Perspectance

Steve Hargadon is the Barbara Walters of the education world, so if you aren’t tuned in to his community or interview projects, you are missing out on an efficient way to keep current and engaged with important issues. Years ago, Steve Hargadon founded Classroom 2.0, probably THE largest “social network for those interested in Web 2.0 and Social Media in education” which has registered over 52,000 members. About a year ago I think, he was employed by Elluminate to man the LearnCentral community (over 68,000 members) and to use the Elluminate web conferencing platform to conduct interviews with educational innovators, seminal authors, and thought leaders. He maintains another Ning site (with over 5,000 members) to announce and discuss this Future of Education interview series. All of the interviews are available for download to listen to whenever convenient. I routinely listen to these on my walks and bus rides home and have never failed to be engaged and informed. Here is a the list of upcoming interviews:

• January 24th, Monday (12pm Pacific, 3pm Eastern, 8pm GMT): Karen Cator on The National Education Technology Plan
• January 25th, Tuesday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): Gary Stager – Inside the Mind of Gary Stager (This one will be fascinating to me and any OMET alum as Prof Stager was one of the most twistedly engaging profs I ever enjoyed at Pepperdine.)
• January 26th, Wednesday (4pm Pacific, 7pm Eastern, 1wam GMT): Michael Horn on Revisiting Disrupting Class — the 2nd Edition
• February 1st, Tuesday (3pm Pacific, 6pm Eastern, 11pm GMT): David Wiley
• February 3rd, Thursday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): Karen Hume on Tuned Out
• February 15th, Tuesday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): David Perkins on Making Learning Whole
• February 17th, Thursday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): Kevin Kelly on What Technology Wants
• February 22nd Tuesday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): John Seely Brown on The New Culture of Learning
• February 23rd, Wednesday (12pm Pacific, 3pm Eastern, 8pm GMT): Steve Wheeler on The Future of Web 2.0 Technologies in Learning.
• February 24th, Thursday (4pm Pacific, 7pm Eastern, 12am GMT): Michael Horn and Heather Staker on the North Carolina School Connectivity Initiative
• March 1st, Tuesday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): Sandy Hirsch on Libraries and Digital Literacy
  March 2nd, Wednesday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): Jim Klein on Social Networking in a School Community and Student Technology Use
• March 8th, Tuesday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): Don Smithmier on Crowd-sourced Learning
  March 10th, Thursday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): Mitch Resnick from MIT Media Lab
• March 22nd, Tuesday (11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 7pm GMT): Frederick Hess on The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas
• April 7th, Thursday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): Bernajean Porter on Local Engagement Around Education.
  April 21st, Thursday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): Barry Schwartz on The Paradox of Choice
• May 19th, Thursday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): Chris Guillebeau on The Art of Non-Conformity
• June 2nd, Thursday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): Cal Newport on How to Be a High School Superstar (“Hack Your Education” Series)
• June 7th, Tuesday (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern, 1am GMT): Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons on The Invisible Gorilla

This is personal and I’m not sure where the autopoiesis will go, but I’m listening to the Heart today. Read on only if you are interested in wading through my reflection pool or connecting with me through mindshares.

I’ve been gone a long time on a professional journey and have fallen somewhat ill. Nature-deficit disorder might be the dominant problem. Richard Louv is popularizing the term with his book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder:

Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses (p. 30).

This midMayDay I’ve taken my first emergent personal time off to BE outside in the arms of the Mother, doing whatever She leads me to do with Her in my own back yard.

*I use this term a lot. It came to me from Jami Sieber’s song, Arms of the Mother on her album Hidden Sky, which I listen to almost every morning. Wanna listen?


Hidden Sky by Jami Sieber
top

Is your organization characterized by conversation silos? I’m betting most organizations are structured as departmental hierarchies that coincidentally keep conversation to a minimum. The focus is probably on getting assigned work done. Therefore conversation, especially between employees across functional team lines and even more so, up and down the “chain of command” is likely viewed as interruption, unnecessary, and typically a waste of time. Can anyone give me an example of an organization that behaves otherwise?

