attempts of flight, failed miserably and most of the time in broken bones or worse in death. The pioneers tried imitating the birds and other flying animals. So what does it have to do with web 2.0. Exactly! I could not figure it out. Anyway if we look at what the Wright brother did right, they did not try to imitate birds, dragonflies, bees and the gang, but they thought different. They looked beyond, and they succeeded. Simply take our own usage of software, if we used version 1.0 of software X and now we use version 10.0 of software X, is there a lot of difference in what we do except for may be a few new features and some new fancy icons and cool new looks. Can't we still do what we do with version 10.0 with version 1.0? Probably I think at least 90% of us will answer in the affirmative. The concept Wayne talks about here is "learning to un-learn". The Wright brothers knew how animals flew, but they simply thought beyond that an decided to fix an engine and come up with the concept of lift by moving wings... wow! I and many other would call it "Thinking out of the Box", but "learning to unlearn" has a little bit more complicated concept, which I find difficult to explain so I would advice you to listen to Wayne's PodCasts.

I am not going to repeat all what Wayne said word to word, since probably he does it much better. Wayne conveyed his ideas to me through a noisy channel and there was data loss, and for me to convey those ideas to a third person would be through even a more noisier channel.. so more data loss and probably data corruption :-).

So I'll just list a few more concepts you might want to lookup if you visit Wayne's blog.

• Perfecting the irrelevant
• Long tail
• Mashup
  
• The snowflakes effect
  
• and of course my favorite learning to un-learn
  

Hope you got something out of the time you spent reading this.. :-)