Phronesis

What if I'm wrong?

Picture: Twitter post from Christian Kreutz

My thought context is one of wondering if less is better when it comes to online tools and networks and where Robin Yap reacts with What happens if he visits the museum without twittering about it or reads a book in Starbuck instead of multitasking.

On Saturday I was invited to make a suggestion for an international working group's webpage. The middle column is "Latest news" so my suggestion was that they add the option for an email or RSS subscription. But people saw this as a bad idea for the following reasons:

1. The technology required to set up an email subscription or feed is difficult (according to the webpage designer);
2. It would unnecessarily complicate the page for users;
3. Only news and not a newsletter was going to be published (in paper form) and therefore what was the need?
4. Having the option to receive things by email is a false option because it leads to lots of emails, "blocks up" your email system, and makes you feel like you are missing something if you don't subscribe. So it would be better not to give that option.

And I ask myself - to what extent are we in the echo chamber  really listening to the  people who aren't? And who's learning from who?

Less is better or tool fatigue

I'm noticing something. Having gone through the whirl thrills of tools and learning it now feels like a time for consolidation.

Cut down on "friends", cut down on online spaces, cut down on people who write too much and look for more granular, deeper experiences that carry more meaning.

I don't really know what I mean by that!

But I do know that I'm not the only one. I have met a number of people recently who are in a phase change and looking to other parts of their life  ...a better integration of online and face-to-face activities and experiences, a smoother transition of history and future, and perhaps a better understanding of the ecology of it all.

Maybe it's just my age.

Or is it just a realisation that if you are not blogging, twittering or hanging out in Facebook that you don't actually miss much? Like an adolescent who catches on that there's something beyond the right parties and being seen in the right places.

At the same time there is still the tug of people who are still waiting to experience online stuff and get into social networking for the first time.

I'm ever more convinced that in my designing of bridges between different social practices, relationship and "languages" (online and face-to-face)  a focus on tools is a futile path for most contexts.

Still working it out.

Communities of Practice - becoming "alive"

I am preparing a session for small workgroups in a global network who want to get better at "marketing" themselves and recruiting new members.

This got me re-reading Wenger, McDermott and Snyder's chapter in Cultivating Communities of Practice where they suggest seven design principles for bringing out a community's own internal direction, character, and energy - or for becoming "alive". The principles are:

1. Design for evolution.
2. Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives.
3. Invite different levels of participation.
4. Develop both public and private community spaces.
5. Focus on value.
6. Combine familiarity and excitement.
7. Create a rhythm for the community.

If there is one thing that strikes me as I read this it's that this book was written in 2002. I'm reminded of how design principles can be excellent - but people only hear them when they are ready for them.

It's in the "little" things

Some of my biggest learning has come through working with John Smith of Learning Alliances. It's through him that I've learned to pay attention to those seemingly small practices that can make things work or not.

John and Shawn Callahan at Anecdote have put together a comprehensive document called "Conference call practices to generate knowledge and record learning" which is just great, not just because it's informative, but because it makes visible a range of practices behind a tool (phone conferencing system) and an activity (a phone call) that normally stay invisible.

2007 anti-stress apps and services

I was reflecting on the tools I've started using this year that have served me best ...

• The GPS navigation system, the Tom Tom goes to the top of the list. It's changed my perspectives of going out (which I avoid, if it looks like it's going to be stressy to find my way).
• A battery charger for my phone! Yes, I know most people did this one years ago, but it's taken me all this time to reap the benefits of charging on the go.
• My Kangaru dongle that keeps me connected to the Internet anywhere in Portugal, and which I even used successfully in the passenger seat driving along the motorway at 100 k/hr.

Mac apps that I started using and couldn't now be without:

• Quicksilver  for navigating my computer;
• Skitch from Plasq for taking quick, easy screenshots and drawing on them;
• also from Plasq I have a lot of fun with Comic Life where you can make comics (or rather I make postcards);
• Fetch for transfering files to my web host and server.
• Scrivener for writing long documents.
• Contactizer, from Objective Decision, for managing my  contacts, projects and to-do's

Multisystem apps or services that have given me additional joy this year are:

Jing Project for screenshots and (simple) screencasts;
Twitter, which keeps me feeling connected, even when I'm not saying anything.

Pet peeves this year have been:

• Webpages and apps that assume your language is equivalent to the country you are living in.
• iTunes gift vouchers which you can only give to someone who is registered in the same country shop as you It seems crazy that I can only give an iTunes gift voucher to people who are registered in the Portuguese iTunes shop. You are not permitted to register in more than one shop.
• People who try and show me something to get it right. Click this button and then ... no, I said this button... now, see what's happened... that's all wrong... Why don't they let me just get on with it?