One might be hard-pressed to imagine a more structured organization than the US Army, and so I read with interest LTC Pete Kilner’s description of consequences when one aspect of the C4P community design model (last post) is missing or weak:

If conversation is missing, knowledge may transfer but is unlikely to be generated. If connections are absent, there will be fewer contributions of content and conversation, and the contributions will have less context. If information context is absent, the community is prone to misinterpret content or apply knowledge inappropriately to new situations. Finally, without purpose, knowledge-building will founder.

As Jay Cross continually points out, 80% of what people learn occurs through informal means, yet companies spend 90% of their education budget on formal training. This is a complex problem, but the formal training, conversational silo, limited cross-boundary connection approach constrains knowledge capital to a transfer model, and ignores knowledge generation.

This gets to why it is so crucial to foster conversation in today’s economies. I’m intentionally using the word “economies” to highlight the value proposition inherent in communities of practice design for organizations. What business today still really thinks that knowledge transfer is sufficient? What educator today believes this? Knowledge sharing, building, and most importantly, knowledge generation is necessary to compete in today’s rapid pace of change condition.

Which of the five parts of your knowledge-building community is weakest? Is knowledge generation even occurring? Is it valued?

Tomorrow, I am delighted to be playing host in a CPsquare Research and Dissertation Fest community conference call to Alice MacGillivray, a Canadian knowledge management researcher.

Alice published a chapter in the Handbook of Research on Knowledge-Intensive Organizations entitled, Knowledge Intensive Work in a Network of Counter-Terrorism Communities. There are three things intriguing me in her work:

1. Alice applied a model that considers community of practice design that she learned in 2004 from (then Army Major) Pete Kilner, practitioner designer who created CompanyCommand, a community of practice that has been transforming Army officers.
2. In addition to applying a practitioner’s model, Alice also used a phenomenographic methodology in her research design. Her study approach appears to be replicable.
3. By applying Pete’s model, and publishing a replicable study in an academic work, a practice approach heretofore known mainly to the practical domain in which it originated has the chance of being tried and disseminated through the academic domain.

Alice is bridging a scholar-practitioner divide that exists and many of us experience but is often times difficult to discuss. This may come up in the call tomorrow along with discussion of the applicability of the C4P model.

Pete’s C4P model is an interesting tool that I will immediately apply to my support of curriculum and faculty development communities. You really should read the well-written short paper, but this definition section might tease you:

The C4P framework defines each of these terms in a specific way. Content refers to explicit, static knowledge objects such as documents or video clips, whereas conversation refers to face-to-face or online discussions. The key distinction between content and conversation is that content involves a one-way communication of information (monologue), whereas conversation necessarily includes at least a two-way exchange of information (dialogue) [25]. Connections, as used in C4P, refer to interpersonal contacts between community members that involve some level of relationship. When one member sends an email to another member, a connection has occurred. Information context is the who, what, where, when, why, and how that enables community members to assess whether and how information is relevant to them. This context provides the richness of detail that makes information meaningful and memorable. Finally, purpose is the reason for which the members come together in the community.

Alice’s chapter is available through the publications section of her artful blog (third item down). The CPsquare call tomorrow from 1-2 PST is free and open to invitees. If you are interested, contact either Alice or myself for the bridge number. Skype is good ? : suewolff or amacgillivray.

Most people at NorthernVoice, a blogger’s unconference that took place this past weekend in Vancouver, B.C. blogged in some fashion during the conference about the conference. Many tweeted. A tiny bit of tweeting was all I could muster. I was in a relaxed, chilled receptive canvas mode – stark contrast to last year. Took lots of notes and used the time as a soft mirror I could fold up and look at later. Since a fair number of participants (like myself) might be reviewing tagged blogs this week, I want to write something about my takeaways. The best thing for me about NorthernVoice is new online friends, and those can start with the sketchiest of blogged ideas.

The session that keeps sticking with me was one of the last ones: “Navigating the space in between – Create relationships, not distance” . It was a sure bet going in due to the everthoughtful Barbara Ganley, Laura Blankenship and Nancy White.

