Saturday, June 19, 2004

Hall Richmond Starts Blogging

The lead on Bigger Pictures came from Hal's Blog. Welcome to the blog community, Hal! (And thanks to Seb for pointing out this welcoming practice!)

 

Bigger Picture DK - Graphic Facilitation

I have long been interested in the role of images in facilitation, both online and off. The folks at Bigger Picture have created a nice intersection with their blog reporting of the F2F graphic facilitation work they did at the Shambala Institute earlier this month. Take a peek.

 

Liz Lawley: blog networks as faculty commons

I'm catching up on blog reading today after being gone and am enjoying picking up links to ideas that relate to the things I've been ruminating on here. Liz Lawley brings up the connection thing for faculty, the intersections offered by tools such as blogs and the persistent role of F2F at some point in time.


Last night Seb and Jill and I were talking about how the connections we’ve formed through our blogs are actually more important to us in terms of collegiality than the connections we have to people that we work with. I “know” Jill and Seb better (at least professionally) than I know most of the people in my hallway. I think this will be increasingly the case for academics—social software tools will foster and support collaborative networks that cross disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and those networks will become the important spaces in which creativity research develop. As Jill said, these social-software-supported networks have become closer to the ideal of the faculty commons than anything on a real campus has ever been.

So, what happens to research and scholarship—what happens to the current concept of a university, in fact?—when these formerly invisible colleges become not only visible, but more important than the traditional, geographically and disciplinarily (not a word, I know, but there isn’t one for what I want) bound colleges we’re accustomed to?

Virtuality simply isn’t going to replace physicality in toto; there’s too much value in physical presence. That’s why Jill and Seb and Clay were all willing to trek to Rochester for this panel—it was worth the expense (in time and money) to be able to connect in a physical space. Location matters—I live where I live for many reasons unrelated to my job, and that’s true for most of the people I know. So how do we blend our modes? How do we get the most out of the emerging blog commons? I don’t have answers yet, just questions.

 

David Weinberger on Individual and Social Elements of Tools

Ah, more on the individual/group nature of tools. (Hm, why do I shy away from the word social? Have to think about that.) In Many-to-Many: Internalizing socialization David asks:

Are individualistic tools adding social components, and are we using those components?
What was fascinating was a comment from Todd Richmond who questioned the social/individual dichotomy and instead posited the notion of a "slider." He wrote:
There is a danger is trying to label all of the bits as “social” or “individual”. In the end, pretty much all media is both: I imagine two sliders from 0-100 for individual and social (this is part of my object theory for media, but that’s another rant), but in this case, neither can go all the way to zero. Even the most social tool and media element has individual components, and in fact the “final” meaning is determined by the individual’s engagement. And the most individual element has some social aspect, even if it is just shared between multiple personalities of the same person (we’re all Sybil at heart).
Most excellent! Worth a virtual truffle!

 

Connecting Weblogs and KnowledgeBoard

Via David Wilcox - an example of ideas to connect blogs and forums on KnowledgeBoard . For those of us visually inclined, see the mindmap.

 

Friday, June 18, 2004

Andy Roberts: More on this "bridging" thang!

Andy Roberts' Blog. Glad to see the questions are floating around for others as well.

 

CPSquare Amsterdam Meeting

OK, time to capture my random thoughts on the CPSquare F2F gathering at the Tree House in Amsterdam on June 13th. Fifteen bright, interesting souls spent Sunday talking about a wide range of issues loosely bound around the topic of Communities or Practice. We had some long-time CPSquare members plus some great new friends from the blogging world. As always, it is fascinating to get a peek at how we each experience these gatherings and the ongoing sense of always feeling like we are the outsiders. Are there really any insiders?

Others have blogged about the structure of the day, so I thought I'd write a bit about the things that have persisted, buzzing around in my head.

Designed for a Group, Experienced as an Individual
In our lovely morning breakout group Mary Ann started us out with a story about a research project she did with a partner at the University of Waikaito (check spelling) in New Zealand. They had a lot of material to gather and organize so they wanted a web space. One partner wanted to use a blog, the other a more traditional web based discussion space. Each of them preferred the space they had organized and it was a challenge for them to work in the others' space. Fundamentally, both were intended as containers for sharing content, yet each user experienced them in different enough ways to create a divided experience.