Is the worm turning and the importance of an empty space

I'm at a new desk. I've transformed one of my rooms into a new office - come guest room. The desk is tall and looks like a bar and you sit on bar stools (with lower back support). My idea is to have a space where I can work with people round the same table. We can talk and work and it's easy to slip in and out of the space.

I'm paying attention at the moment to the way my work with online tools is making me more conscious of offline spaces. I find myself worrying at  the way people are reaching for online tools as panaceas. Mastering the tool becomes a pathway to  a promised land.

I'm co-responsible for those expectations. And I increasingly doubt them. Spaces as places to be together and alone. How do we design for those spaces and places?

In her (as always) fantastic Nobel Lecture on Not Winning the Nobel Prize Doris Lessing says

"Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.      

        If this writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn."

I'm struck by how "writers" could be a metaphor for people as creators of meaning. Do we need an empty space to surround us as we design meanings for our lives? Where are the empty spaces for listening and paying attention to words and inspiration?  How meaningful is what we are doing, if we can't find that space? How many poems and stories of learning and change may be stillborn, if we  grab the instruments and ignore the spaces?

From wicked competences to wicked outcomes

"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well-informed just to be undecided about them".

That brilliant observation comes from a report about "The assessment of wicked competences" by Peter Knight and Anna Page of the Open University in Milton Keynes. Wicked competences are achievements that cannot be neatly pre-specified, take time to develop and resist measurement-based approaches to assessment.

Wicked competences got me thinking of the problem of evaluating a community or a network. How to assess those soft outcomes is a question I often find myself chewing over precisely because wicked outcomes are not so easy to capture.

I like that... wicked outcomes it is.

Writing together

Last week there were ten of us who came together in Portugal to write. Normally when I write I spend ages procrastinating in the name of getting my cognitive wheels oiled and ready. But a time limit of two days and peer pressure meant I couldn't do that this time.

It was a remarkable experience as we represented different disciplines, professions and world views with people travelling quite far to get there, including from Australia and New Zealand. Some people knew each other from the area of Community Informatics, but for most people it was the first time they were in conversation. Despite this the final piece of writing was remarkably consistent - more like one person writing on different days than different people writing on the same day.

Flashes of the two days come back to me as I remember the silence of concentration when we were writing alone. Anyone coming in during those moments might have thought we were doing individual activities but it was very social in all sorts of ways. You were writing for the immediate group and about something that we had already discussed. There were also IMs and jokes being exchanged during the silence.

My observation is that it was a commitment to learning and a humility (and pragmatism) that goes with that that made us feel like the event was such a success. We'll probably get three journal articles out of the process. Ten people and two days seemed to be the right number of people and days for the activity. The two days were quite exhausting.

For myself it was wonderful as I get so caught up in projects that I don't have time to research and write, but which is what I love to do. It was a privilege to take those two days and I'm really really now going to set aside one day every week for writing.

It was a fascinating process, with more notes abut it on the wiki.

Questions about online communities

At a recent workshop with Etienne Wenger about "Learning Communities" I promised to put up the questions that were asked by workshop participants.

Only just doing it now. Sorry!

The questions are great. They reflect those that I often hear and would easily the basis of a future workshop discussion (online or face-to-face).

• How can I transform my own organisation? How can I mobilise using my own experience?
• How do we sustain a community of practice?
• There are lots of words - forum, discussion, communities... What are they and what's the difference?
• Looking at educational technology. How do you include that in a learning community. What about face-to-face, where does that fit in?
• How can an eLearning model be based on the value of people and their experience? How do you "open the space"?
• What are the critical factors for success? Does size matter?
• How do you reinforce/sustain a community - especially when work takes over?
• How do we recognise/certify informal learning and how do we measure an increase in productivity of that community?

Informal Learning - Etienne Wenger

I've put up my notes on Wenger's session at the eLearning conference in Lisbon on the conference blog.

Etienne talks about learning as a question of who we are in the world. Who we are as learners is not a technique it as an experience of being alive and of being in the world.

This seems so key and so fundamental to all the work that I do. A social perspective on learning is a perspective of learning to become a person who has a certain experience of the world. This perspective is integral to my designs for learning. People ask me for techniques, methods, tools, recipes, activities, communities of practice. And I can earn an income from selling them those.

But really all I have to offer is something of my own trajectory and my own being in the world.

My being in the world is increasingly complex and covers many domains. I engage in many different domains, personal, public, professional, academic - and what's more, my domains cross languages and cultures. The question facing me and other people is: how do I manage myself in a meaningful way at the intersection of my involvement in  these different domains?