found it at thisiscolossal

End of 2010 Schuberg Philis invited Jeff Sutherland to train everbody in Scrum. In that period we were looking at ways to structure and organize the team workload. Our servicemodel was already based on cross-functional teams, end-to-end responsible, and one of the successful approaches during busy times was to almost isolate the team in a warroom and setup a warroom list of activities. Sounds like a backlog, right? So we found out after a company visit with Anton and Harm to LinkIT. So only natural to get involved with Scrum, see if we could apply it in another context than software development. The best way to get involved is to get it from the source and get in touch with the founders and original thinkers. That is how we got in touch with Jeff.

As we moved on, one of our Scrummasters, Mark Reijn, told me that his father-in-law got interested in what he was doing and that his father-in-law started experimenting with Scrum principles in the classroom. As it turned out, Willy Wijnands and his colleague Jan van Rossum, two Chemistry teachers from the Ashram College (secondary school in Alphen aan de Rijn, Netherlands), actually found with Scrum the missing element in the new way of teaching. It was actually Mark who did a great job introducing them to the basics of Scrum and helping them setting up backlog and all for setting up Eduscrum.

Both teachers are deeply involved in renewing the Chemistry education for a long time now, looking at how to make the material more attractive from a factual way of teaching into a more contextual way of teaching. Next to that they were experimenting with how to get insight and use the personal qualities of the children in school. We had a very energetic first meeting, ideas were flowing back and forth. There is not much difference between schoolchildren and adults in business after all. And all the time I was having this one single thought: “OMG, still five years to go before my oldest daughter is going the highschool, how cool is this!”

Willy and Jan were joined by Ellen Reehorst and they started to work with other classes, everything from 12 year to 18 year olds, different subjects like Physics, Math and even the humanities like Dutch. At that point they started eduScrum and at that point a first post was written for Jeff Sutherland’s blog. What is really cool is that they are using Scrum not in a way to structure projects between teachers at school, but that they discovered the true core of the philosophy and apply in the way they teach. They had the guts to put the team central, allow the kids to select themselves based on their self identified core qualities and then have the teams sort out how to absorp the material. Instead of just grinding through the material and keep on sending as teachers, they put the team central, and allow them to find their own way. This reverse from push to pull in the classroom is resulting in more energy, happier kids and higher grades. In a world were the cognitive development of kids is key, they actually achieve more by teaching less, and learning the kids a more important lesson early on, that a team is more when you allow them to focus on their strengths instead of the individual weaknesses.

Check out the video they made, it is really heartwarming

read more:

• http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2012/04/scrum-future-for-education.html
• http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2012/11/scrum-ripples-bringing-scrum-beyond-it.html
• http://www.eduscrum.nl

The way I gather news and insights has changed tremendously in the last years. The blogosphere obviously is a large source, but the buzz on the twittersphere has become just as important. Next to that mobile devices have become equal important to find, read, capture stuff, anywhere, anytime. Needless to say, with this tremendous flood of news, I definitely do not want to read stuff multiple times. So in the last years I have been tweaking my workflow.

a day in the life of
Basically when I wake up, I start reading posts, check what happened on mail, continue with the blogospshere, maybe sometimes some tweets. Facebook is there, but only for some news on friends, not necessarily to discover new stuff. Many sites offer multiple channels and personally I find the blogsfeeds and tweets easier than Facebook timewalls. After bringing the kids to school, I’ll drive to the office. There I switch back and forth between the iPad, iPhone, macbook and corporatelaptop to read blogs and tweets in between the things I do.
Evenings at home the whole thing just continues until going to sleep. When at home and reading, the evenings are spend with the iPad and the kindle. The latter is great just before going to sleep, a different light and not too much chances of getting distracted surfing other sites.

discover
Discovery starts in two realms: the blogosphere and the twittersphere. At the moment I follow about 200 blog feeds and about follow about a 100 accounts in twitter. The blogfeeds are maintained in Google Reader. I just love it and switch long time ago from bloglines (it still exists). Google Reader works great on Chrome so my MS laptop for work and Macbook are covered. On the iPad I use Mr. Reader to be the best client, especially in dark mode and I definitely like how they format the posts. On the iPhone I now use Reeder. I like its clean interface, although for scanning it slightly less great as Mr. Reader, I wish they made one for iPhone. What I like from both clients is how they display the posts, better than Google Reader itself. For twitter I use both tweetdeck web application itself, not the Chrome extension, with a multitude of search strings. But most of the times I use Twitter itself on laptops or mobiles. I did use services like flipboard, which I stopped using, and the LinkedIn app. I found out about the last one that they do not serve my needs.

capture
I love to capture what I read. gives me a better feeling that keep great thoughts. For me the best app is Instapaper, this great service from Marco Arment. Support the guy, he does a great job. Anything worthwhile just goes tot this service. I always thought I really needed it to read stuff later, but it works like version control, knowing that it is stored somewhere comforts. I have the Instapaper client on all devices and once a weeks it sends the saved posts also to the Kindle. The amazon service is just great and i love the Instapaper/Kindle email integration.
Additional notes I save on Evernote, just do not know what todo without it, to save notes and share between devices. I do use the website and apps directly, hardly ever seem to use the email option. The only thing I stopped doing is to save articles on Evernote, in favor of Instapaper. Marco just does a better job.

sharing
Next to reading I like to share, at home, work, family and to friends. For that i use multiple channels:

• email to colleagues to distribution lists, Mr. Reader isgreat for that, it allows to share complete posts.
• tweets, only the really interesting and remarkable stuff, basically from any client, straight from Google Reader, Mr. reader, or copy paste in the browser
• facebook, occasianlly for friends
• LinkedIn, hardly only for the Dutch Tableau Usergroup, which I am co-running. Thank got they stopped Twitter connectivity
• blog, yeah, I have my WordPress blog, great reads are captured in posts, and I have added a Instapaper list through RSS on my blog. Did try Tumblr, but found it too simplistic and favored WordPress. In the past I did look at Blogger, but switched to WordPress, because of the larger community.
• aggregation to company blog, basically two options: repost the entry with link and rss aggregation

I did use services like Posterous and Ping.fm in the past, but found out it is not about linking your social services together and have one entry. Google+ I am not using it, are you? I have multiple entry into social media channels, for example I love to access Twitter from both Mr. Reader and from Google Reader.

More important there are few more services to be mentioned without which the workflow is not complete: Lastpass, Google bookmarks, Dropbox and the Chrome account.

• Lastpass is just amazing, I was able to raise my securityy tremendously by making all my passwords unique. The apps share great on all my devices (besides the kindle of course)
• Google bookmarks is useful as well, I just need something to save the new sites I have found. It is not when reading an article, it is to capture the whole site. but granted, knowing it is secured somewhere is more important than finding it again, it is just comforting.
• Chrome toolbar, I love chrome, what I love even more is the synced toolbar, it makes my both laptops look the same. basically I have all basic day-2-day services as icons in the bar and also two shortcuts to secure in Instapaper articles and Google bookmarks

So the you have it, my digital workflow, the reading part. There is a bucketful of services I use for music, pictures and video’s as well but that is a different topic.