Martin Terre Blanche on ATutor OS Collaboration Tool

Martin Terre Blanche writes in his blog, Collaborative Learning Environments

The people who made ATutor (University of Toronto's Adaptive Technology Resource Center) have now created ACollab "a fully accessible, open source, multi-group, Web-based collaborative work environment" which they say is "ideal for groups working at a distance developing documentation, collaborating on research, or writing joint papers, and ideal for online educators who wish to add group learning activities to their ATutor courses".

I gave the demo a very brief try-out. The design is generally simple and fairly elegantly brings together some of the obvious things a group may need to work together: Member sign-on, group membership, member and group administration, events calendars, (threaded) discussion forums, simple text chat, and document libraries (i.e. the ability to upload, download, organise and comment on shared documents).

A Partially Definitive But Slightly Abstract Guide To Why Blogs Are So Successful

Via Seb, Tom Smith's A Partially Definitive But Slightly Abstract Guide To Why Blogs Are So Successful :

Bad Is the New Good ( It Really Is )

Some Things Just Don't Work (And Never Did, Let's Get Over It)

People need to PeripherizeTM, Not Focus ( There is Too Much Information )

Thinking Out Loud ( The Best Place to Do It )

Informality Fucking Rocks ( Everybody Hates the Suits Really )

You Don't Know What You Know ( Really )

You Probably Know Too Much To Even Begin Writing It Down ( Really Really )

A Little And Often is Best ( Your Mum Was Right )

The Link is God ( Which makes Google the Devil )

Person Centric not Place Centric (You can only be in one place at a time)

Personal Taxonomies (Let Dublin Core catch up rather than dictate)

You Own Your Blog ( You Are Your Blog )

Information Exists in the Context of People (And Always Has)

If It's Not Documented, It Really Doesn't Exist

Democracy is the Least Worst of the Alternatives (Let's Get Over It)

Reflection is the New Black (Who'd have thought?)

Lets Plan To Start Now, Plan Later (That's The Plan Anyway)

Passwords Blow Goats

Distributed AND Centralized (not OR)

Nobody Owns the Blog Concept

If Blogs are the Songs, RSS is the Home-made Compilation CD (RSS is cool)

People Can Cope With Simple ( Just about, but not always )

Don't Try And Make The Computer Do Things It Can't And We Can ( i.e Manage Knowledge, Make Sense, Inspire, See Connections, Make Jokes, Cock Up)

Google for 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined'"

I'm hitting on "If Blogs are the Songs, RSS is the Home-made Compilation CD." So does that mean the community that emerges from blogs is a remix?

(Edited to fix funky headline)

danah on a roll: "Autistic Social Software"

danah boyd's crib notes from her Supernova presentation are a must read: "Autistic Social Software" :: Supernova 2004. I debated and debated which snippet I'd post, but there is too much good stuff. Read it. Here is a temptation: the conclusion:

I'd like to conclude with a quote by Douglas Adams in "Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet" - "Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do."

Let's stop trying to dumb down people through technology. Let's step back and build technology that will make sense in the everyday lives of those who use it, that will empower them to use their evolved brain in a meaningful way.

danah finds a great one: spirtual perspective on community

apophenia: spirtual perspective on community

'A community can represent many things and be directed toward a definite goal, but community itself is the focus of a spiritual science that inspires universality. Day-to-day living in a community fosters a very practical concept of existence. Community life represents the frontier between the macro and micro in terms of human organization, making it possible to experience all levels of human existence. The community is, therefore, a vast landscape for a material realization whenever each person enters into contract with the gifts, virtues, and shortcomings of its members. It is also the immense spiritual and psychic laboratory that enables our spirits to develop.'

-Alex Polari de Alverga
in Forest of Vision: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Spirituality and the Santa Daime Tradition"

Reinvigorate // Visual Speller

Want to check your blog or webpage for spelling errors? Check out Reinvigorate // Visual Speller. It ain't perfect, but it sure is a handy dandy little tool. I'm also experimenting with Reinvigorate for tracking website statistics.

KeyIdeas: Blogging starts technically simply, it gets complicated REALLY fast!