A Tale of two Dances was a neat little video that set the tone and they had us draw a picture of a face together with a partner to illustrate how we are constantly straddling across boundaries to connect and co-create.

Laura stated, “We both have left comfortable spaces.” She knew how to do the online world and was wanting to be there, but wants to try and make some connections outside, into her neighborhood. Her community neighbors are not online. How does she connect? How does she find the ones who know what Twitter is? She feels like she is in the limbo space and doesn’t know how to do the dance yet. She knows she’s not the only one trying to bridge that space.

Barbara is very comfortable in that space in between, at the edges, with the chaos. As a Middlebury College veteran faculty member, she regularly moved her students to that edge space, “but students are one thing. How do you move people in neighborhoods to those places?” She asked, “How do we use the boundaries and borders as places of deep learning potential, to find one another for help?”

Nancy talked about how it’s “some of me, some of we”, and how “the network creates a whole new me.” She asks, “Where are the juicy spots for each of those ways of being?” and then answers for herself, ” It’s about noticing the transitions and using them positively.”

Then they asked the group what people are doing to make the crossovers a rich space. What are people doing?

With far too little time, some people challenged the premise that the gap needed bridging. Dana Boyd’s identity work came up and brought back for me ongoing struggles with choosing and defining personal and public identities: “Some people need to rely on the separation provided by the two worlds.”

Someone, (I think maybe a thoughtful Heidi, but correct me if I’m wrong) stated what for me is the point I have been mulling over since the weekend,

“It’s a consciousness thing. It takes some self-confidence and/or foolhardiness. It takes not caring about what people think of you, maybe. It’s more taking more comfort in one’s identity. Learning to be ok with someone not liking that.”

For months, I have felt so stuck and befuddled with my not blogging despite the urge, that this message was a shiny key. Traversing worlds… integrating digital and embodied identities, requires a certain self-knowledge to even know if, when, why, and what one could, should, would want to BE present and engaged off and/or online. How can I know when I spend far too much time in front of my closet wondering which clothing is me today? What makes me so full of adolescent-type ambiguity the older I get?

I wonder, just a little bit, if my state of unease and mixed emotions toward on or offline social engagement has something fundamental to do with my serious intentional empty nest choice to return to school and delve into this ever emerging field as an online professional technology steward . Perhaps my choice keeps me in a more permanant transition forever swimming the tidal margins. Perhaps I am simply adapting to this brackish condition and need to realize my salt and fresh, off and online worlds allow me to flourish in the mix -but it’s still me BEING in the middle here. What do I want to BE doing?

And if you have read along this far and anything resonates, what is your story? Do you also see yourself in some kind of life transiton that overlays your online profession? How are you adapting (or not) your identity to the conditions of emergence?

Coming into the birding class, I had a goal of learning more about bird voices. I do have an iPod and recorder that attaches to the bottom. It’s been great for meetings, speakers, and singing, so I started “capturing” bird sounds with it. I had dozens collected before I first sat down to import the .wav files to my desktop pc. Listening to them played back was a huge disappointment – all white noise and wind, my loud bumps, cars and dogs, and the faintest of bird noises. So, I set another target to learn how to edit these files.

I could (and probably will) write for a couple of hours about the learning process, but our final class is tonight and I want to have something for people to see and hear.

We saw and heard this striking red, white and black woodpecker recently on a hike up to Olympic Hot Springs. Doug focused on taking pictures, and I recorded it’s sound.

The image below shows what the woodpecker sound looked like in Audacity after extracting it from the surrounding noise. There are three distinct areas that show up in the graph.

Neither the graph nor the sound really matches Cornell’s Ornithology library sound for a red-headed woodpecker. I’m not sure now what I saw or heard.

NOTE: Here I am in class and a classmate just showed a slideshow. I think the picture of a red-breasted sapsucker looked like what I saw. Sure enough, back at the Cornell site, a sound match is confirmed.

While taking the Birding class during October and November, I went out many times to observe birds. I usually took binoculars, a notepad and pencil, and some bird identification books. I’ve always been frustrated not being able to see birds well enough to tell what they are, so on these trips, I was also excited to take along my iPod recorder to try and identify the birds by their sound. The whole sound project was a learning experience, but did not contribute as much to identifying birds.

