Author: Howard Lieberman

The world is changing due to tech

There is no question that the democratization of technology made possible by a combination of economies of scale and Moore’s Law has put incredible power in our pockets. Today’s smart phones have more speed, storage and resolution than super computers of the 1990’s and also have fantastically more connectivity and flexibility. In our digital age, the world has changed and the change is accelerating.

What does this mean for society?

Technology is changing the nature of work, careers and families making them no longer limited by geographic proximity. Connections through shared interests, now easier to find and develop, are often bringing people together from very different cultural backgrounds.

How does this affect families?

What does it mean to be a parent in the digital age? How much time should you and your kids spend with technology? Can a parent actually control their child’s use of technology? Should they? What types of technology usage should be encouraged? How does technology usage impact social skills development? How is technology, and the world it’s making possible, changing education? Are kids learning problem solving and other important skills? What is the kids point of view? How is technology enabling those with special needs?

And for the individual – What about them?

Is your world bigger? What if you’re a kid? A grandparent? How do you learn? How do you fit in a family, a community, and a team? How many families and communities are you in? How is technology changing the way you see the world, and the way you see yourself in the world?

… Join us in a provocative discussion!

Tuesday, September 22nd
7pm – 9pm
Doors open at 6pm for appetizers and no-host beer and wine

Tickets: $20 in advance • $30 at the door

Mark L. Miller, Ph.D.,Mark L. Miller, Ph.D. founded Learningtech.org [The Miller Institute for Learning with Technology], incorporating it as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in March 2000. He continues to serve as both its lead technical contributor and its President and Executive Director. The mission of the organization is to help “children of all ages” use technology more effectively for learning. The firm has helped schools throughout California, as well as in several other states.Learningtech.org has three Program areas: Planning and Funding Services (E-Rate applications and technology plan preparation); Technical Services (network design and configuration, device imaging, software R&D, and troubleshooting); and Education Services (in-class and out-of-school STEM enrichment, including high technology summer camps, and professional development).

Learningtech.org’s early work included contribution to the efforts of Smart Valley (Net Day and PC Day), Challenge 2000, Wired for Good, and the Center for Excellence in Nonprofits. The Institute works mainly with K-12 schools, libraries and other nonprofits. Recent work has included helping prepare a US Department of Education approved tech plan for all public schools in Puerto Rico, obtaining tens of millions of dollars in E-Rate funding for schools in California, Arizona, Hawaii, Tennessee, and Puerto Rico, and completing a STEM summer camp that demonstrated how to successfully include foster youth, a highly underserved group. A recent Peninsula TV show featuring our after school STEM offerings for middle school students is available here: http://vimeo.com/39080224. Great Nonprofits rated Learningtech.org as a “Top Rated Education Nonprofit” in 2014 and earlier years. Reviews are available online: http://greatnonprofits.org/reviews/profile2/the-miller-institute-for-learning-with-technology.

Before founding Learningtech.org, Dr. Miller had served as Lab Director for Learning and Tools at Apple Computer, reporting to the Vice President of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group [ATG], where he spent almost a decade heading up educational technology investigations. Apple programs under his direction at various times included: Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow [ACOT]; Apple Global Education [AGE]; Visualization and Simulation; Business Learning and Performance Support; and Multimedia Authoring Tools. Responsibilities at various times included oversight of over three dozen employees, including Apple Distinguished Scientists and numerous engineers with advanced degrees, with budget responsibility in excess of $6M.

Dr. Miller’s other corporate experience included early work at Bolt, Beranek and Newman on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and several years at Texas Instruments, Inc., Central Research Labs, where he established its widely recognized Machine Intelligence research program, emphasizing educational applications, expert systems, natural language processing.

Miller also co-founded Computer*Thought Corporation (Dallas, TX), a high-tech startup backed by venture capital financing – over $5M equity financing raised during the first three years of operation – where Miller led the technical design of the Ada*Tutor product, an advanced instructional system used to retrain software engineers to use the Ada programming language, as mandated by the U.S. Department of Defense for projects such as Space Station.

