Online Roles and Characters

In 2001 I wrote a small piece on Online Community Member Roles. Over the years I've received email from people suggesting other roles, or roles that reflect a certain context. Somehow it helps people sense patterns of behavior. Of course it also runs a high risk of stereotyping. But it keeps popping up on the radar screen.

In this evening's blogtroll, I came upon Meatball wiki on communities in the Power of Many blog. Hopping over to the Meatball Wiki page I found a wealth of work on online roles and characters. Also a link to Social Roles in Electronic Communications.

OK, I'll stop blogging tonight. I know. FIREHOSE!! And I'm reminded by Judith that I need to get my blogroll up. SOON!

Instant Gratification - Get an IM when your site is visited!!!

Instant Gratification - Get an IM when your site is visited -- I have been experiencing and playing with the "gratification" stuff around blogging compared to other online forms. It is a different sort of drug. Then I saw this. Endless!

I tried it, but it seems blogger does not allow the script!

NMC 2004: SmallPiecesLooselyJoined

Stephen Downes pointed to UBCWiki: SmallPiecesLooselyJoined a while back and I finally looked at it today. WOW! This is COOL! Especially after my previous post on conferences and precious F2F. I will be on the road so I can't toddle up to UBC (go if you can - it's a beautiful place) but I'm going to try and participate online. Now, to figure out of I a decentralist, centralist or fence sitter? I think it depends on how much chocolate I've had! I think I'm a meta fence sitter tonight.

I'm REALLY looking forward to this!

Shirky: The backchannel and conference design

Ah, one of my favorite themes about the intersection between online and offline interaction. Clay Shirky on Many2Many takes a look at the impact of online channels related to F2F events in Many-to-Many: The backchannel and conference design.

I could blather about this for hours but here are the three thoughts I'd like to put out to the blogosphere.

1. How can we best use our F2F time, including at "conferences?" - I think it was Pete Kaminksi, but I'm not sure, who said something like "our F2F time is too precious for work." Now my dividing line between those two is fuzzy as hell, but I totally agree that it is time to think about the precious F2F resource and how best to use it. This challenges ANY conference model, but in my mind it suggests more things like Open Space.

2. What are the ways we can use pre/post online work to make the most of the F2F time? In the sometimes successful (yes, into every life a little rain must fall) Muckabouts I've been party to organizing, the use of pre for agenda creation and relationship creation/deepening and post for reflection and next steps has been powerful. I use this in my work in international development as well. It works. Furthermore, by starting online, people see how they CAN develop "real" relationships with each other as they verify what they first "sensed" online and then experienced F2F. Starting online also makes it easier to go back online. I know this goes contrary to a lot of "common wisdom" of starting F2F, but I believe in it strongly. Again, context and how you do it matters, of course!

3. Control and Responsibility - The more we can support people taking responsibility for their learning and experiences, the better off I believe we are. This is really what those jargon words, "capacity building" and "sustainability" are all about. A few individuals can catalyze all they want, but change or forward movement requires the whole wave to wash upon the shore, not just a few drops! I think these online adjuncts (or are they central?) are one area to explore to support the wave.

Now, the things I have been thinking about a lot in terms of technology in the room at F2F conferences (IRC,IM, wiki, group annotation, etc.)include:

• How does this divide us? When is this productive? Deletory?
  
• What are the preparation implications (tools, training, etc.)
  
• When do you turn it off? Why? Who says?

Online Facilitation at Royal Roads University - 2003

Susan Byrne and Linda Waddell wrote an interesting paper about the preparation and execution of online facilitation in distance courses as part of their Masters work in Distributed Learning at Royal Roads University (a lovely place just outside of Victoria, BC!)

On page 66 they offer their recommendations:

Based on the findings of our project, we believe that RRU
could enrich learner and online facilitator satisfaction by:

Defining and developing an RRU online facilitation model and
standards for facilitating at RRU.