Welcome to the Blog World, Elana

A friend and colleague of mine, Elana Centor, started her blog in the wee hours last night. Elana is a multi-talented woman and one of those talents is writing. Her passion is writing about life in the business world. The things we often think about to ourselves, but rarely speak because they are, well, um, not so business-like. In her intro Elana writes:

This column delights in telling tales out of school. It’s about what really goes on in corporate America. The focus is on the story, not who’s telling it, or what company the story is about. I’ll leave that to the investigative reporters.

Check out her first column, The Office Bio Break. And welcome her if you are so moved, into the community. I have been telling her of my blogging experiment and the most lovely experience I've had with the wider blogging community.

The Invisible, Immutable Power of Cmmunity

Read the story here. A lovely story of community.

Resources from Impact Alliance

A few handy links for folks interested in the use of online interaction in development. The resources, however, are more generally applicable. Part of Impact Alliance's Resource Center

Online Communities and Online Community Resources.
Online Facilitation

Sensible Blog Research Approach from Liz Lawley

Liz opines with a ton of common sense: Many-to-Many: blog research issues

I don’t think it makes sense to lump all research and observation about blogs together under one rubric. Right now, I there are at least five different approaches to studying blogs that I’d like to see explored in more depth, and I suspect that readers here will add a few more.

Forshortened, here are the five areas:

1. First, study of the form itself.
2. Second, related to the last bit above, is the study of interactions between blogs and blog authors, and the clusters (or communities) that are forming in this context.
3. Third, the kind of ethnographic studies that I referenced above, but done not in “the blogosphre” (if there is such a thing) as a whole, but in those clusters and communities that we’re able to identify.
4. Fourth, analysis of the content and style used in weblogs.
5. Fifth, study of the use of weblogs as tools in specific organizational contexts.

I'd add, of course, how people bridge between blogs and other tools - the wiki/blog combo has gotten some attention recently, but there is more. How does our RSS reader experience influence the community formation between blogs, for example? The tools shape the culture and the culture shapes the tools.

Heath Row Blogs Supernova

Here is a a sample panel Heath blogged. Man, that man can TYPE! Fast Company Now

Backchannel at a F2F Event

Jason Defillippo captures so much with this picture of backchannel at Supernova.

I'm a multi-moder, so I have no problem backchanneling on a laptop while still paying attention. But boy, do I feel sorry for the presenter. Why be F2F?

Strategic Questions as a Tool for Rebellion

The facilitator's soul in me lit up when Chris Corrigan pointed out this site, Crabgrass. Working for Social Change.

"A STRATEGIC QUESTION IS A SPECIAL TYPE OF QUESTION
Questioning is a basic tool for rebellion. It breaks open the stagnant hardened shells of the present, revealing ambiguity and opening up fresh options to be explored.

Questioning reveals the profound uncertainty that is imbedded in all reality beyond the facades of confidence and sureness. It takes this uncertainty towards growth and new possibilities.

Questioning can change your entire life. It can uncover hidden power and stifled dreams inside of you... things you may have denied for many years.

Questioning can change institutions and entire cultures. It can empower people to create strategies for change."

Later in the page my current favorite theme comes up, bridging...

BUILDING BRIDGES TO OTHER POINTS OF VIEW
In these times of tremendous diversity and conflict we are challenged to find ways of building bridges and co-creating new ways of working together to meet common goals. An important feature of strategic questioning is to put one's own opinions to the side and strive to find new ideas and ways. When Barbara Walters asked Anwar Sadat what kept him from going to Jerusalem to meet with Menachim Begin, suddenly Sadat was examining the obstacles in the way of this goal in a fresh way. In the way she phrased the question, Walters enabled Sadat to think freshly about the political realities and envision a different reality of his own making. She was identified as a neutral. I believe she was just honestly asking about the obstacles in Sadat's way of change. He found his own way through those obstacles under good questioning.

Strategic questioning is a way of talking with people with whom you have differences without abandoning your own beliefs and yet looking for common ground which may enable both parties to co-create a new path from the present situation. In every heart there is ambiguity; in every ideology there are parts which don't fit. Strategic questioning by someone who is perceived as neutral may help the questionee think beyond old answers. New policies may be envisioned, whistle blowers encouraged. This is one of the most important features of strategic questioning.

What does Chocolate Cake have to do with learning?