Thankfully, two or three times Doug came with me, bringing his Nikon D60 camera with something like 6 or 7 megapixels and a big 200mm telephoto lens. I was amazed how much detail we could observe by zooming in after loading the pictures on the computer and into a photo editing program. As I looked up the kinds of birds I thought we had seen, sometimes I would realize the evidence pointed to a different species. This slide show is built to show the naked eye and sometimes binocular view contrasted with a zoom and crop on the computer.

November 16, Sunday morning fog fighting sun, five mile walk, down to Canyon Park Starbucks and then on to the little wilderness behind the business park down 228th. Way at the beginning, blocks from my house, the 9:30 LBFJ birds are playing after breakfast. So too the Crow trios on telephone wires. I’ve learned to hear these robins, chickadees, and juncos. Is that the peer peer peer of a Redtail in the distance? The Cok-a-ree of blackbirds? But we’re miles from a marsh yet. (more…)

I began to get hooked on social networking technologies with my memberships to dial-up bulletin boards in Pine and newsgroups in Prodigy, before the graphical web. The technologies allowed me to access the wisdom of experts who knew how do stuff as cool and weird as ammonia-fuming a piece of oak furniture. (I used to be a cabinetmaker.) This learning by joining, following and participating in online social networks has mushroomed for me into something of a comfortable career in educational technologies. I help people learn with these tools, but almost unanimously, people express feeling terribly overwhelmed by the increasing numbers of so many group memberships.

I don’t feel overwhelmed, I just go with my own flow – even when this means I will lose track of some group or conversation I have joined. The pyramid shaped diagram I’ve drawn illustrates my priorities for social network involvement. The base represents more quantity or incidents of contact, but less time and attention needed. Involvement higher up on the diagram reflects fewer personal contacts, but more intense time commitment. I think it’s just a natural prioritization behavior that has evolved. Does the image resonate with you?

I know that my comfortable experience is unusual, but I wonder if talking about how other people manage might help build knowledge around this contemporary problem. This is why I jumped at the chance to collaborate with my colleagues Sylvia Currie, Jeffrey Keefer, and Bronwyn Stuckey to facilitate a free seminar called Managing Multimembership that started today in the SCoPE community. It’s easy to join in, and you do not have to feel guilty about not keeping up. In fact, you can participate right here by commenting on the Voice Thread or taking our 6 question survey. After that, if you get a chance, drop in on the seminar and throw in your two cents.

Golden and red-orange Fall has fallen against a clear blue sky today, the day my first child was born 27 years ago. I wish I could crunch through leaves with him, but he is working. Soon my soul, free to go out and wander for hours watching and listening to birds, will also be surrendered to a job I have wanted, so this day is even more precious.

This post was supposed to be notes from an hour of playing with Wavepad (that turned into two) a recent discovery for free download in my Windows Programs menu. It’s a pretty amazing and intuitive sound editor, like Audacity I guess – need to compare the two. I have been recording bird sounds on my Ipod to the point where I have a way too much data. Reminds me exactly of the excitement of capturing qualitative people data then sitting down at the computer to transcribe it. Tedious excited anticipation of the coding has to wait while I learn about sound editing (something I have always been curious about though). I learned from one of the readings in bird class that bird songs occupy an “aural niche”, a frequency especially situated to the ambient noise. This might prove helpful to know in trying to identify a bird by it’s sound. I tried comparing this one sound bite to an American Goldfinch identified on a website because Wavepad has a frequency analyzer. Even though the three-note song I my captured sounds similar, the frequencies are very different. It is hard to distinguish sounds when they are recorded at different levels and play so fast. I have to slow them way down, listen and look at the patterns to tell the difference. I feel so “out of tune” with the natural world seeing myself perseverate with a computer to “learn” what bird is what by analyzing the abstracted sign of the real. Blogging about it all is even a further abstraction. Whatever happened to my Spell of the Sensuous?

I must go seize this day outdoors now!