Dr. Miller’s teaching experience includes Adjunct Faculty at the University of Texas and Southern Methodist University (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; Survey of Knowledge Engineering; Design and Implementation of Programming Languages; Compilers, Assemblers, and Operating Systems; Software Engineering Using Ada; Discrete Structures). Miller has supervised successful M.S. and Ph.D. candidates. While earning his Ph.D. at MIT, he served as both Research Assistant and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Artificial Intelligence and LOGO Laboratories. Miller has also taught high school mathematics as a guest instructor, and Filemaker Pro and other topics from time to time at Community Colleges and County Offices of Education. He currently co-teaches middle school Computer Science and instructs after-school STEM enrichment daily for grades 4-8. He has also co-developed a high school computer science elective, which was UC A?G approved; he co-taught the course at multiple high schools for several years. Since 2012, he has been a Contributing Member of the STEM Committee for the California After School Network http://www.afterschoolnetwork.org/stem, where he is currently focused on integrating Computer Science, Coding, and Computational Thinking with the Next Generation Science Standards.

 

 

Jason Marsh is currently working with Virtual Reality applied to consumer, non-game experiences. Consumers are spending millions of hours ‘in their information’ – experiencing their social feeds and topics they are interested in. This experience doesn’t occur in a geographical location as much as in cyberspace, the mental representation of information, rich with connections and emotion. But all of that is mediated by screens, often small ones, with rectangular frames that limit the ability to maintain context, go back to prior explorations, or share complex ideas with others. I see Virtual Reality as the solution, and that’s what I’m working on for my own pre-funded company FLOW.

Besides being a software designer and engineer, I’ve been doing what I call call Information Architecture (http://www.marshworks.com/what-is-an-information-architect/) for enterprise companies, most recently at my prior startup Acesis, working with healthcare software.  I’m capturing and presenting complex information to busy thought-leaders in healthcare and business. I diagram everything, using software tools to zoom from the macro view (the ‘why’?) to the micro view (the ‘concrete’?). The audience can be grounded in both the big picture and the specifics very quickly. Now, in VR, the prototypes keep flying off the screen and I’m seeing where the ecosystem sees value as I converge on minimal viable product ideas.

I was also the Founder and Executive Director of the Sierra Montessori Academy in Grass Valley, CA. This was a significant expansion of my efforts in educational reform bringing technology into the classroom with Challenge 2000, SRI, and the Institute for Research on Learning. I wrote the charter and obtained approval for a new K-8 public charter school based on the educational principals of Maria Montessori and Project-Based Learning. Now more than ten years old, the school opened with 120 students on a 35 acre site.

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Jason Marsh

(530) 878-4414

Mandeep Dhillon
Entrepreneur & Children’s Technology Advocate

Mandeep is passionate about influencing how kids will use the technology they were born with to improve the quality of their lives and the world they live in.

Co- founder and CEO of 1StudentBody Inc. (1sb), where we are connecting the world’s students. Our primary application, Sidechat, is revolutionizing the world of teen communication with a media and group-centric mobile messaging app.

Former VP Strategy/Togetherville at Disney Interactive; CEO/Co-Founder of Togetherville (Disney); former consultant (McKinsey), lawyer (Latham & Watkins), non-profit leader (Lohgarh), JD/MBA (UVA) and die-hard college basketball fan (Duke). Duke University Alumni Board member & Sikh community activist.

Born in England. Raised in the Bronx, Smithfield, NC and Raleigh, NC. Lived in DC, Charlottesville, VA, Redwood City, CA and now San Jose, CA. Married to my best friend and the proud father of three digital natives.

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Oct 27: Health & Fitness Technology

After thirty-five years in tech and business, I find myself spending most of my time in New England, exposed to an intriguing question not asked very much in Silicon Valley. “What is the role of liberal arts in a digital age?”  With a personal background applying technology to the arts as an electro-acoustician, musician and educator, much of my professional life is and has been spent answering “What is the role of technology and business in the arts?”  My answer to the question was to create multiple technologies and tech businesses almost all designed to lower the overhead associated with creative expression.

