Phronesis

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.

Magic fingers ...

Last week I gave a brief presentation about communities of practice at the launch of Magic Whiteboards by INOV@R in Mangualde.

Later, over wine, cheese, and conversation one of the teachers was enthusiastic about the active group of teachers he was part of, and with whom he felt he learned so much. He also observed that the success of this group - which he could now call a community of practice - could be attributed to the "magic fingers" of the school president. These fingers subtly worked to connect people and put opportunities for them to meet in the way. 

I thought that was a fantastic observation. And a great word. In my line of work we talk about facilitation. And now we have started talking about technology stewardship. How DRY!! Neither of those titles captures the magic and playful essence of community building.  Neither do they say anything about the invisibleness of most of that work.

And then there is the problem of translation. In Portuguese I really dislike the word animador for facilitator. It gives the idea of an entertainer, or  someone who is jumping up and down rousing people to respond. But facilitador doesn't sound good in Portuguese either - making thing easy for someone is not something you associate with learning.

And let's not even start talking about stewardship! How will I EVER translate that word, let alone the concept?

From now on I'm sticking to metaphors for the idea of facilitation .. magic fingers - dedos mágicos. 

Stimulating people's imagination to use new tools

Two familar scenarios + ongoing design questions + an idea:

Scenario one:
I'm invited to work with people on a project for starting a distributed community of practice using new technologies. The people in the team don't use RSS feeds or tags but understand the potential and want to introduce it for others. So in our team we communicate about the project via e-mail, telephone and face-to-face meetings.

Scenario two:
I'm doing a workshop about new technologies where the starting point may be a discussion group or forum. I introduce people to new technologies and start bringing their del.icio.us or flickr feeds into a shared space like a Wiki, or more recently, into Drupal.

Ongoing design questions (see Nancy's second wave adoption):

• Are we focusing on the right value to the people we are asking to use these new tools and ways of working?
• How do we stimulate people's imagination to try new things, like tools and processes that may be of use?
  
• How do we trigger inventiveness with new tools?

And another related design question I puzzle over:

• understanding Web2.0 is more than the sum of knowing how to use individual tools. How can you zoom in and out of individual tools and the bigger picture without making it feel overwhelming?
  

An idea:

The other day I was wondering if it wasn't worth my while spending some time at the beginning of a project to set up a Google homepage or a Netvibes page where the team I'm working with (in the first scenario) could get a feel for how RSS feeds (and maybe tags) could serve them. Even if I was the only one with a calendar, flickr and del.icio.us feed in their desktop homepage, they would also get a feel for what it was like if we to be some context as well as exchanging ideas, plans and information.

Then I saw that Weblogg-ed is using Pageflakes as a student portal.  Pageflakes is similar to Netvibes. A brilliant related idea! I'm going to set up a working group portal on Pageflakes or Netvibes for the project I'm working on. Team members will also be able to edit it. The rest of the team can have it as their homepage (or not) and sooner or later might start developing it and making it their own.

I'm also going to set one up for the beginning of a workshop. Hey! I'm also thinking you could design a Pageflake page for the run up to an event or a conference...  I think this has great potential for stimulating people imagination and it's a concrete way to help people get a picture of the overall benefit of the tools without them having to know how to use each individual one.

technorati tags:desktop, designforlearning

Lively remembering - not to be forgotten

This week has been busy so I'm still catching up on last week's thoughts. After the Prato Dialogue, we did a workshop at the Community Informatics Conference in Italy.

It didn't turn out as we expected. Our plan was to use photos and del.icio.us and the blog - during the workshop - as memories of what we were doing. We were doing "lively remembering" rather than talking about it - that's the CoP perspective bit.

The main desvio in the workshop came from taking photographs. We didn't ask for permission first. I kicked myself because I've always been very sensitive about taking photos. As a child living and traveling in sensitive African countries and with many Muslims, I was conditioned to think that taking photos would cause offence at best and get you beaten or arrested at worst.

Then there was the time when my mum built her website - around ten years ago. She put a photo of her and her four daughters on it. I was shocked that she could contemplate being so public and made her blank out my face!

But I've gone from feeling self-conscious about taking photos to treating it in the same way as I do taking written notes. And the issues and ethics around private and public have changed and become more complex.

Making artifacts private, including photos, often makes less them less accessible to the community they belong to. For example, you take photos of a group event and put them in flickr. If you mark the photos as private, then to access the photos people need a flickr account and be your contact or join a group. But most people I work with can't (don't) manage to work with flickr. Only if I make the photos public, or even embed them in a flickr badge on their site, can the community take ownership of their photos and the community experience.

In conclusion, I don't feel like I've come any closer to resolving an ongoing tension between reifying an experience (or not), where to locate the memory of a community that they can take ownership of it, and how to make it private without it becoming inaccessible or forgotten.

technorati tags:memory, Prato2006

Blogged with Flock

A discussion forum mindset?

I've been observing how there is a "generation" of people who have become so used to using discussion forums that they have difficulty in seeing online interactions outside that lens.

