Communities

communities of interest and practice

Literacies

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What is literacy? We may think we know. Some people even say we need 21st century literacies. But Marshall McLuhan said that, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Is this how we view literacy, though the rear-view mirror?

Chris Hedges, in America the Illiterate wrote that the lack of print literacy is creating a society that is not able to reason or understand the complexities of our modern world.

“We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection.”

I find a strong counter-argument to the notion of literacy under attack is Mark Federman’s paper entitled: Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. and Ms. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in tumultuous times [follow the link to the PDF of entire paper at bottom of Mark’s blog post]. Mark looks at two other periods in history when our notions of literacy changed. Three thousand years ago as the Greeks grappled with written language, Plato decried the demise of wisdom. As the printing press changed Europe and the balance of power shifted from the clergy to secular powers, we witnessed a series of bloody religious wars; followed by the Enlightenment.

So why are we saying that literacy is under attack when orality has been under attack for the past three thousand years? Because nobody remembers anybody who remembers the old ways. According to Mark Federman, societies take about 300 years for memory to fade and for major changes to be adopted. We are now just over half way through the change to electric media. Today, we have traveled over 160 years into the electric communication age, launched by the invention of the telegraph, which separated words from paper.

Mark Federman concludes in his paper:

“Have no fear – Johnny and Janey will, in all probability, learn to read, just as they learned to speak. But orality has not structured society since ancient Greece, and literacy no longer structures society today. The challenge for all the Mr. and Ms. Smiths throughout the academy, and eventually in the secondary and primary classrooms throughout the world, is to recognize that the exclusive focus and predominance given to the pedagogical artefacts of a literate world is inconsistent with the skills necessary to participate in the discovery and production of knowledge in a ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate [UCaPP] world. In a UCaPP world, what is valued as knowledge comprises a vastly greater domain than that in a world structured by literacy.”

Finally, Professor Mike Wesch, in the video of his presentation to The Library of Congress, An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, gives examples of how videos, and video-making, are creating a different literacy, enabling a new type of worldwide communication. What kinds of literacies do producers of YouTube videos have?

“And we’re looking at this cultural inversion I mentioned earlier where we tend to express individualism, independence and commercialization while desiring community, relationships and authenticity. This is really a tension that, as these lonely individuals, we crave this connection – at the same time, as individuals, we see that connection as constraint. And what we’re seeking then through technologies often is a form of connection without constraint. Some way of connecting very deeply without feeling the deep responsibilities of that deep connection. YouTube offers this possibility and what we see on YouTube are people connecting very, very deeply. [For example] – bnessell1973 – [on losing his son to SIDS] April 17, 2007 : Creating characters gave me an escape. It allowed me to be silly. It allowed me to act how I wanted to feel. It became a form of therapy, a coping mechanism. And after a while it brought fun back to YouTube for me.”

Is video becoming the/a new literacy? Are we returning to our oral past after three thousand years?

Before we say that literacy is under attack, we should ask ourselves what is literacy today and what might it become tomorrow.

Social Media Workshop Notes

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As promised, here are the follow-up notes & links from yesterday’s social media workshops in Miramichi.

Personal Knowledge Management

Presentation slides (this is one large file of slides from both presentations)

Related posts:

Role of an online community manager

Books for small business:

Trust Agents

Social Media Marketing

The Social Media Business Plan

Books for educators:

Johnny Bunko

A Whole New Mind

How Computer Games Help Children Learn

Videos shown:

Goodbye butts in chairs

Dan Brown: An open letter to educators

Social Media in Plain English

Videos not shown:

Has education changed since the industrial revolution?

Social media revolution

Social media reading list for school leaders

The Twitter experiment at UT Dallas

Social Media Explained Visually

Social media workshops

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I will be presenting two 1/2 day workshops on Thursday, 25 March in Miramichi, NB. The event is sponsored by Silicon East and attendance is (almost) free. There is a $10 fee to cover refreshments.

Please pass this on to people in the area who might need an introduction to social media, without any hype or sales pitch. I will be heading up on Wednesday late afternoon and can pick up a few people in the Moncton area who want to go up early. I will be staying at The Rodd, where the workshops will be held, and returning on Thursday late afternoon.

Workshop #1: Social media for training & education (9:00 AM to noon)

Focus: understanding web social media and how they can be used for training, education and personal learning
Topics:
What is Web 2.0?
Personal knowledge management – a sense-making process
Tools, techniques and resources for social learning on the web: e.g. social bookmarks, blogs, twitter

Workshop #2 Social media for small business (1:30 PM to 4:30 PM)

Focus: understanding web social media to connect with customers
Topics:
What is Web 2.0?
Examples of social media use for business: e.g. blogs, twitter, slidecasts, videos
Web tools, techniques and resources for small businesses

Pre-registration is not necessary but please let me know in the comments if you plan on attending and if you could provide transportation or need it.

Social media & workplace performance matrix

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c4lpt_corporateJane Hart has an excellent resource on Case Studies for Social Media & Learning in the Workplace that she keeps up to date. I’ve looked at it many times and thought that it might be easier to see the big picture as a matrix, which I’ve created as a Google Document.

Feel free to use and improve this spreadsheet. If you do re-post it, please let me know so I can add the link here. Much of the information comes from third-party reports so I cannot attest to its accuracy. Let me know of any errors or omissions and I will address them.

If you would like to edit the Google Doc, or get it as a spreadsheet, please contact me.

