Reflective practice using blogs

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Paul Lowe is the course leader of the Masters programme in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, and shared his experience using blogs with our Work Literacy group today. Here are some of the points I picked up:

  • blogs act as the glue between synchronous events
  • blogs are ways of mapping the learning journey
  • every blog is unique and gives a whole-person view, which you don’t get with assignments
  • blogs encourage dialogue and show how to relate to an audience, which is good for photographers in training
  • there is peer group feedback
  • blogs allow for rich media – images, video, sound, links to other resources; all of which can be mashed up, tagged, recomposed, mixed – by all participants
  • blogs can also be emotional and playful

The MA course lets the students choose their own blog platform so that blogging can continue after the course; a nice step beyond the LMS-centric approach to academic courses. I also noted that student blogs are not used an assessment vehicle which should encourage more open reflection. To ensure that blogs and comments are read, the course assigns small groups of  “blog buddies” to read and comment on each others’ blogs. This course is an excellent example of some pragmatic uses of online social media.

The recorded session is available online, just enter any participant name and leave the password blank.

Greedy Instructional Design

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Last year I wrote that Instructional Design Needs More Agility, saying that it’s time that the training industry develop its own agile approach or risk becoming redundant. Continuing on the theme of faster and more flexible development, Daniel Lemire thinks that programming could use the greedy algorithm as a basis to manage projects. I mentioned on Twitter that I thought that a “greedy approach” was similar to agile programming and Daniel replied:

@hjarche greedy here means: don’t think globally, make the best choice locally, and the end result will be ok. So, yes, it is agile.

My experience in larger projects is that we spend too much time in planning and then freeze that process once we start development, even if the plan is no longer relevant. In smaller projects planning can be almost non-existent, with a quick decision on what model/approach to use and then it’s off to meet whatever was stated in the contract. Building in agility or the greedy algorithm at the onset seems to give more options to the development team, who now have the responsibilty of confirming that they are on course as they continue to refine the product.

Giving thanks

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It’s Thanksgiving in Canada and we’ve just finished an excellent turkey dinner. The gang is playing a game, but I’m odd man out – sitting and listening to the antics. Meanwhile, the economy seems to be melting as we wait for our national election on Tuesday. Personally, I’ve been watching this site to help me decide which way to cast my vote.

I’m thankful that for the past five years I’ve been able to work from home and grow my business. My wife also has her studio in the house and we spend most of days together. Usually one of us is available for any family activities that happen during the day. Even with our financial uncertainties, it’s been a good lifestyle, and now it seems that everyone else is the same financial situation that we’ve been in – not knowing what’s going to happen beyond the next month or two.

On a positive note, Andrea has her first gallery show next week and it’s a big leap for her. About as big as when I became a free-agent. The show is called Fibre Optics at Fog Forest Gallery in Sackville until 25 October.

Who knows what the future holds, but for now we are doing what we love and making a living. I can’t be asking for much more at this time.

The second week of Work Literacy

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This past week on Work Literacy has focused on social bookmarks, perhaps the easiest and simplest of social media. Most people are already using bookmarks/favourites with their preferred browser so the leap to social bookmarks is not huge. I’ve learned a few more things about social bookmarking for learning and have discovered that Diigo is used by a lot of educators.

Once again this week, several of the +600 members jumped-in and became guides and coaches, making the work of the facilitators much easier (thank you). This kind of sharing shows that online activities can actually scale well beyond the size of a traditional course, as long as the instructors/facilitators don’t try to control everything.

I also like what Michele Martin has done with her Delicious Portfolio and think I will create one for myself. The portfolio is a good snapshot for those of us who do much of our work online and is easy to keep up to date. I can see this usage becoming common.

Next week (#3) we move on to blogging. The real benefits of blogs, which I noted over three years ago remain today:

  • Using a feed reader (via RSS), saves a lot of time and bookmarking.
  • The information I get from bloggers is usually weeks ahead of the mainstream press. Call this competitive intelligence.
  • By blogging, I have raised my profile on the web and increased visits to my site by a factor of 1000 in less than one year. This is cheap marketing.
  • I use my database of posts when preparing reports, proposals and presentations. It helps to have a searchable system like Drupal. [now WordPress]
  • Blogging forces me to think and reflect in order to write, so that what was just an idea in my mind becomes more concrete.
  • The underlying technology of easy posting and RSS to keep track of things, makes a lot of sense for collaborative learning and collaborative work – two areas of interest for my business.
  • Through blogging, I have met a number of business partners.
  • Blogging keeps me in touch with a lot of interesting people and expands my view of the world, providing new ideas for my business.
  • When I have a problem, especially a technical one, I post it on my site or someone else’s and usually get an informed answer within 24 hours. It’s like a large performance support system.
  • It allows people to get to know my opinions before they engage me as a consultant; saving time and potential frustrations.