Developing capabilities to subordinate technology to serve creative people is time consuming. It took ten years of university to acquire sufficient background to serve on the front lines as a  contributor to the Digital Age. Our digital age can be considered to be an artifact of the democratization of technology.  This age is an economic manifestation of Moore’s Law paraphrased to, “for the last fifty years the cost of semiconductor technology has halved every year”.  Even math people accustomed to exponentials are still surprised at how enormous this growth rate is. Two raised to the fiftieth power is over a thousand trillions or to powerfully illustrate this in terms of money, 1 cent would become 10 Trillion Dollars. This is how calculators become more than super computers.

Computers are a thousand trillion times more accessible today than  they were in 1965 when Gordan Moore stated his law. Billions of people now have a supercomputer or two in their pocket which are far far more powerful than the most powerful devices in the world of a few decades ago. This digital age is not going to end any time soon unless we accidentally wipe humanity out, because people like having this power. Liberal arts communities have overnight become the dominant market segment of the technological age because they now vastly outnumber technical consumers.

This clearly defines at least one very important role of the liberal artist in a digital age, to be the voice of the customer. As liberal artists, are in general much better at communicating with people than engineers are, one extremely important role could be to define what humanity needs and wants, as part of many dialogs with engineering communities who tend to contribute facts pertaining to what is possible, how much will it cost and how long will it take but have less experience in what do nontechnical people need.

Voicing humanities needs is certainly an important enough role for liberal artists to spend some time understanding the frames of mind, of both the technologist and businessperson. There is no reason that poets as masters of succinct communication, can not learn how to write a specification. After all the digital age has turned many musicians into recording engineers and programmers, and many photographers in 3D digital signal processors, and the maker movement is converting the do-it-yourself community into 3d prototyping experts rapidly moving toward small run manufacturing.

It is for this reason I propose that there be courses available to liberal arts communities called  Introduction to Engineering and Entrepreneurial Thought.  Artists, technologists and entrepreneurs all be creative innovators, who differ enough in tool requirements and priorities for sub-optimal new devices to come into being. Systems thinking, project management and complex program collaboration are regularly taught to technical and business majors. The boundary between liberal arts and technology is an artificial one that can easily be traversed through some cross education. Notice I do not say cross training, as training is for animals and robots, not thinking expressive people. Teachable moments regularly occur throughout the entire maker movement gathering steam all over the world. The price of 3D printers is now dropping from hundreds of thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars. Imagine what will happen when the cost of manufacturing is radically reduced even more than the effects of the low cost of a global labor market. Even more dramatically, imagine the impact of concept to market cycle changing from years to days. Hardware development is entering the rapid iteration the software world has been enjoying for a couple of decades. Once again the economic driving force of democratization will further blur the distinctions between liberal arts, performances arts, and technological arts.

The age of the specialist is less than 200 years old. Before this age, everyone grew their food, shoed their horses, built their houses, and did almost everything needed.  Humanity is on the order of 200,000 years old or a thousand times older than this. There is the tendency to assume the world belongs to the specialists, but I would like to remind all of us that almost all specialists work for generalists.  For better or worse generalists are the decision makers and purse string holders in society. Even those who begin as specialists, as they grow in influence, power and leverage become generalists. Liberal artist education is about how to think about a wide range of topics in order to be better prepared to be in the world. This is as true today in the 21st century as it has ever been and perhaps more so. The more gifted or curious the student, the more important  it is that they are exposed to the ways of thinking of the specialists who are literally defining the world they live in every day, the engineers and entrepreneurs. Engineers create tomorrow and entrepreneurs deliver it to society. Engineers and business people all need to learn to read, write, draw and get along with teams in addition to doing math. In the 21st century the liberal artist needs to know something about the mindset that has created the world they live in.  Just as business and tech people need to know about culture, beauty and the humanities to be fully human.

It is only through collaboration that we will co-create a sustainable and meaningful world. Each of us has to learn to put ourselves in other persons places. It radically improves the ability to communicate and get things done. It will also greatly increases each persons value to the world and to themselves.

Intrapreneurship is evidently currently a hot topic, This week I received notifications of two different Intrapreneurship Conferences in New York City in October 2015. One October 21 – 23rd, simply called the Intrapreneurship Conference states it is the 6th edition and another one called the Corporate Innovation Summit on October 8th states it is a spin-off event. I have no personal knowledge of either event so can not report on them, but I do have roughly 20 years of personal experience as an Intrapreneur at Bose and Apple in the corporate world, in higher education at Cogswell Polytechnical College and at DARPA probably one of the speediest, most progressive and best funded technology think tanks in the US Government.