I'm doing an online conversation with the researchers at Ultraversity this week and next, so I've been browsing some of their logs. Today luck brought me to Linda's and a recipie for Chocolate and Almond Cake. Check out the rest of her blog -- there are some great notes on learning!

The Power of Many: Genesis file of Electric Minds

Christian Crumlish (who is writing what looks to be a very interesting book - the Power of Many) posted a link which brought many memories and feelings flooding back. It is an archive of the History of Electric Minds conversation topic. The take a peek back in time! It is weird to see the words of others and my own which were such an important part of my life in 1996-97 and really, where I learned what this crazy online world is all about. Thanks for the pointer, Christian! And Electric Minds lives on -- it has morphed over the years, but it lives on! I'll have to go pay a visit.

Slides from Joe Cothrel and Jenny Ambrozek's Presentation at Infonortics VC

Harry Collier has put up the slide decks from the 2004 Infonortics Virtual Communities Conference held in The Hague June 14-15. Fair warning: slide decks don't convey the content, context nor experience of any of the presentations. If one piques your interest, post a comment and we can try and build some of that context.

At the conference (besides taking a risk and making a bit of a fool of myself as my colleagues and I tried to stretch the form of 30-minute conference presentations with our bit on "Improvisation in distributed communities of practice" - I still need to write about it!), I was very interested in the survey Jenny and Joe completed on the state of virtual communities in the business sector. They are currently working on a report which will come out soon. I'll be sure to blog it!

Their data overview can be found here.

A couple of things struck me:

• Dang, it is great to see an overview, a reflection of where we've been. Wow! Thank you Joe and Jenny.
  
• The five strategies synthesized out of the recommendations from the respondents felt very familiar and common sense to me. Again, there is some smile of relief to have one's ideas validated in some ways. (I'll post them below)
  
• The data made me wonder what I understood to be the "network" of people working in this field called "virtual communities." It used to feel clearer to me, but now the application of group online interaction tools flows across far more sectors than it did in the late 90's. Even the word community is at questin (and rightfully so in my view.)
  
• Where is my place in this network? What is my community within the network that allows me to hone and grow my practice of online group facilitation? It too is much more diffuse and rather unconnected.
  
• I am used to hearing the voices of academics and bloggers and I notice their absence of sorts in the summary results. I recognize that this is a survey in the business context which impacted the survey sample. But it made me recognize that the things that influence me are far wider ranging. I had not realized that. This was really helpful for my thinking processes. Or maybe I don't recognize their voices in this report and expected something different. Food for thought.
  
• What is the role of visualizing networks? (half baked question)
  
• How do we help build this field? I do believe it is a field, but it is still very unformed.

Here are the 5 recommendations from Joe and Jenny:

1. Think local and real: real and virtual and local and global are merging. What opportunities exist for your community?
   
2. Get Networking: social networking software is the latest community tool. Try it and apply your learnings to your online group.
   
3. Empower the People: People want to participate in new ways. New media and mobile are only the start.
   
4. Raise the Bar on Data: What data are you currently capturing? Don't stop at ROI - insights from discussion can be just as important.
   
5. Advocate and Educate: Your community knowledge has value. Find better ways to articulate what your community is and does.

Upcoming.org

Upcoming.org

From the site:

Upcoming.org is an event calendar, completely driven by people like you. Enter in the events you're attending, comment on events entered by others, and syndicate event listings to your own weblog.

Fleeing here back to offline life in a second, but coordinating events is a critical part of a distributed community. I have to check this one out further.

Shaping the Network Society - Schuler and Day

Doug Schuler and Peter Day have a new book coming out worth a gander - Shaping the Network Society: The New Role of Civil Society in Cyberspace. Here is the table of contents . (MIT Press)

Furl - Your web page filing cabinet

Thanks to Jerry, I am now playing with Furl - Your web page filing cabinet. I am fascinated by the fact that this tool not only allows you to save webpages, but has a RSS feed and email subscription options to alert yourself and share your collection with others. I'm going to start using it today. (Goodie a cool new tool for sharing! I, like Jerry, did not quite "get" the del.icio.us interface!)