Opportunities in difficult times

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It’s hard to get management’s attention when things are going well. They’re running off to meetings, golf games, conferences and the like. However, as cash and clients become scarcer, management has to focus on the business at hand and figure out how to do things better. They might even question the role of the training department.

I’ve been in the business of virtual learning and online collaborative work pretty well since the Web entered the business world. It’s been a hard sell over the years, especially since many people would prefer a trip to Florida in the Winter to attend a training course. Everyone deserves some time away from the office, but as travel and training budgets get slashed, more companies are examining learning and working on the Web.

WWW's "historical" logo, created by Robert Cailliau.
Image via Wikipedia

Recently I’ve been seeing more search phrases like – “open source social networking” and “cheap web conferencing tools” – coming to this site. Necessity is the mother of invention and people are looking for options. Luckily, many organisations have led the way in online collaboration over the past decade and there is a fair bit of expertise around, as witnessed by the range of knowledge on our Work Literacy online learning event. There are also a lot of tools to select from – some would even say too many.

I have a feeling that there will be a growing demand for innovative ways to help people in organisations work and learn together using the Web. For instance, I’m talking with a potential client who does not want me to travel on-site. Since I’m advising on how to move from a classroom teaching model to e-learning, he reasons, we should set the example and do all of our work online. I’m quite comfortable working that way, but it’s taken several years of practice.

I also see a rising interest in online performance support and just-in-time help, as opposed to just-in-case online courses. For professionals with skills in analysing business problems and finding methods and cost-effective technologies to address them, this is a time of opportunity. If people in the learning & development field complain that they can’t get management’s attention at this time, then perhaps they never will.

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Facebook Learning

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An example of a social network diagram.
Image via Wikipedia

Last week on Work Literacy the topic was about social networks for learning. Tony Karrer wrote a good summary of things that were noted, shared and learned. A number of people wrote that Linked-In was for professional connections while Facebook was more for social chatting. Others picked up on this and showed how Linked-In could be used for learning, but there were not a lot of instances of Facebook being used for learning.

A recent article by Marcia Conner in Fast Company is one of the best articles I’ve read on how Facebook can be used for learning, Face to Facebook Learning. She cites the work of one of my local colleagues, Hal:

Or how about the work of Hal Richman, who started the Convergence of Social and Business Networking group on Facebook to explore the learning he was seeing all around him. Early on he conducted a survey and 81% of group members said they like to merge their social and business worlds and 93% said they expected or aspired to meet people they will network and collaborate in the future. One qualitative response captured the essence of many others with, “It is important that business contacts get to see the real you. In that way you present a more rounded and credible personality who is more likely to engage others.” Discussion topics were thoughtful and revealing, helping me as a group member to learn about how others were grappling with important emergent themes.

There are lots of concrete examples and links to explore how Facebook can be used for learning and Marcia has created a group, What are you learning on Facebook?

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Finding the Sweet Spot – Review

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The first comment on the cover says:

“This one is a keeper. Buy three. One for you, one for someone you care about, and one for a friend who really and truly needs it.” Seth Godin

I was given a copy of Dave Pollard’s Finding the Sweet Spot by a friend and read it on the plane home last week.  I’ve been watching Dave develop the model for natural enterprises for quite some time and even helped to coin the term, so I’m definitely a fan of the “natural entrepreneur’s guide to responsible, sustainable, joyful work”. Natural Entrepreneurship is based on a six step model that is easy to understand, but will take some work to implement, but then anything worthwhile requires effort:

  1. Find the sweet spot: Identify your Gift, passion, and purpose
  2. Find the right partners
  3. Research unmet needs
  4. Imagine and innovate solutions
  5. Continuously improvise
  6. Act responsibly on principle

Implementing these steps does not require an initial outlay of capital and natural entrepreneurs can get started even while they hold down a job. Each step is covered in detail, with practical advice and some anecdotes. A key aspect of natural entrepreneurship is that it is not premised on the unsustainable notion of perpetual growth.

The book is well written and edited and doesn’t ramble on as a series of blog posts might ( a bit what I feared when I picked up the book). I would recommend this book to anyone growing or changing an organisation, from single start-up to small company or non-profit; though there are examples of larger companies in the book.

I will be adding Finding the Sweet Spot to a few select reference books that I’ve used for business strategy work; including Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Christensen’s Seeing What’s Next. Now I have to buy some extra copies to give away.

The social aspect of bookmarks

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This coming week (#2) at Work Literacy we will be discussing social bookmarks. I wrote about the basics of social bookmarks last year in Step 1: Free Your Bookmarks, which discussed how to get your data onto the Web cloud.