Diffusion of social learning

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Paul makes an excellent comment to my article on social learning in the enterprise that Jon Husband kindly posted for me on the FASTForward Blog:

I see the critical aspect to social learning to be ‘diffusion’. Knowledge ‘flows’ at specific speeds, and complex, technical details have high viscosity. Some nodes are efficient at in-flow (fast learners), some at out (teachers). Excessive turnover removes nodes before their knowledge has spread to the rest of the group. Isolated groups fail to transmit their knowledge. Again, if I were debugging a company I’d want to measure this. How long before a new product feature is well understood by sales? by management? Does R&D know about current marketing efforts? How much does a idea change as it’s communicated through the company? Are there particular points where ideas get stuck, or particularly garbled?

There is a lot to unpack from this paragraph and it highlights many of issues around learning in the enterprise. It’s not just about having access to knowledge or people but getting ideas flowing throughout the organization. Redundancy comes to mind as a principal for supporting social learning diffusion. There has to be more than one way to communicate or find something.

Just because something was blogged, tweeted or posted does not mean it will be understood and eventually internalized as actionable knowledge. The more complex or novel the idea, the more time it will take to be understood. Often I have revisited articles and only understood them when I have read related views or had a chance to find examples of some new concept. Understanding networks, for instance, is easier when you live and work with them and can see examples of network effects.

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Diffusion – Viscosity – Flows – Redundancy

Born in a storm

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six in six coloursSix years ago, on 19 February 2004, states of emergency were declared in Nova Scotia and PEI after a prolonged blizzard, later named White Juan, dumped as much as 95 centimetres of snow.  Many roads were impassable, blocked with snow drifts of up to 4 metres.

Another event in the local area received significantly less press – I started this blog on 19 February 2004:

This is where I post my thoughts and comments on ideas, events or other writings that are of a professional interest to me. Current areas of interest include social networking applications, like blogs, wikis and the use of RSS feeds, which is one reason why I have this blog; to practise what I preach. I’m also interested in the use of open source software platforms for learning. The development and nurturing of communities of practice online is another area of applied research that interests me.
My previous blog is still available as an archive.

I’d like to thank, once again, all of the people who have helped me on the sense-making journey enabled by the medium of blogging. The ability to publish anything at anytime has been not only empowering but enlightening. I have learned so much from so many people, especially other bloggers, and I truly appreciate all the comments added to my own, often half-baked, thoughts.

18 feb 2010

Communication and working together

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Lilia Efimova is looking at teams, communities & networks in terms of communication forms:

One of the things I came up when playing with different ideas was to position teams, communities and networks in respect to the most prevalent forms of communication in each case (in all cases the other forms of communication are there as well, but are not at the core of it).

This is her model in progress [please read Lilia’s full post]:

communication_efimovaThis maps to the group work matrix I developed, based on TIMN and the Cynefin framework. For types of work that have clear goals, then communications for getting things done can be mostly coordination (traditional project management), as there is structure and clearly understood goals. With less structure and goals, collaboration entails working together, with less management but shared objectives (communities of practice). In informal environments, where group work seeks opportunities, then cooperation is the best way to work together (networks).

CCC_ based on mathemagenic

One can easily envision someone working on all three levels on any given day:

  1. a small team producing a deliverable on a deadline for a client (coordination);
  2. members of that team providing advice and information to other teams on related projects (collaboration);
  3. team members working with a larger and looser network in identifying new business opportunities (cooperation).

It would be important for an organization to allow for collaborative and cooperative communications and activities, and not constrain all work and communications with too much structure and the need for controlled coordination.

Aggregate Understand Connect

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I’ve changed one word, but doesn’t it make more sense like this?

As I talk about PKM here or with this graphic and discussion, “understand” is more descriptive of the human sense-making activities than “filter” is. Perhaps I should go back and change these posts to reflect what we are actually doing – understanding as part of the sense-making process.

This is inspired  partially by The Problem with DIKW as well as comments by Stephen Downes, but I still want to keep the PKM concept as simple as possible, for business reasons, not academic ones.

Aggregate Understand Connect

Learning to work anew

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My Net Work Learning presentation on Slideshare has garnered a fair number of views in the past two weeks and I’m assuming there’s an interest in the themes presented. Slides alone are rather limited in getting a message across, so I’ve created a slide show with audio that covers most of the first part of the larger presentation. I will make more of these if there is any demand.

I like the audio & slide format because I don’t need video editing skills and the pictures/words seem to work well together. I used Jing Pro to make this.

Click image or link to launch MP4 (4 minutes):

Net Work Learning Screenshot

Net Work Learning

Presentation available on Slideshare (slightly modified)

Blind Monks 2.0

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David Guillocheau at Talent[Power]Management describes what I would call human resources in a wired world [enough of this 2.0 appendage]. He discusses (in French)  the various aspects of networked-enabled HR.

Recruiting: social networks; online events; serious games.

Integrating new workers: online mentoring; internal blogs.

Evaluation: online employee profiles; internal markets or currency.

Training: communities of practice; learning communities.

Internal communication: manager blogs; internal social networks, micro-blogs, chat.

Social interactions: private collaborative work space; blogs, internal polling.

HR management: communities of practice; project management space; blogs.

In the comments, Frédéric Williquet adds a definition of this new approach to human resources, which I’ve loosely translated: Human Resources is a community agent that ensures an environment where employees have the opportunity to collaborate, innovate and excel. It provides a framework to inspire employees to work collaboratively according to their interests and abilities.

This definition sounds very much like wirearchy, especially the notion of a two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility. The above examples of networked HR are wirearchy type work: based on knowledge, trust, credibility AND a focus on results – enabled by interconnected people and technology.

Enterprise 2.0, Learning 2.0, HR 2.0 or Social Business Design are all the same thing seen from different angles. They are the proverbial blind monks examining an elephant.

Blind_monks_examining_an_elephant

We are all examining how best to get work done in a networked economy, because the Internet has changed everything. This is most evident today in publishing and journalism, but ever more so in how we manage work without geographical boundaries. We are all learning how to work anew. It’s time for the blind monks to start working together.