Why? Is it habituation on the platforms we first experience? Learning style? (I trotted out my long held observation that global thinkers adopt to a wider variety of online tools and experiences faster than sequential thinkers and that blogs are very suited to global thinkers. See Lilia's cloud theory. Whatever the cause, there is a very real experience gap so when we are thinking about online interaction tools in a group or team setting, we have some serious challenges. Just because it works for one or some does not mean it will work for the group. We need to figure this out better and think about solutions that bridge individual experiences into a more shared experience WHEN THIS is critical to the purpose at hand. (It isn't always -- important caveat!) So I'll keep harping on this designed for a group/experienced by an individual thing.

This segues into the question about why there are some very strong feeling camps and distance between camps in the blogger/discussion board/wiki arena and how can we move past advocacy for one over another and instead look for bridges?

The Group That Eats Together Communicates Better?
Finally, the two highlights of Sunday revolve around meals. Our lunch was a collaborative pot luck including some great red wine from the Basque region of Spain, fresh danish from Denmark, Dutch cheeses and meats, US chocolates and lovely fresh fruit and bread. Many hands cleared the decks for lunch, we had a laughter and conversation filled 90 minutes and then poof, all hands cleared things away so we could continue our conversations. It was seamless and it felt efortless to me. Was it the wine? The company? The companionable act of sharing food?


Later that evening we had to get to Den Hague where many of use were participating in the Infonortics Virtual Communities conference. It was getting late, we had to prepare for the next day and there were no restaurants nearby. So we walked across the street to the Shell station, bought and heated up Indonesian foon in the microwave and had another amazing dinner eating food from a gas station sitting in the parking lot of a fancy-pants hotel. I still smile when I remember it!


Summing up? It is great to be in a community of practice on communities of practice. And it is great to punctuate our ongoing online interaction with F2F meetings with fresh ideas, old and new friends, wicked complicated problems and always, the communal meal.

 

emerge 2004 - Blended Learning from Southern Africa

emerge 2004 will kick off June 28th through July 10th. This online conference focuses on Blended Collaborative Learning in Southern Africa. There are also some F2F events for those in the region. (I wish I were!)

I'll be co-presenting a 5 day online workshop on online facilitation the first week with one of the conference organizers and friend, Tony Carr from University of Cape Town. Although the conference focuses on folks in Southern Africa, it is open to others for a very modest fee. Come support learning!

 

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Supernova 2004's Online and Distributed Elements

I've been experimenting with online elements complements F2F meetings. For the last 4 years I've used online interaction tools pre, during and post-event for learning and community events. It is great to see others doing the same such as the upcoming Supernova Community Connection.

Value for Registrants/Onsite Participants

It has been easy to see the value that online opportunities in preparation pre-gathering (relationship building, agenda negotiation, building content background, etc), note taking during (wiki, IRC, blogs, simple note taking for later sharing) and post-event wrap up and synthesis. The biggest challenges I've found is the effect of unqual participation across the group, but this happens offline as well. F2F synchronous backchannel deserves some attention in a later post. ;-)

What is the Legitimate Participation of Remote Folk?

The blog and wiki for Supernova are available to non-registrants. The question is what is their role? I've peeked into events like this from a distance. I enjoyed being part of an IRC chat for a couple of hours at PlanetWorks earlier this month. But mostly because I knew some of the folks in the chatroom. Other times I've found it primarily a pretty solitary activity. A case of barely legitimate peripheral participation? Do onsite folks want to waste precious time with non registered offsite folks? Registered offsite folks?

 

Digital Note Taking - ClearBoard

A nice little pointer via McGee's Musings to ClearBoard

is a handy tool that magically converts a photo of a white board, a flipchart, a piece of paper, or any drawing on a relatively uniform background into a crystal clear image as if you were actually drawing on a computer. ClearBoard is designed from ground up with the latest and most sophisticated image processing technologies.

Hm, this would help with some of the notes we took last Sunday! I've been using digital pictures of flipchart notes for post-f2f work. This looks like a tool that could come in handy!

 

Home Again - The Effect of Travel on Blogging

Now home from Amsterdam, the CPSquare meeting and Infonortics VC conference. Phew. Ready to sleep. Have lots of notes to share, but had far less time and connectivity than I had anticipated. It has been interesting to note how this disruption felt. I wanted to blog at the conference -- could not get the wireless to work with my laptop. Intended to blog at night but the long Dutch evenings were far more conducive to picnicing in parking lots and dining on the beach. Treasure and maximize the F2F. More in the coming days. In the meantime, here are a few of my fellow bloggers captures:

Erik's notes
Lilia's notes
Ton's notes