Increasing competencies of online facilitators by providing
more training in online facilitation.

Identifying and using a model of instructional design, which
consistently promotes interaction and provides opportunities
for more in-depth learning. This model of instructional design
should also enhance online facilitation.

Bottom line: they wanted more interaction and presence from instructors and instructors feel pressured (time/competency?) by these requests. No surprise. The scalability of online interaction is a huge question that came right to the forefront with distance learning.

The issues of standards is tougher. It is style? Substance? Freqency? And wouldn't these be contextual?

It is an interesting read.

Explaining this Weird Online Stuff With Scenarios

My acid test for explaining something about this crazy online world is to see if it makes sense to my mother or my husband. Both used to live mostly offline lives. My mother is getting wired so this is changing a bit! ;-)

When I go off all passionate about some online interaction thing and faces go blank, I stop and check myself. I am speaking from an insider context. Poor, poor communications. I revert to a story or a scenario. Then the light comes back on in folks' eyes.

When I came upon Dale Pike's note on a weblog workshop he ran at UNC in March I had a nod of appreciation for his use of scenarios. Dale wrote in his Stand Up Eight Weblog :

"One of the greatest challenges to introducing weblogs to someone who doesn't know much about them is that 'weblogging' quickly becomes a huge and interconnected jumble of processes and procedures. As you get your mind wrapped around the concepts, you don't realize how significantly you are changing your own processes. Ask someone who religiously uses a news aggregator to stay current to explain the difference between weblogs and email or weblogs and discussion groups and they may have some difficulty articulating why the medium feels so unique. Threaten to take away their aggregator, however, and you'll soon see just how embedded the processes can become.

I also started thinking of usage scenarios for weblogs. Everyone uses them for their own purposes, but there seem to be certain categories of use that are particularly well-suited to the medium."

He goes on and gives some examples.

One of the things that has REALLY ticked me off is how people draw conclusions about a tool based on their experience -- really one scenario. In fact we can probably surface a negative scenario for each positive one. And without this, we can't really understand the factors of success or failure -- tool, context, process -- the whole shebang.

How can we build a collection of scenarios that show the multiple facets of both online interaction tools and techniques? Some wiki that we all contribute to? How do we bring the multiple perpectives we need to advance online interaction? And keep it from being a "this is better than that" world? Is this collaborative research? Is Wikipedia a model?

A Checklist for Assessing: F2F or Online Meeting?

Nancy Settle-Murphy and Penny Pullan of www.chrysalisinternational.com shared this checklist as a tool to help determine of you should meet F2F or remotely. Nancy had shared it on the Yahoo groups OnlineFacilitation list I facilitate. I offered Nancy this feedback:

I really nodding in recognition with the second half, but the first half was harder for me to fall into step with. I think some of the characteristics you identify with F2F meetings are also REALLY essential to distributed meetings. 1-4 particularly apply to distributed mtgs. 8 can work really well remotely. 10 may be a reason FOR an asynch meeting.

Can you share a little of your and Penny's thinking about these as stronger indications for F2F? Or is it the whole group together on the first table that is the indicator?

Nancy responded (and kindly said it was ok to share this on my blog):

Our thinking was that if the list of statements on page 12, taken together, were mostly answered with an "I agree," then chances are, a FTF meeting may help achieve objectives in less time, with richer results. We drew from our own personal experiences as meeting facilitators, and considered the conditions under which remotely-facilitated meetings can work well, and when FTF sessions typically produce better results. I emphasize "usually," since sometimes it is possible to, for example, have a useful in-depth discussion with people you've never met. It's just usually more
productive and more revealing, given all of the ways we communicate nonverbally, to have these discussions FTF (yes, there are exceptions!). And yes, you're right that statements 1-4 can apply for those who wish to/need to meet remotely---we were thinking that if "yes," was the answer for all of these, then FTF might produce desired results more quickly. Again, this is based on our experience as FTF and remote facilitation over the years...