My FURL RSS is http://www.furl.net/members/choconancy/rss.xml

Stephen Powell: Discourse framing and presentation

I'm currently a "hotseat" guest at Ultralab's Ultraversity so I was interested to see Stephen Powell's post about Discourse framing and presentation

Reflecting on the difference between the discourse in the Ultraversity First Class conferences and the Hotseat tool, I am struck again by the 'tangible' difference in the learning experience that different online tools can provide. The fragmented nature of FC conversations is in stark contrast to the rich flow of ideas possible where contributions are displayed sequentially on the same page. Take a look at an screenshot of the Hotseat Tool and FC to get an idea about what I mean. It is also worth pointing out that there are a range of bulletin board systems that fall somewhere on a continuum between the two.

Tools impact our impression and participation. They also influence the style of discourse. I have no doubt about this. The question is how do we understand the impact on individuals and build that up to a group experience. With very strong personal preferences between tools, that old briding issue pokes its head up YET AGAIN!

Bridging Practitioners With Experts

Bravo to Stephen Powell of Ultralab New Zealand for this initiaitive: Practitioner/conference keynote presenter links

Dear Colleagues. As a part of the NAVCON2K4 conference we are seeing to recruit 30 teachers to take part in a pilot project to look at how we can support classroom practitioner through undertaking small scale action research projects linked to keynote presenters at the conference.

The project will start in the beginning of August and will finish in November when a research paper on the success of the project will be shred with the Ministry of Education and published online along with the individual action research projects. The project is a an action research project in its own right and as such everyone involved is a co-researcher and contributor to the research paper.

To support this, we will use Blog technology to help researchers in developing ideas, planning, and undertaking their action research. The project will be facilitated by Stephen Powell and Anne Trewern who have experience in supporting students through the action research process in online environments.

I've been ranting about individual/group bridging, but there is a HUGE need to connect practitioners and researchers working in any kind of online distributed work. What other bridges can we facilitate and build?

Mopsos - My presentation in Lisbon

Martin Dugage shares his ppt from a Knowledgeboard Meeting in Lisbon, June 2004. I appreciate the care Martin takes with both his thoughts and visuals -- the ppt alone communicates quite a bit. Check it out: "Mopsos - My presentation in Lisbon". I really like how he is playing around with the idea of our multiple identities. His reference to "family" on slide 12 had me cheering. I think be ignoring that we now work and trespass across our multiple roles and identities across the 24 hours of a day is foolish grasping at a past where we did segment our lives more distinctly.

For When We Try and Share F2F - A PowerPoint Blog

beyond bullets is Cliff Atkinson's offering to the world - a blog on PowerPoint. Now regardless of where you fall on the PowerPoint love/hate spectrum, it's always nice to have some insight on the deployment of a ubiquitous tool.

Digital Communities: Award Winners

Via Howard on Smart Mobs - Ars Electronica: Digital Communities: Award Winners. Wikipedia and The World Starts With Me are the winners! Bravo!

Digital Communities are about emergent collective action, citizen empowerment, social as well as economic entrepreneurship, the ingenuity of the users of technology and their power to actively shape their media, the future evolution of new tools and social forms, the improvement of culture and alleviation of suffering, the humanization of technology, openness and inclusiveness, and the sheer fun of making things together. Digital Communities can save lives, bridge differences and the Digital Divide, multiply knowledge, enable markets, revitalize democracy and provoke civic engagement ­ but only if people seize the power that technology provides and wield it thoughtfully.

Although sociologists Barry Wellman and Keith Hampton provide a more formal definition of "community" as "networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging and social identity," we further define "community" for the purpose of this competition as "a web of relationships, sustained over time, among people who care about each other," and we define "digital community" as "a web of relationships that is enabled, enhanced, or extended by digital tools."

Wikipedia and The World Starts With Me, the two winners of the first Golden Nicas awarded for the new Digital Communities category, exemplify the complementary aspects of virtual discourse and face-to-face action implied by the name of the category. The "digital" part of the definition does not imply that technology alone can create community — only people can form social groups, although alphabets and Internets can enable those people to act in ways that weren't possible before. And the "community" part can include many different kinds of groups who have fun, organize political or civic action, create art, engage in commerce, provide peer support in medical or family crises, learn and teach, start businesses, and fall in love.

