Tom, I'm glad that you studied the IEP.
Gayle, I would be interested in hearing about the topics that you're covering during your training sessions for WMF supervisors, especially whether you make sure that every supervisor has had an opportunity to learn about the experience of IEP. My impression is that the AFT5 leadership didn't make connections between IEP and AFT5 during the AFT5 design and planning. I'm not sure if this is because the AFT5 program leadership never read the IEP report, or if it's because the AFT5 leadership didn't see how lessons from IEP could be relevant to the AFT5 program. I hope that every program leader at WMF makes a point of learning about IEP early in their leadership career. I think IEP is a very useful case study in program management.
Thanks,
Pine
Hi, Pine.
On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 3:41 PM, ENWP Pine deyntestiss@hotmail.com wrote:
Tom, I'm glad that you studied the IEP.
I did this in the beginning mainly through Jessie Wild's support, who always kept articulating the SF staff for improve the education group learnings, and Nitika Tandon, now at CIS - a pity I barely talk to Nitika since a long time ago, although I have called her independently to learn more once.
Although I have studied, we should have had more time for that. And I believe now with the learning team this will be improved at WMF. I'll share here also some thoughts I sent to my colleagues at the former global develoment efforts mainling list...
"I discovered some time ago an organization with interesting ideas regarding failures, Admiting Failure http://www.admittingfailure.com/. They say in the main page
"We have a conundrum. It is really hard to talk about failure. Admitting Failure is here to help. This is a community and a resource, created to establish new levels of transparency, collaboration and innovation within civil society.
Fear, embarrassment, and intolerance of failure drives our learning underground. No more. Failure is strength. The most effective and innovative organizations are those that are willing to speak openly about their failures. Because the only truly "bad" failure is one that's repeated."
Pretty interesting. :)
Also, I discovered an interesting article of professor Daniel Dennett these days, which I would like also to recommend, How to make mistakeshttp://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/howmista.htm, where I quote
"The main difference between science and stage magic is that in science you make your mistakes in public. You show them off, so that everybody can learn from them--not just yourself. This way, you get the benefit of everybody else's experience, and not just your own idiosyncratic path through the space of mistakes. This, by the way, is what makes us so much smarter than every other species. It is not so much that our brains are bigger or more powerful, but that we share the benefits that our individual brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.
The secret is knowing when and how to make mistakes, so that nobody gets hurt and everybody can learn from the experience. It is amazing to me how many really smart people don't understand this. I know distinguished researchers who will go to preposterous lengths to avoid having to acknowledge that they were wrong about something--even something quite trivial. What they have never noticed, apparently, is that the earth does not swallow people up when they say, "Oops, you're right. I guess I made a mistake." You will find that people love pointing out your mistakes. If they are generous-spirited, they will appreciate you more for giving them the opportunity to help, and acknowledging it when they succeed, and if they are mean-spirited they will enjoy showing you up. Either way, you--and we all--win."
Which reminded me a TED talk of Igor Nikolic on Complex Adaptive Systemshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS0zj_dYeBE I saw sometime ago, where he says
"What we really do is make mistakes all the time. The question is, how can we make mistakes in such a way we can recover from them? How do we do social experiments? [...] How do we do without making a big mess? How do we try different things in a environment without distroying it? And how do we learn from things that went wrong? That is something that we really have to address.
We have to grow. What do I mean by that? It has to be a step-by-step thing evolving, adapting, learning. You cannot jump in the future. [...] And maybe most importantly, we have to do it together.""
Best wishes,
Tom
Make interesting mistakes.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Everton Zanella Alvarenga" tom@wikimedia.org To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: gyoung@wikimedia.org; "Nitika Tandon" nitika@cis-india.org Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 8:57 PM Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Office hour inside out (program evaluation)
Hi, Pine.
On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 3:41 PM, ENWP Pine deyntestiss@hotmail.com wrote:
Tom, I'm glad that you studied the IEP.
I did this in the beginning mainly through Jessie Wild's support, who always kept articulating the SF staff for improve the education group learnings, and Nitika Tandon, now at CIS - a pity I barely talk to Nitika since a long time ago, although I have called her independently to learn more once.
Although I have studied, we should have had more time for that. And I believe now with the learning team this will be improved at WMF. I'll share here also some thoughts I sent to my colleagues at the former global develoment efforts mainling list...
"I discovered some time ago an organization with interesting ideas regarding failures, Admiting Failure http://www.admittingfailure.com/. They say in the main page
"We have a conundrum. It is really hard to talk about failure. Admitting Failure is here to help. This is a community and a resource, created to establish new levels of transparency, collaboration and innovation within civil society.
Fear, embarrassment, and intolerance of failure drives our learning underground. No more. Failure is strength. The most effective and innovative organizations are those that are willing to speak openly about their failures. Because the only truly "bad" failure is one that's repeated."
Pretty interesting. :)
Also, I discovered an interesting article of professor Daniel Dennett these days, which I would like also to recommend, How to make mistakeshttp://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/howmista.htm, where I quote
"The main difference between science and stage magic is that in science you make your mistakes in public. You show them off, so that everybody can learn from them--not just yourself. This way, you get the benefit of everybody else's experience, and not just your own idiosyncratic path through the space of mistakes. This, by the way, is what makes us so much smarter than every other species. It is not so much that our brains are bigger or more powerful, but that we share the benefits that our individual brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.
The secret is knowing when and how to make mistakes, so that nobody gets hurt and everybody can learn from the experience. It is amazing to me how many really smart people don't understand this. I know distinguished researchers who will go to preposterous lengths to avoid having to acknowledge that they were wrong about something--even something quite trivial. What they have never noticed, apparently, is that the earth does not swallow people up when they say, "Oops, you're right. I guess I made a mistake." You will find that people love pointing out your mistakes. If they are generous-spirited, they will appreciate you more for giving them the opportunity to help, and acknowledging it when they succeed, and if they are mean-spirited they will enjoy showing you up. Either way, you--and we all--win."
Which reminded me a TED talk of Igor Nikolic on Complex Adaptive Systemshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS0zj_dYeBE I saw sometime ago, where he says
"What we really do is make mistakes all the time. The question is, how can we make mistakes in such a way we can recover from them? How do we do social experiments? [...] How do we do without making a big mess? How do we try different things in a environment without distroying it? And how do we learn from things that went wrong? That is something that we really have to address.
We have to grow. What do I mean by that? It has to be a step-by-step thing evolving, adapting, learning. You cannot jump in the future. [...] And maybe most importantly, we have to do it together.""
Best wishes,
Tom
-- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
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Le 2013-03-24 19:57, Everton Zanella Alvarenga a écrit :
"The main difference between science and stage magic is that in science you make your mistakes in public. You show them off, so that everybody can learn from them--not just yourself. This way, you get the benefit of everybody else's experience, and not just your own idiosyncratic path through the space of mistakes. This, by the way, is what makes us so much smarter than every other species. It is not so much that our brains are bigger or more powerful, but that we share the benefits that our individual brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.
I agree with the last sentence. Thus said I also think that science can teach us more relevant way to think our world when we make abstraction of our ego. Any thought about how smarter/greater/special/different human are, will just burden scientific investigation. I don't mean we should make total abstraction of ego, you need ego to sustain empathy, and without empathy reason is useless in codemning harasment, torture, murder and so on.
Now, why don't we take mistakes as a chance to refine our thought model, or even make a breakthrough in it? Well, there's this cult of "performance", and most people seems to prefer doing nothing than doing things and looks ridiculous. There's a famous quote, attributed to Lucius Annaeus Seneca, on this topic: "It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult".
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