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
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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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

A man blows leaves out his driveway, swirling huff of leaf birds billows into the street. In the sky silver bright above, bird specks swirl themselves forward into a flocking ball blown down through the air. I want to take pictures of everybody for my blog, but a funny thing happens. All the birds keep flying away as I lift my camera. I suppose they do not wish to be captured. I walk along accompanied by bird clans flitting in and out of the bushes and fence thickets beside me as if to sing peekaboo, yoohoo, peep peep peep do you know who we are? When I stop, they stop, still, for just awhile – and then, delightfully as I now notice always happens, everyone comes out to say hi and hold their lives all around me, dancing, darting, dot dot hopping across my path. I am so enchanted trancelike, I imagine one of them might light on me before they notice. Slower and slower breathing, I melt into my own stillness and their cheerfulness. A Stellar jays cha cha cha stacatto joins the now apparent starling choral facade.

A car approaches and snaps me back to waking life, but I see so clearly the beauty of being, and the birds are teaching me something: To know, listen. To listen, stop. Be still. Be. Stop thinking to capture is to own, and to own, to hold. Instead behold. Be. What a rhythm I am finding.

Many months ago, I was introduced to a man looking for ideas about a youth service venture. Couldn’t help him much, but turns out he was an Antioch alum too. So as to the mid stream topic change, little wilderness to man acquaintance….This man took me to the wild areas behind the business park, showed me all around the running stream where the willows bend down and salmon spawn in Fall. I was amazed that for twenty years, I had never known such a wonderful little place was living five miles away. Stranger still, in the many months since he showed me the place, this was the first time I had returned, despite promising myself to at least come see the salmon in Fall. Today, I was dovetailing my exercise, spiritual renewal, computer fasting, and my need to get in one more bird trip for Sue’s class. I knew there would be birds there; that was something else the man told of.

First thing I see is ducks! Great! because I’ve been wanting to tell what ducks are what. I wonder if I’ve learned any of them. Mallards, a pair. White and black buffleheads, forgot how many, at least 4 or 5 – two coots, some ruddy and hefty-necked ducks, but then got distracted with a hawk sitting low in a bush. Blackish head, dark back, brown and white speckled chest. Football shaped, Red-tail? Just as I lift the binoculars, it lifts off – no red tail showing. Juvenile?

Then around the corner comes this guy, the very guy who showed me the place. He tells me about where a pair of redtails have been nesting the past three years, and where maybe a second pair did this year and how this could be the youngster from their nest. He tells me how the osprey pair I had found on the 228th ridge cell tower have been there for four or five years, and how they would come eat here three miles away, near 2:00 every day. He told me there’s a kingfisher, (I saw it a bit later), and to come between 7 and 8 in the morning or 3:30-4:30 these evenings to see so many more birds, and ducks flying in over the cattails. I envy this ordinary citizen, his incorporation of constitutional observances into his daily life. I now work 8-5 the bulk of days in an office with an hour commute on both ends. I decide to invite this kind of ritual into my life anyway.

Monday, an hour for lunch but so busy I decide to at least step outside and soak in a half hour of rare November sun. I walk up the sidewalk and remember that around the corner is Wilburton Hill Park – with a botanical garden. It takes less than five minutes to arrive inside the peeps of kinglets, chickadees, juncos, nuthatches and at least five other birds I do not recall hearing. Little paths go off into Lost meadow, Yao garden, around backstreams, the volunteers Perennial garden, an alpine rock garden, fountains, and everywhere bird activity and benches to sit and listen. I’m walking briskly to get back to work, but thrill wells up alongside gratitude. I will come to know this place and learn much more how to be here. The birds will keep teaching me to slow down and breathe. They invite me to turn daily from my work. I notice the hours of my new job impose haiku on my life and I’m liking it.

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.

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!

Saturday, October 11 – Field Notes

enroute: Western Tanager? A yellow bird with black wing, tail and head (from underneath). It came out of a fir and pine forest at the edge of a clearing and
strongly paddled the air across the highway enroute to our first stop.