Bottom Line – Intrapreneurship Works especially well in innovation cultures and seems to follow some common progressions of steps to be described below but first lets define the term.

An intrapreneur is an internal Entrepreneur, meaning they have significantly less responsibility to make things happen than most entrepreneurs who have to generate the resources to meet a payroll. As entrepreneurs take greater risks they also enjoy much greater potential rewards. The largest difference is resources. The second largest difference is politics. And with one, comes the other. Having lived on both sides of this street, there are advantages and disadvantages to each. Experience as either one is helpful preparation to be the other. Large companies acquire small companies all of the time and attempt to convert entrepreneurs into intrapreneurs with mixed results, but this is not what this discussion is about.

It is about the simple fact that being an intrapreneur is a terrific way to be an innovator. In person interactions, conferences and attending events do rule but for a lot less investment here are several important lessons.

1. Learn how to create and maintain relationships with people who can provide air cover. You are going to need it as soon as others are threatened by having to share resources, essentially immediately, as you can not begin without resources. You can not fake relationships. You have to care about the people who care about you. If you can not, life is going to very hard. And do not be duplicitous everyone can tell. You have to be authentic.
2. Expect to have to work just as hard as an entrepreneur just in different dimensions. Large organizations do not like to change even if they claim they want to. And no, you are not likely to get rich doing it internally. This means your motivation has to be more than money. You really have to want to make this happen as it will cost you personally unless you have enormous innovation vitality and resilience. Of course when you succeed, then you are a hero and it all feels worth it, but this may take a few years.
3. Try very hard to do this within an innovation culture. You can spend years and get no where if the values of the organization do not include supporting new ideas, tolerating mistakes, and valuing intangibles. It is not very likely that you are going to change a corporate culture just because you are present. The only company you can be sure to dramatically impact the culture of, is the one you are a founder of.
4. If you can, try to innovate in ways that are complimentary to what the company thinks their main business is. While this seems obvious, make sure you do know what business your enterprise is in and what business models it subscribes to.  Also be aware that people who help you are probably risking some political capital by taking you and your cause on. Their careers can be hurt. When you act, put yourself in the other persons place.
5. Search to identify and support proof points before you are asked for them. There have to be intermediate goals to spread the risk out over smaller steps. Make sure you can set and manage expectations, because things never turn out exactly how you expect them to and that is part of the fun. Innovation requires quite a bit of improvisation but even seasoned improvisors try to ascertain as quickly as possible what key and tempo they are playing in or cacophony results. Do anticipated homework before you are asked. Offer decision makers something they can say yes to.

There are plenty more lessons, but these basics can get you launched and for those of you who can make it to New York City this fall, each of the two conferences entrance fee is $1000 as an early bird, decent Manhattan rooms are usually upwards of $250 per night, even Air BnB is $100 or more, and plane tickets are another few hundred. Even parking a car is $50 or more per day. It is hard to get to any conference for less than one or two thousand dollars, not counting your time, but this could be a great place to start – ask your company to pay for you to go and explain why this is a great investment for them as you intend to shake things up and this will reduce the risk somewhat. If you do not have the courage to let your boss you are going to shake things up and ask for a couple of grand, perhaps you should rethink being an intrapreneur?

Innovative behavior is found within individuals who work in all walks of life, as it is a most basic human response to adapt to circumstances. This is the largest differentiator between people and other life forms, the degree to which we can adapt. We are so powerful at adapting that we also adapt our circumstances to fit our needs and desires. This innovation response is innate in humans of all ages, on every continent and both genders.

However it is not generally found in equal measure in all places, situations and circumstances and this is quite reasonable for innovation is not always an appropriate response. Sometimes tried and true responses are more beneficial to the organism whether it be a nation, a business  or an individual.

It is because of the very wide range of conditions people find themselves in that innovative behavior can reasonably vary so very much in frequency and strength. To shrink this range to one that is manageable we are addressing different professions conduciveness to innovation but before doing so noting the tendency for younger entities to innovate more than older entities. Children take more chances than adults. Young companies take more chances than mature ones.  A newly formed nations have more degrees of freedom than established ones. Innovation appears to be something that most of us unlearn.