We hope that the two winning examples, one existing almost wholly in cyberspace with the aim of creating public knowledge, the other one using digital media in Uganda for serious health education in the physical realm, establish an example of how broad the term "digital community" can be. Wikipedians created something that would not be possible without Internet-based communications, and The World Starts With Me uses digital media to improve a vital task in the face-to-face world that can be done without sophisticated technology but might be done more effectively with appropriate digital tools.

Online Communities and What The Heck Do We Mean By Facilitation?

Pete Bradshaw's recent post about learning communities spawed a thread on facilitation that caught my eye. Pete and Andy Roberts, also of Ultralab (there is a thread here today! All Ultralab, All the Time!)Pete referenced a paper from 2002 that talked about the importance of facilitation. Andy asked if it was time to question this approach. In the interchange, I sensed two different interpretations of facilitation, which begged me to scare up a few of the classics:

The Concise Oxford Dictionary:

Definition: Facilitation: v.t... make easy, promote, help forward, (action or result); hence ~A’tion.

Brad Spangler at BeyondIntractability.org includes the neutrality issue in his definition. Can we be neutral when we are from within? (This brings up some comparisons to the role of the researcher in action research):

Facilitation (or group facilitation) is a process in which a neutral person helps a group work together more effectively.

Ned Reute on the International Association of Facilitator's site wrote:

A facilitator is someone who uses some level of intuitive or explicit knowledge of group process to formulate and deliver some form of formal or informal process interventions at a shallow or deep level to help a group achieve what they want or need to do or get where they want or need to go.

The folks at Facilitate.com (consultants) describe a facilitation core competency which suggests that facilitation is not a role of one member.

So What the Heck do We Mean in the Context of Online Groups?
First of all, I don't think we can make any sweeping comments as context varies between groups and matters enormously. A small, longstanding group may self facilitate with ease and finesse. A large network-like group may also self facilitate (or is it self regulate?) and it means something completely different. A short term, diverse group may greatly benefit from the hand of a facilitator. In complex situations, pairs of process and content facilitators may enable a group to achieve it's goals.

So when Pete references a facilitated model in his paper, I think it is helpful to think about the possiblity that there are many facilitated models and that the very notion of facilitation can be different across them. Not all facilitation is external. It can be self-facilitation. It can be various combinations.

The one thing I would say is that there is something quite different between facilitation and coercion. I have seen a lot of stuff written about facilitation as a top down, controlling activity. In my book - and my biases and values are clearly showing -- facilitation is about helping people do things for themselves. Not doing it for them, nor controlling how they do it. There are times when leaders, for example, are facilitative. There are other times they are directive or controlling. There is a difference.

A good Cartoon is hard to beat

Lee LeFever points us to a good one...

This raises a process question - a linking question... Lee pointed to Jeff Veen as his source. How far does a blogger have to carry this attribution thing? Somebunny -- tell me!

Andy Roberts' Blog

Andy Roberts of Ultralab posts a pointer to another bridging discussion, this time between blogs and Usenet. The full thread can be found here. Peter Kleiweg wrote:

I have started a blog. And then another, on language. Writing in
a blog has advantages over writing on usenet. It is a personal
space you take care for yourself, and becomes a repository to
sort your arguments. On usenet, your arguments tend to get lost
somewhere in the threads, and you end up repeating yourself. A
blog is a bit more permanent. I also think I try to compose a
blog message more coherently, take more time to write something.

I have comments enabled on my language blog, but I don't really
like it. Sure, I want to get responses, want to know I get
noted, but I don't really want to engage in a discussion in the
comment section of my blog.

What I would like in my blog is to remove the comment section,
and tell visitors of my blog the following:

- If you want to contact me personally, write to me by e-mail

- If you want to express your view and opinions about
something I write here, do so in your own blog, and if you
link to my blog entry (and use that link at least once), then
I will take notice of your writing

- If you want to have a discussion about something I wrote here,
please post a response on usenet in the following group:
europa.linguas.blogs
I am reading that newsgroup, and will respond if I like

The only tool bridging pattern I've discerned from this and other previous stuff I've linked to is the issue of personal preference for a tool for a specific type of interaction... and that these preferences appear PERSONAL. Is anyone researching this? Useability folks? What can we learn from these to apply to collaborative work situations?