A discussion forum is more organised, predictable and tidy than blogs and tags and feeds. Also a facilitator (or teacher) is still able to manage and direct the conversations - by approving members, setting permissions, deciding topics, moderating discussions etc.

Managing a discussion forum is also seen by many people as requiring quite a high level technology know-how. And there's a status from having that know-how.

That has got me wondering if those people who haven't even yet entered the world of discussion forums would find it easier  or less easy to enter the more messy, unpredictable and less controlable world of blogging and feeds.

These thoughts have been simmering away as I prepared the CIARIS Friends Meeting site using Drupal. The important place for interactions is through blogging and using feeds inside the site and from outside the site (outside in this case are del.icio.us and flickr feeds), and syndication of course. The discussion forums are the least interesting part of Drupal, but I've incorporated them because it's what some people will be expecting.

I was fascinated when an experienced online facilitator described his moves when he entered the CIAIRS site. His eye immediately ran down the left side of the screen to look for discussion topics. He dismissed  blogs as irrelevant (as who would be keeping a blog here?) He clicked on forums, saw there were no discussions and left the site.

Drupal can be used as a real hybrid genre. It incorporates (or can incorporate) blogs, wikis, tags and discussion forums. Among other things you can write book pages (that make a book) and have projects. It can also look like a website or a blog. It's this messy combination of technologies and genres that is Drupal's strength - but does that mean only people with messy mindsets who let go control can realise its potential?

Engagement in online learning

John Smith and I have an article in the eLearn magazine today. It follows some of our practice and reflection on designing for online and face-to-face engagement  - from a communities of practice perspective.

Rules of Engagement (9/22/06)

Drawing upon their experiences with CPSquare—a community of practice about communities of practice—authors John D. Smith and Beverly Trayner offer a framework for designing online courses. Starting with the premise that "learning comes about through informal engagement with other people," the authors describe techniques for helping people relate to each other in an online community setting.

Multi-channeling

I've  been waiting for  Swarm-it to be released and here it is.  I'm certain it's the way forward, especially when you have some people in communities who have easier access to a mobile phone than to internet connection. Ahem - like most people in the world.

It is a multi-channel mobile group messaging system, so you can send messages to and from mobile phones and/or email and/or IM. And it works with different mobile operators. I think this is a major leap forward and I can't wait to try it out with a group, or rather, what they call a swarm. There is a group message board for each swarm and with a logo option. It's very simple to set up. Lots of potential - and farewell stuffy message boards!

There is a free version and a Pro version and I wasn't clear if everyone in the "swarm" has to pay for the Pro version, or just the person who creates the swarm. It is something that really needs to have interfaces in other languages, because many of the people who could really benefit from it are people who don't (easily) operate in English.

Designing online/face-to-face events

I'm getting ready for the online preparation phase of a face-to-face meeting that will be taking place in Lisbon in October. People from different parts of the world will be spending an afternoon together because they are all partners in a programme in which each one plays a crucial part in their specific local context, but who haven't had a chance to see the wider context in which they are all working. 

The sponsoring organisation want to be sure that the afternoon when people are together face-to-face is productive -  productive in terms of supporting potential relationships and of supporting partnerships between participants who could contribute to a changing and shared vision for the future.

This isn't an uncommon scenario in international projects. And sponsoring organisations are coming to realise how much potential there is in having online preparation and post-event phases so that the precious face-to-face time can be used to its full potential.

Designing for these events always raises similar questions:

1. What technology should we use - a simple discussion group (Google or Yahoo groups?), a mix of tools (like a discussion group, social bookmarking, wiki, blogs, etc.?) or a Content/Course Management System (like Moodle, Drupal etc.)
2. How can we make the most of the fact that people speak different first languages, rather than letting different languages be a barrier?
3. How can we support those people who have easier access to e-mails than to the Internet.
4. How to support both those people who are comfortable with technologies, those who don't have a clue about technologies, and all those in between?

In the case of this particular meeting I have opted to use Drupal with the wonderful and patient help of David Wilcox whose blog is Designing for Civil Society and his son. In terms of technology and language Drupal has different language interfaces and we'll make use of Google language tools.  There are thirty people participating in the meeting, so signing everyone up to Squeet (free email RSS reader) is a way of making sure that people get many of the messages from the Drupal site by email, even if they don't go there or subscribe to the feed. We will probably use Bryght "a hosting web-site service" based on Drupal.

Of course the hardest part is not the technology. The tricky bit is people. In particular, as soon as you start changing  modes of communication, changing languages and exploring different ways of learning, then some connected things happen in terms of group dynamics:

• people are eased or pushed or fall out of their comfort zone;
• different people feel included or excluded in the conversations;
• power relations change as people who are invested in one mode, language, or way of learning can feel quite vulnerable in another.

Just changing one of these variables - technology, language or learning approach - is challenging enough. Changing all three can be very potent. I am interested to see how creatively we manage those tensions in relation to the mix of technology, language and potential learning.