There are professions that are more accepting and more requiring of innovation than other ones where it is generally agreed a more conservative approach serves us all with better results. Although innovation behavior can not really be arranged linearly, for purposes of brevity we are simplifying this characterization of innovation vitality.

Beginning at the end of the spectrum where there are enormous degrees of freedom available to practitioners we have performance artists. If the slowest average tempo for music is 60 beats per minute and performers rarely initiate less than one note per beat on average, the duration of each note event is only one second. During a 90 minute jazz performance (5400 seconds) an musician would play (initiate) a minimum of 5400 separate note events and in most cases performances include far more than this. This makes the importance of adhering to playing any given note the same way every time not very great. In fact as jazz is an improvised art form, one would be penalized for playing every note in the manner that was expected. Improvisers are expected to continually stream innovation in the form of trying new combinations of notes, harmonies and rhythms almost constantly. This is a profession in which innovation is not only acceptable but absolutely required.

At the opposite end of the spectrum lies an administrator of a very mature society or company where the expectations of the population being served is to not be surprised. The degrees of freedom constraining such a person are very small and reasonably so. We do not want the garbage to be picked up on Sunday at 2:37 AM when we thought it was being picked up on Wednesday at 7:30 AM. We would not know when to take it out to the curb. Businesses and municipalities demand high degrees of predictability and art demands relatively higher degrees of surprise.  In short we do not expect the same amount of surprise from our accountant or doctor as we do from a chef or performer.

The difference has to do with emotional engagement which tends to expect a different predicability to surprise ratio than intellectual engagement which tends to desire more predictability and less surprise. There are many fields that would not be recommended to overly emotional people and there also many fields that would not be recommended to one with a stringently analytical persona. Of course to some degree all of us have more than one mode of operation but most people have characteristics that tend to push us in specific directions. And yes we also can change over our lives and even during a single day or for some form minute to minute. Those that change from minute to minute would not run for president. Those that change over years not seconds, should not audition for jazz bands.

In gross terms we expect our leaders to be predictable and our lawyers to codify and memorialize rules we can count on so we can adhere to them. The ten commandments come to mind as having a very long run. People have felt it reasonable to subordinate themselves to these for millennia. We also expect people in the art and in ad agencies and marketing to surprise and delight  us.  Do our leaders sometimes surprise and delight us? Occasionally but mostly they disappoint us because we do not want them to detour from what they said they would do when we elected them or hired them.

It all has to do with what time constant is being operated upon. At we looking at seconds, hours, months or years. For some people planning their life more than open week at a time is totally impossible and for some going to a restaurant and ordering something new because what was desired is unavailable is extremely unwelcome.

There is not right or wrong, there is just a range just as ultraviolet is at one end of the visible electromagnetic spectrum with red at the other. It does not mean red is better than blue or yellow or green. We have a lot of colors and we also have a lot of kinds of innovator behavior.

If you want to improvise you had better not become a ballerina or anything else that expects you to do exactly and precisely what everyone expects. If you want no surprises there are many fields that would be unsuitable.

The places where creativity is most at home are the ones where someone can create their own world and then go live in it. Composers can create their open music and then go play it, computer programmers can create their own computer language and write programs in it. Video game coders can create their open us inverse and go live in it. Now all of these people can also bring others with them into their worlds as well and in order to be classified as an innovator not just a creator they need to.

Unfortunately those who are skilled at insight are not necessarily skilled at completion and vice-a-versa. This is why teams are generally needed for innovation to be adopted. Or even if there is a one person team, that person has to change modes of operation to accomplish the set of tasks required for their insight to be applied in the real world.

There is a psychological shrift that has to occur when changing modes and it can be unconscious for those lucky enough to smoothly flow from one set of tasks to another or it require or create huge upheaval in a persons state of mind to shift those gears.

Most research never makes it into products, most books that are began are not published, starting and finishing do not rehire the same skill set.  Accomplished people have to be capable of chaining these gears, to pay bills, take out trash and cook dinner. Even those of us who are leveraged are genially not born that way.

Being conscious of the innovation spectrum helps one to engage appropriate parties.