1. Crockett Lake @9:30 AM Sunny, breezy. Some beach cleanup group parked and let some spaniels run after a bit, but that did not seem to affect our sightings.
Bald Eagle - sitting atop phone pole in the parking area. From that perch, he was able to survey the vast saltmarsh, lake and Admiralty Bay. He flew off in the direction of the lake. Not bad for first spotting. Sue’s Swarovsky scope allowed us to see every feather. A few minutes later up the road, we watched it clean blood off it’s bill from eating.
Great Blue Heron, at least one big one in the marsh.
2-3 other herons, Sue says likely Great Blue, but we wonder if it is a Little Blue or a Green Heron. Seemed smaller in comparison, but Sue says to notice the size compared to stop sign. The two in dispute were a little bigger than the sign. One sat for a long while on a fencepost, the others hunted in the grass. In the scope, we see green on the head of one, another had more of a whitish head, and to me at least two of the herons looked much smaller than the magnificent Great Blue that took off flying.
Rough-legged Hawk – Saw two of these hunting over the marsh. Got a great look underneath: One large checker under each wing. White band under black-tipped tail, white speckles on wing w/ black tips. As it lit and sat on a post, we observed it was greenish around bill, had white shin feathers blowing in the breeze, and as it spun around and stretched, showed the tail barred on top.

2. Keystone Ferry? Though this was not a stop on the map; I am going from memory days later, was driving follow the leader and one of my notes says Pt. Townsend ferry, but that doesn’t make sense. There was a little ferry dock in a tiny bay I think. (I need to keep better notes!) First we looked out to an old large abandoned pier in the water where dozens of cormorants were gathered.
Double Crested Cormorant – sunning in characteristic wing-drying position was markedly larger than the others and the scope revealed yellow near the bill.
Pelagic Cormorant - was not listed on my chart, but the Brandt’s was. Brandt’s not enough smaller however. In the guidebook, we see the pelagics do live here and are enough smaller.
3 diving ducks – Harlequins according to id from classmates and Sue who says this is one of her favorites that she sees on Greenlake a lot. Had red on side and a “fake white eye spot”, grey neck. One was a female.
Common Loon – This was a little tricky because the bold markings were gone as the bird was mottled w/ gray (starting to get winter color), but still had the charateristic neckband. I thought it seemed smaller than 23 inches though.
Marbled Murrelet? – This was my favorite sighting of the day because the bird could have been so many things. I’ve always wanted to see one of these mysterious creatures who nests far inland in old-growth forests and, Sue thinks, walks to the sea! I sketched the little mottled gray squatty bird floating in the protected cove near the ferry dock. It’s bill seemed to me to distinguish it from a Cassin’s Auklet which is what I first thought from its gray color on my chart. I don’t think everyone was conclusive on this id though.

3. Ft. Casey State Park – cold, sunny, very windy
We gave up looking out to sea, too windy, just lots of gulls. The group fans out. Sue and I go up into the woods where there is lots of bird sound and flitty action high in the trees. I record several things onto my Ipod- later will link to what I saw and have learned to identify:
Red-breasted nuthatch – “Yank, yank, yank” Sue first identified the call, and a little later I saw three or four crawling and chasing each other down the bare part of a fir tree.
Yellow-shafted Flicker – heard all over the forest before seeing red and black moon swooping tree to tree.
Chestnut-backed chickadees – brown patch on the side in back of of black head, soft gray bodies, and Mountain chickadees (no brown) cheerful and busy at many levels of the conifers.
Juncos – everywhere in thickets of staghorn sumac “Eh, eh, eh, eh”
Sue says she thought she heard the high-pitched sqeak of a Kinglet.

4. Ebey’s Landing (Again, I think this is where we stopped.) My yellow index card-sized postIts each have sketches and marking notes about birds, but I forgot to note where they were. Sue had provided us with maps and marked stops, so I had thought it would be easy to remember where things were by the stack order of my postIts. Not so. Next time!
Surf Scoters – many swimming together offshore seen in scope with yellow, black and red bills
Horned Grebes – two swimming offshore looked like Western with black and white neck, but squattier and much smaller than the Western. Scope showed red eye on white winter feather which distinguised it from the Eared Grebe.

