Archive for the 'networks' Category

Jan 11 2012

Updates from Communities and Networks Connection

Published by under communication,communities of practice,community,networks,technology stewardship,tools

I’m continuing cleaning up and adapting my  technology configuration this week. Here is part 2!

I confess, I don’t pay nearly enough attention to all the good things flying past me, including things on my own Communities and Networks Connection. In case this is new to you, this is an aggregation project led by Tony Karrer. He set up a system that lets me curate content from a wide variety of bloggers interested in communities and networks (If you aren’t on the list and want to be, drop me a line!). Tony just let me know that Aggregage, the platform that powers has some new features that are now on the  Communities and Networks Connection.  Announcing the PERSONALIZATION ENGINE! That means that Communities and Networks Connection now allows you to sign-up and have your content personalized based on their interests. You can sign-up via the “Personalize Your Content” button on the right side of the interface shown on the right side of the picture on the right (right, right?).

Tony has explained it well on his site, so I’m quoting the master. He refers to his own aggregation site, eLearning Learning 

Now with personalization it’s even better. The picture below gives a sense of what’s happening:

Aggregage-Personalization

Curators handle finding the best sources of content.  The system then uses social signals such as those coming from Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, delicious as well as clicks and views.  These are compared to averages for the source and also looks at who is providing the signal, how often they signal things, how often they signal for that particular source, etc.  Those aspects existed before and it does a good job of finding great content.  You can read a bit more about these aspects in eLearning Learning Launches New Features.

What’s new now is that the site allows you to sign up and provide your Twitter and LinkedIn information.   The site will look at your activity on these sites and the content of what you share.  It will use that to find interests as well as to cluster you with other users who are like you based on interests and sharing.  You can partially control your interests via the Subscription page as shown below:

eLearning-Learning-Subscription

This will change over time based on your LinkedIn and twitter activity.  You can always visit and manually select interests as well.  You can read a bit more here: Personalization Explained.

The system then can combine three pieces of information to figure out what will be most interesting to you:

  • Social signal score – are people in the audience finding it interesting
  • Topic match – does it match up with your interests
  • Like sharing – are individuals who are like you sharing this

The system uses these to both rank things on the site and to generate Daily and Weekly newsletters.

The reason that I’m most exited about this is that I partly use eLearning Learning to make sure I don’t miss things that is good content that is relevant to me.  Now with personalization, it is even less likely that something will sneak by.

I also personally like the format of the new newsletter.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

So I’ll add my pitch – give it a try and let me  know what you think. In the mean time, here is the best of Communities and Networks Connection 2011


Hot Topics for 2011
2011 (4593)
People (2501)
Social (2225)
Share (1603)
Sharing (1603)
World (1555)
Change (1546)
Networks (1534)
Community (1515)
Difference (1467)
Business (1431)
Development (1425)
Management (1349)
May (1324)
Media (1298)
Information (1296)
Open (1240)
P2P (1220)
Learning (1191)
Groups (1181)

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Dec 21 2011

conVerge11 Keynote, Workshop and Reflections

Published by under events,facilitation,identity,learning,networks

I’ve been home just over a week after three great weeks in Australia, which started off with a keynote and workshop at ConVerge11 in Melbourne. (You can access all the session notes here.) The keynote was at 4pm on the first, packed day and I was asked to help encourage people to come to the cocktail reception afterwards. So I took my charge as “drive them to drink!”

Keynote

My goal was to provoke some thought about how we step beyond this idea of “creating communities for learning online” and instead think about connecting for learning — across cohorts, with the outside world, with our sponsoring institutions and with ourselves. After all, we can’t simply keep joining more groups. That does not scale. When we do utilize community approaches, we also need to think about how we make them the best they can be.  So I wove in the idea of the social artist (borrowing from Wenger and Houston). I confess, I dumped a LOT on people in an hour. If they didn’t need a drink when we started, I’m sure they did when I finished!

Below are my annotated slides because, as usual, my slides make no sense on their own. First is the Slideshare deck, and below is the PDF handout which is actually easier for reading the annotations.

conVerge 11: Connecting for Learning: Left and right, up and down (annotated)

View more presentations from Nancy White
LEFT AND RIGHT, UP AND DOWN-Annotated PDF
Workshop: Advanced Online Facilitation Practices
Friday afternoon we had a great group for the workshop. Since I dumped a million ideas on everyone the day before, my approach to the workshop was full on participatory. At the last minute I decided to run an online experiment with Google+ at the same time to both capture what we did and to bring in any outside voices from my network who happened to be awake. (Not many… it was Thanksgiving weekend in the US.) 55 comments later… Do read the comments. There is a lot of insight that people contributed and a big thanks to Evan for scribing! (most of the comments under my name are Evan capturing conversation from the room.)
I started by asking people to write their teaching and learning strengths via key words on paper, then share and talk about them with others around them — especially to move away from the people they know. Sort of unmasking the superpowers in the room.
We then went with Dave Gray’s Empathy Mapping exercise to help surface different perspectives. That generated some fantastic insights about our own teaching approaches and what we know or assume about our learners. Somehow someone asked about how to get people in a comfortable place to talk about what they think and I mentioned the Human Spectrogram. Instead of telling, we DID it!  By the time we did both of these activities the 50 minutes had disappeared, we were running five minutes late and everyone was coming in for the closing session. Poof! And ConVerge11 was history.
I also have a Tweetdoc of the Tweets I was able to capture Nancy-White-at-Converge11
All in all, it was a great re-entry into my network of teachers and learners in Australia, a well run conference and …as always, when I present, I present from my own edge to deepen my own learning.