I think that social bookmarks and RSS aggregators are the two basic tools for using the Web for personal knowledge management. For those with limited social media experience, I usually suggest these two tools to get the hang of information flows on the web, which can feel like a tidal wave.

Dave Pollard, who is participating in the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course notes how social media can have a connectivist aspect:

Refocusing Social Tools: Just as Knowledge Management is now shifting focus and attention from collection to connection, social media need to turn their attention to enabling more, more effective, more informed, more valuable conversations. They need to help us identify ‘the right people’ (to live with, make a living with, love, and talk to) and then connect with them in real time in simple yet powerful ways that mimic, as much as possible, face-to-face conversations. They also need to help us make these conversations and meetings and social interactions more effective — bring more clarity and context, reach consensus, enable stories to be told and remembered, capture non-verbal communication, and pick up from where we left off at the end of the last conversation — keeping us connected, all the time, everywhere.

Social bookmarks are but one aspect and one way to keep connected online, and in my experience one of the easiest ways to get started with web social media.

Getting your bookmarks out on the Web where you can easily access and search them definitely can help with personal productivity. It’s just easier to find things. However, it is only after some time when you have a number of pages marked with your tags and comments and when you have connected with other people that you realize that social bookmarks are more than just a heap of personal links. Other people start connecting to your network and they can annotate a link for members of their network. Suddenly, who you know becomes as important as what you know. If someone in your network knows that you’re interested in an area, perhaps they’ll find and mark a reference that you would never have found. Serendipity can happen, but only once you’ve engaged in the social space.

Here is an example of some recommendations from my network:

An educational crisis?

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Florence Meichel (in French) examines the US/World financial crisis and looks back at Ivan Illich’s criticism of industrial schooling:

Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will provide a better life. And everywhere it develops the habit of self-defeating consumption of services and alienating production, the tolerance for institutional dependence, and the recognition of institutional rankings. The hidden curriculum of school does all this in spite of contrary efforts undertaken by teachers and no matter what ideology prevails.

Critical thinking and an understanding of the frameworks that guide our political and financial institutions would really help the citizenry to understand the complexities of what is happening. It sure beats listening to politicians and pundits in 30 second sound bites. Unfortunately, it’s what many have been conditioned to accept, because they’ve been told that these systems is beyond their understanding.

Is the financial crisis really an educational crisis?

Update:

Will Richardson offers a different perspective and sees all that is happening as one big teachable moment:

I’m sure there are more, but how about these topics, just for a start:

  • How mortgages work
  • What credit is
  • What the tax code is
  • The intricacies of borrowing money
  • Investing in the stock market
  • Balanced budgets
  • What debt, both personal and national, is
  • The political process (or lack thereof) of the two Houses of Congress
  • The electoral college
  • Truth in advertising
  • Vetting of expertise (as in talking heads)
  • The “Global Economy” and our effects on it

Learn the language before you speak to me

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Stuart Henshall says that you should Use the Tools First: Then Talk to Me:

I just walked out of one session where the presenter made a joke about Facebook. I checked; I’m fairly sure he’s not on it. That’s a big problem that exists here. You cannot talk about the impact of wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, tagging, even search unless you actually use them.

I agreed with this as soon as I read it and then wondered why. You don’t ask a doctor to have first suffered a disease before discussing how to treat it. Many academics in business school have never started a company, yet they can talk about the fundamentals of business.

Why is the Web, and especially social media, so different?

I think that one fundamental difference about social media is that they have a strong influence on the user, very much in a McLuhanesque medium/message/massage way. Those who come to web media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. You cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors that you have in your primary language. Furthermore, if you do get to an advanced level in your new language, you may not have noticed it but the language, with its idioms, metaphors and culture, has had a strong influence on how you think in that language.

Social media change the way you communicate. Write a blog for a year or more and your writing (and thinking) will change. Use Twitter for some time and you will get an immersed sense of being connected to many people and understanding them on a different level. Even the ubiquitous Facebook changes how you may think of being apart from friends. Social media can change the way you think.

When you adopt a web social medium you are also starting on the bottom, or at the single node level. You have to make connections with what will become your network, either by connecting to existing relationships or doing something that helps to create new relationships, like writing a post. Starting over again, in each medium, can be daunting, especially for someone in a position of authority who is concerned about image or influence.

Yes, you need to use the tools first. You have to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is almost nothing like it in the industrial workplace or school system to prepare you for this. Therefore you won’t know what you’re talking about until you learn the new language of online networks. The only way to learn a new language is through practice. Social media are new languages.

PS: I took Stuart’s advice and downloaded the social web browser, Flock, from which I wrote this post.