5. Coupeville, lunch stop
Janet and I headed for a warm coffee and sat in the sun on a bench outside the bakery eating our lunch for a long time, learning more about her work. With only 15 minutes left, we jaunted up to the public path and saw a bald eagle in flight (Kevin had reported it flying right over him as he napped), and a juvenile bald eagle also. At first, we thought it was a very big hawk, but we noted the similar broad wing shape and size since it was flying near the other eagle. I sketched the long white streak pattern of the under wings which matched the picture in the Peterson field guide back at the car.
Belted Kingfisher - Sighted from the pier in Coupeville, we saw it catch a little fish after it dove off a tall boulder next to the water. Flew back to some dead branches on the beach.
White Winged Scoters - hundreds it seemed flew into the bay near the dozens of commercial mussel piers which we were able to see up the hill from downtown Coupeville. They were mixed in with surf scoters too, which was easy to tell once Sue set up her scope under the Madrona tree. Eyes of the white-winged are red on a white patch.

6. Kennedy’s Lagoon?
Another Kingfisher, but this one seemed noticably larger to me. Wonder if this is because we watched from a closer distance or are there two kinds? It was fishing in the lagoon on one side of the road. There was the water of Penn Cove across the highway with more scoters I think. Missing notes for this stop.
Ring-necked Pheasant – Right before the stop sign to turn left onto the big highway (20?), there were hunters in the farm fields to the left and we were noticing how much the high grass must shelter other things hunters would want. Just then, a magnificient pheasant climbed p out of the ditch. The other cars were already in the intersection, so they missed it.

7. Partridge Point
Looking west over the big water, we spotted more grebes. With just binoculars I could tell they were the squattier ones again, but it took Sue’s scope to see the red eye on white and confirm Horned Grebe again.

8. Dugualla Bay, north of Oak Harbor
I think because it was getting late, we skipped Sunset Beach, driving on through Oak Harbor. I think it was here we saw some ducks that were hard to identify. Conclusion of group (mostly w/ Sue’s prompting) that they were American Widgeons. They had a white head stripe (on top)and top of neck and throat, lightly ruddy underneath the body. There were different ages and sexes too which mottled things up a bit, but I guess the white top of head was the key marker for this kind of duck.
Kildeer - two or three or 4 brown and white flapping flags swooped right over and past us in tight formation, shish kabob legs lighting so gingerly on the cobbled beach.

Home again…About 4ish, the group split up with the Seattle group friving up to Deception Pass for one last stop before heading home via I-5. As I didn’t need to transport anyone back, and because I had driven that long stretch of freeway twice the past week, I decided to feast my eyes on more of the pastoral island scene and catch the ferry home. It would have been faster too had I not arrived at the ferry just as it was pulling away. The day had been relaxing for me and I melted away to gull music as I waited, glad to have spent a day this way and looking forward to more bird reading.

Field guides

– Although I own a number of field guides, Sue had said something in class about how birders often don’t do a lot of guidebook searching while in the field. The readings were also indicating much more emphasis on recording observed detail rather than dissecting the subject with a book. But because I have tended to look out at the water and mentally categorize everything simply as either gull or duck, I wanted at least a cheatsheet of hints. Mac’s Field Guide to Northwest Coastal Water Birds was a great introduction for me. I would know that these birds actually live where I would be looking and I would not get lost in pages of irrelevant detail. Sue brought plenty of guidebooks too, and we spent a lot of time at each stop looking birds up in them. While my cheatsheet was helpful to get oriented to at least the type of bird, and others in the group used it too, there was a point when I was confusing a Common Loon (obvious to Sue) with possibly a Pigeon Guillemont. Sue suggested I needed to stop referring to my chart so much and get into the guidebooks to distinguish features. The books are really necessary because identification of species is complicated by birds having various markings at different seasons and ages of the bird’s life.