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Oct 17 2011

Follow-up from the Leadership Learning Community Webinar

Published by under communities of practice,community,engagement,events,language,networks

Last Monday I was a guest of the Leadership Learning Community for an short online gathering. The description was pretty loose and they expected around 50 people to show up.

Communities, Networks and Engagement: Finding a Place for Action
We have so many online tools at our disposal to theoretically connect and activate engagement with others. But what happens when we say “we’re building an online community” but few engage? When is it worth the work and effort? What are our options? And if we build it, what are some starting points to help us work towards successful engagement?

We were using a GoToWebinar platform, which I’ll admit, I don’t like because it is really a broadcast tool, with no peer to peer interaction and all participant interaction funneled to one person (and there were four of us involved in producing the event, so lots of forwarding, etc.)  I decided to abandon a more formal presentation style to try and engage people from the start because after all, this was what the webinar was about! So we started with some polls, and then with my host, Grady McGonagill, we took questions during the presentation and Grady and I diverged into conversation as well. Consequently, I did not get through the material. So I promised to follow up with the slides, resources and answers to any outstanding questions we did not get to. Thus this blog post. Here we go…

Questions

  • Any tips or recommended resources for facilitating hybrid online/phone focus groups with smaller groups (5-15 max)? Also, any recommendations re: optimal group size for this sort of interaction? If the group is all online – you are lucky. The most challenging groups are mixed online and offline. For facilitating, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. 1) Think multi-modality. Audio alone doesn’t work well for a lot of us to stay engaged. Have a visual element – a shared Google doc or presentation, a wiki/chat room in Meetingwords.com or use the white board in a web meeting tool. Of course, this visual aspect needs to be relevant. I really like pairing chat rooms w/ audio (be it on phone, skype or whatever) where people can talk to each other without having to wait for audio “air time.” This does challenge some people who are less comfortable multitasking. You might consider methods like “the clock” both for phone and web meetings (see here and here). 2) Think 7 minute chunks. Break things up alternating content sharing with interacting, visual with audio. Remember, it is hard to pay attention when our bodies are not in the same place. 3) Group size issues are similar to those F2F. Once you get over 5 or 6 it is harder for everyone to have a chance to speak up. With some web tools, you can do break out rooms — just like F2F!
  • How do you balance “quality control” with network engagement/ participation/ responsibility? I was very intrigued by this question. It is probably helpful to figure out what we mean by quality control. I’ll take a guess and someone chime in if I get it wrong. I’m assuming this is about content — did a member give correct or useful advice. Was the data shared accurate, etc. My experience is that in communities where people care about what they are working with (the “domain”) they also care about quality and help weed out the “iffy” stuff. The key is to cultivate habits of critical thinking and useful practices to apply that thinking (which means civility!) If we are talking about “quality people” I’m assuming this means attracting people who know something about the domain. Again, if the learning matters, you will attract good people. It can feel, however, like a leap of faith. One word? LEAP!
  • We have persons in developing countries as well as in places where the internet is not an issue… this produces a big challenge to overcome to connect the majority of them. How do you engage them? How do you make them feel part of the community (normally they believe and put money, but not always participate). Again, I need to be careful in my interpretation of this question! When we work globally, we have both similarities and differences to account for. First, if there is clarity on shared domain (what the group is interested in an how it is concretely relevant to them today!) you are ahead of the game. Many global communities I’ve been involved with have very broad, generic domains. While no one could disagree with them, they were so broad everyone deprioritized their participation. A big tent may hold many people, but a big tent can also be empty. Consider focusing the domain in a way that carries relevance for people NOW. Then make the tent bigger later. Second, cultural diversity (linguistic, national, professional, gender, etc.) can be harder to detect online, but can trip us up faster. I find making these differences discuss-able little bit by little bit helps. Encourage people to share their ways of working and interacting. Compare and contrast a bit. This helps people find common ground and know when to “cut some slack” for others’ behaviors which they may not — ahem — love themselves! Finally, talk about participation — don’t assume it. Ask for small, doable things from people to build that sense of and experience of engagement. Don’t ask for TOO much — people are busy no matter where they live! Small bites are tasty! (See also the next two questions)
  • Do you have any recommendations for technology when your community is spread around the world? In my experience where bandwidth and electricity are limiting elements the most effective technology is email based technology. The use of text on mobile phones is the first technology that might unseat email. There are also community rhythm issues when you have people coming from diverse bandwidth contexts. For example, when you have a mix of folks who are “always online and reply quickly to messages AND people who are online once a week or every two weeks, you can get a lot of asymmetry in participation with those on less feeling left out and “late to the party.” If this happens to you, encourage the always-on folks to slow down. It’s good practice for us “fast fast fast” people!
  • What does diversity mean in this discussion?  How does class diversity and online access play a role?  How do multilingual networks connect and thrive?  What hosting platform handles multilingual groups best? Diversity means MANY things and some have different implications than others. Lets start with linguistic diversity. I have used platforms that have multilingual interfaces — and which one will work for you depends on what languages you need. But the user interface is just step one. That helps people get online. But the key is having a) critical mass within each linguistic group for ongoing interaction and b) “bridgers” who help summarize and translate. I’ve blogged a bit about this issue and you can read some of the articles here.
  • Can you repeat at some point how to access the wiki? I mentioned two wikis. One was my online facilitation resources wiki here. The other is the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit, a collaborative effort to capture a variety of online and offline methods.
  • CPsquare doesn’t give much on their initial website — any chance you all can give more guidance on how to connect to it? It is hard to get a sense of all the wonderful things that happen around CP2. First, it is important to know it is a membership community. You can see the blog for free, but ya gotta join, ok?  For example, there is the quarterly “Foundations of Communities of Practice” online workshop which is a deep dive into CoPs. John Smith, the community steward, told me to mention”help in real time” which is a discussion board for Q&A with fabulous people resources, the month telecon on “shadow the leader” where the community hears about the community leadership practices of one person over the arc of a year  (currently Marc Coenders on evolving his evolving business model), the R&D series on student projects where mostly PhD candidates support each other and then when drafts of work are ready, the community offers feedback. For more details, read CP2 blog for news and updates. My shorthand? CP2 is a place to engage with others who care about communities of practice!

