Full Circle Associates

Via a Tweet from John Hagel comes the Enormous forest xylophone plays Bach’s Cantata 147 (Wired UK). A phone handset advert? Yup. But in it beauty, art and music. In our communities and networks, can we use art and music as a way to focus attention, learn and share knowledge? What ideas do you have? Post a comment!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_CDLBTJD4M&feature=player_embedded

Months ago I got an email from Trish at PKids, an organization devoted to childhood immunization and disease prevention, asking if I’d do a webinar in the way off future of February. Well, today was the day. Last week in preparation I realized I had to get my act together. With most of my current experience in international development and my maternal/child health days nearly 15 years old, it was time to tap my network. So before I share the slides I want to send a Twitter thankyou/shout out to all the people who provided retweets, links and information. You are the best, @eekim, @stephenjdowns,  @SusannahFox, @epatientdave , @garyschwitzer, @SocMediaRckStr, @RavennaBlog, @CAPublicHealth, @paularobeson, @eqpaho, @CDCgov and all you other social media health geeks!

Here are the slides and attached is a PDF file with the slide comments (WhyMeWhyOnlinePKIDSFinalwnotes) which capture the basic narrative of the presentation. If you register on the PKIDS site, you can also access the recording of the webinar.

via Why me? Why Online? Social Media and Public Health.

Just a quick post to point to a great piece of advice from the ever-wonderful Chriss Corrigan, The art of giving instructions: 7 practices for facilitators. Scan the snippet then, if you are a facilitator, read the whole thing. It is worth your time. Come to think of it, these apply for parents, bosses and anyone else.

I think one of the hardest things to do as a facilitator is master the art of giving instructions.  Even for facilitators, public speaking can be a stressful experience, and there is nothing worse than trying to give instructions to a group while your knees are shaking and your mouth is dry.  But for all facilitators, and and especially those of us who work with radically new ways of meeting, this is a whole art in itself.  Giving instructions poorly leads to confusion and chaos and can quickly erode the trust of a group.  Being too direct can shut people down and create a sterile meeting.  The art is finding the space between the two.

Note: I’m working a back log of “draft posts” that have yet to see the light of day. This is one from my trip to the Netherlands in December!)

Just a quick post from the Netherlands where I’ve been working with the fabulous Marc Coenders on an evaluation project for ICCO and it’s ComPart “project.” It has been lovely to work with the Compart team of Maarten Boers, Pier Adrea Pirani and Pete Cranston (the last two from Euforic Services and old KM4Dev pals.) It was a bit like “old home week” to use an American expression. The work has been fascinating, intense and challenging. The key word that keeps coming to me is fractal. Just when we get to one moment of understanding, things tilt just a bit and a new pattern slips in shifting things again. This is great for meaning making, not so great for finishing an evaluation report! It reminds us that we are working in a complex environment and if we are to succeed, we have to work with emergence. (See Peggy Holman’s terrific book, Engaging Emergence). We expect to be able to share the evaluation early in 2011 after the team has had time to absorb the findings!

As a little “side benefit,” Maarten Boers of ICCO hosted a borrel, or gathering for the knowledge sharing/KM/social media types in the area at the end of the day, some from my dear old KM4Dev network. It had been a long and intense day of meetings, plus silly me managed to catch quite a bad cold, complete with fever, etc. So I was really pushing my physical limits.

We planned a Fish Bowl for the borrel focusing on the interplay between organiztional change and technology, springing off of the evaluation work at ICCO with their “ComPart way of working.” I was greatful to be able to mostly listen from the outside of the fish bowl and took copious notes, some of which I’ll put below.

But I have to say, there were a few funny, wonderful moments when we, most of whom were working both in a second language and from a very tired state, misheard things and we created something new (and funny) out of it.

• What about “solo galaxies,” misheard from “solidarity.” Earlier in the day I was taking notes on the flip chart and I thought, hm, what a unique thing. Did that mean someone was really working in isolation, a “one star galaxy?”
• We have the fish bowl method, but what comes to mind when you say “fish bowling?” Who is bowling? Are the fish the pins? My visual imagination went crazy.
• Later during the conversation I brought up the concept of “free riding” in networks and communities and how do we distinguish this from legitimate peripheral participation. Some one wanted to know what writing had to do with it and wasn’t free writing good for getting past writer’s block?

I love this stuff.

Anyway, here are the notes — there are some terrific one-liners. I apologize for not catching who said what, nor for having a list of participants. Not such great network weaving on my part!

When I’m designing or coaching design of learning experiences, including “classes” or workshops – any form – I like to include a reflective activity for whomever is teaching, facilitating or leading. And I like it to be visible to all the participants. This role models reflective practice in learning and removes some of the distance (power and participation) between the teacher and the participants. I believe in some way we are all on the learning path, even though our roles may vary.

In that vein, I wanted to point out Howard Rheingold’s Teacher’s learning journal | Social Media CoLab.Howard starts his reflection with goals:

My teaching goals:

I want to create the conditions for the class as a whole to make something magical happen. I want students to take away from this course all the learning outcomes I explicitly describe, but I also want to achieve much more: I want to awaken those who have been lulled to semislumber by so many years of desks arrayed in rows and “will this be on the test?” — I want to awaken them to their own powers to use online tools and their thinking skills to not only cope, but to thrive in a world that requires continuous learning. I want to grow more aware along with my students. I want to model and facilitate exploration of and reflection about the impacts of our own media practices. I want to induce student teams to outdo each other in coming up with fun, thought-provoking, incisive, profound, ways to engage with the texts and ideas. I want to inspire so much interest in social media that students read all the required texts and even some of the recommended texts.

Why I teach this way:

The subject itself has compelled me to teach about it: I have personally explored, observed, exploited, and analyzed media since internet-based communication was in its infancy, but when social media grew from a playground and laboratory for a small group of enthusiasts into a worldwide platform for commerce, politics, sociality, I became convinced that knowing how to use and think about social media could influence the final shape of the emerging infosphere. What you know and do today matters because it will be part of setting the rules for who can use these media, how they can use them, who will profit, and who will control tomorrow’s media. When I started teaching, students were starting to use Facebook — and they were already accustomed to surfing the web during class. The same media I’ve been using and which I’m now teaching are also directly challenging traditional methods of teaching and learning. Believe it or not, the ability to find out in real time whether the professor knows what he is talking about — and to silently share what you’ve discovered with the other students in a class — is a relatively new thing. When I started asking around about how teachers and students were  using social media for learning, and started asking the students themselves about what was working and what wasn’t, I began to learn that students thrive and learn from conversation among peers as well as the traditional public performance of whole-class discussion, that students’ collaborative projects amazed me and the other students with their ingenuity, that some risk-taking was exhilarating. Much of the structure of this class comes from the explicit feedback, experiment, and risk-taking of previous classes.

Given all that I’ve said so far, this description of the ideal 21st century teacher makes sense to me. I believe I fulfill some of these requirements. I strive to fulfill others. I vow to adapt, communicate, learn, envision, lead, model, collaborate, and above all, take risks. I take risks because I’ve learned that if you try something larger than your capabilities, you’ve learned something about doing something big — even if you fail. If you succeed admirably at doing something that you know you can do, you’ve learned something about doing something small. There’s nothing wrong with doing small things well. But I’m here to help those who want to go for it. This century requires thinkers who know how to take on significant challenges.

What happens, what changes when we share our intents? Does this bias participation? Seed the idea that the intent behind our actions shapes those actions? How do you as a teacher or leader show your intent?