What this reinforces for me is that any tool or process to help us identify how we might do something - F2F or online - needs to allow us to include context. My context recently, for example, is distributed groups that at BEST can be F2F once a year. I have many people call or email me asking me, "how should I choose a tool or remote prcoess for my group." My most common answer is, "it all depends."

(This has an echo to Clay Shirky's essay Nomic World.)

BumpList: An email community for the determined

Lee LeFever of CommonCraft is celebrating the one year anniversary of his wonderful company. Cheers, Lee. He pointed out this great group today. I had to join (and of course, the obligatory guilt of bumping someone!) because I'm fascinated by the dynamics (or lack thereof) in a mail list group. Check it out... BumpList: An email community for the determined

Feed Bleeps and Blops

As a novice, I'm screwing up right and left and learning from it. I think I had my feed files in the wrong place. Testing now to see if I got it right. Otherwise, no one subbed will have seen the (many) posts since June 27th. Live, learn and always, EXPERIMENT!

Check The MetaWeb Graphic

The Metaweb from Nova Spivak of www.mindingtheplanet.net

I love the upper right quadrant, but I get a hit off of David Snowden's distrust of 2x2s which oversimplify issues -- or even misrepresent them. In this case the dichotomy of the two axis emphasizes the unnatural split between information connectivity and social connectivity.

I'm struggling with a similar categorization problem in the Tech Study I'm collaborating on. We categorize to simplify and show patterns, but it is the categorization people remember, not the complex substrate from which it springs.

Is this a problem or am I worrying needlessly?

Technology and Cultural Contexts

Trolling my blog roll I came upon a link from Ross Mayfield to a story from May 9 in the Portland Oregonian. It resonated with a pattern I see in my work inside but even moreso outside of the US. People consistently use tools in ways designers -- with their particular experience and cultural contstructs -- never imagined. Of course, I think it is brilliant how people adapt tools to their needs. (I also worry about the cultural implications of how tools affect the community of users. That's a whole 'nuther kettle of fish.)

What amazes me is that the results of the study seemed to be a surprise to the writer, but a given for the anthropologist. We are living in a global society, but in the US, we still persist in a US set of glasses. Ross referred to this as ethnographic disruptions. If we look at it from a global perspective, it is not disruption. It is common sense! It is only the blinkered who are surprised.

Intel study upsets ideas of how products are used:

"One of the things this project helped me see very clearly was the ways in which we were assuming the cross-cultural nature of the home, that there was a physical thing that was the home that would be the same everywhere. The assumptions around that got built into a lot of things that we and the technology industry more broadly were doing...

In the West, one of the critical metaphors we use to divide up our time and our space is the idea of the negotiation between work and leisure. ... But what if there's a third set of activities that are really important? What if there are things around play, or religion or health and wellness that don't neatly fit into the work or leisure category?

One of the things that became clear in Asia, and is becoming true in the West, but we're not really good at seeing it, is that people are using these technologies for those third activities. In Asia, it's visible in the way people use mobile devices to support religious activities. The nicest example is people using their mobile phones to find Mecca. LGE, a Korean handset company, has produced a Mecca-finding handset with GPS technology in it...

...In the U.S., we imagine that mobile phones are linked to individuals, and it's a mode of individual communication. In fact, the model of privatized ownership is one of our foundational social notions, even within the family. We have one of everything -- our own cars our own TV, PC . . . But people believe in different ways of ownership . . .There's a bunch of working classes and ethnic groups that own phones in common. The model is not individual-to-individual communications, but node to node, or social network to social network, and that model is proliferating, particularly as devices move out of middle classes and into a wider spectrum in society where people are never going to own them individually.

I definitely saw women in middle-class homes in India who describe themselves as regular Internet users who had never touched a PC. The way they could say that was that they'd been dictating messages to children and grandchildren, and those messages were being inputted into the computer."