Have other questions or thoughts? Chime in with a comment.
Slides:

Communities, Networks and Engagement: Finding a Place for Action

View more presentations from Nancy White

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Aug 18 2011

Why I Love D’Arcy Norman’s Blog

Published by under community,networks,reflection

IMG_4652I have lost track of my blog readers, buffeted by eddies of excess digital content. I stumbled back upon D’Arcy Norman’s blog this afternoon with pure delight. (The is one of his Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr … sometimes I prefer to just watch someone’s Flickr stream instead of read so much. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to set that up on an iPad for an idiot like me?)

It has been a long time since I visited D’Arcy’s blog. I new Alan Levine was heading that way and since I’ve been following Alan’s trip, the time felt right. I did not head for one post, I just read and scrolled. Kismet. Serendipity. This seems appropriate during August, where I am cutting myself some slack, in anticipation of an insane Fall work schedule. (Thus the gardening posts and food themed Tweets.)

My networks are now for the most part serendipity networks because they have become too large for me to track. When I need to research, interact, I can activate them for sure. But now they are like going to the candy store, staring at the counter for a few minutes, then picking a chocolate or two.

Here are a few chocolates from D’Arcy’s recent blogs.

he rides a steel cable. A link to a mind blowing YouTube video of a person who rides bikes where most of us can’t even imagine. I’ve watched it twice already.

ds106 campfire jam.  Friends jamming F2F and online.

photo(s) friday: dock life. Beautiful family photos.
And my favorite, which is so good I have to copy snippets that D’Arcy quoted… Thanks, D’Arcy!

on conformity through positive reinforcement.

From Neil Strauss’ article in the WSJ:

Just as stand-up comedians are trained to be funny by observing which of their lines and expressions are greeted with laughter, so too are our thoughts online molded to conform to popular opinion by these buttons. A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn’t retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And so we don’t show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us.

and contrasting Like culture with the power of positive narcissism:

“Like” culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem, which a healthy individual should be developing from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Instead, we are shaped by our stats, which include not just “likes” but the number of comments generated in response to what we write and the number of friends or followers we have. I’ve seen rock stars agonize over the fact that another artist has far more Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers than they do.

and on freedom from Like culture:

So let’s rise up against the tyranny of the “like” button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same. Write about what’s important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear. Form your own opinions of something you’re reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think. And, unless you truly believe that microblogging is your art form, don’t waste your time in pursuit of a quick fix of self-esteem and start focusing on your true passions.

Hallefrackinglujah.

Indeed, Hallefrackinglujah. And let’s hear it for summer serendipity.

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Aug 09 2011

Communities and Networks Connections – Top Posts Late July

Published by under communities of practice,community,networks

Front Page of http://cc.fullcirc.com/Sometimes I am a silly goose. I help sponsor a great aggregation site, the Communities and Networks Connection, but I lose track of it on my own radar. I do get the highlights via an email subscription (look at the right side of the page) and thought I’d offer a little glimpse, a temptation, if you will, to the site.

Best of Communities and Networks Connection

Week of July 30, 2011

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.