Communities

communities of interest and practice

An educated and informed citizenry

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Rob Paterson thinks that Canada and its government are moving beyond the nation-state and that coalitions may become the main model for future governments.

Meanwhile, the Internet, airwaves and coffee-shops across the nation are engaging in a sort of dialogue. Unfortunately it is not always an informed dialogue and this is a sad state of affairs. How can the electorate engage in the political process when too many do not understand it? In New Brunswick public education there are no classes on civics or government. Our sons learn about politics at the dinner table; thankfully. For instance, there is a lack of understanding about the duty of the Official Opposition, as they’re not just the party that came in second place:

The duty of the Official Opposition and other opposition parties is to “challenge” government policies and suggest improvements, and present an alternative to the current Government’s policy agenda.

There have also been many comments based on the “fact” that the current PM was elected as such. Our Prime Ministers are not elected, only Members of Parliament are elected, and the government’s right to govern is based on the confidence of those members:

The Prime Minister and the Cabinet are responsible to, or must answer for, their actions to the House of Commons as a body and must enjoy the support and the confidence of a majority of the Members of that Chamber to remain in office. This is commonly referred to as the confidence convention.

If the Government is defeated in the House on a key (“confidence”) question, then the Government is expected to resign or seek the dissolution of Parliament in order for a general election to be held. It is not always clear what constitutes a question of confidence. Motions which clearly state that the House has lost confidence in the Government, motions concerning the Government’s budgetary policy, and motions which the Government clearly identifies as questions of confidence, are usually recognized as such.

There is no doubt that a democracy depends on an educated and informed citizenry. We now have easy access to information, but we need to continue with the education.

Social or Community?

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Fred Cavazza raises an interesting point on the difference between social and community platforms. “Community” platforms allow members to fully engage in conversations, while “Social” platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, are more passive. In the comments, Fred says that blogs are definitely social, as they allow authors to block and filter comments.

Graphic by Fred Cavazza: Community (left) – Social (right)

Using social media is not the same as fostering a community, is what I infer from Fred’s comments. My experience is that communities are much harder to control, can have short lifespans (e.g. most Ning communities) but can be much more dynamic. For instance, there are some interesting conversations and new forums created on LearnTrends that would not have happened on any individual blog. One recommendation for successful online communities is that the founder needs to give up control to get one going and then must stay actively involved, but with a gentle hand, to keep it going. Just like a real community.

Corporate Learning Trends & Innovations

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Sessions start tomorrow (Monday):

Come to Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations 2008 if you want to:

  • participate in a stridently unaffiliated event (no Platinum sponsors here)
  • discuss things you don’t find at commercial conferences (we’re indie)
  • take part in an event that’s 100% free (because the web scales)
  • join sessions  anywhere with net access (this is entirely online)
  • track emerging opportunities in learning (if it’s not at the forefront, it’s not allowed in)
  • socialize online with peers and other participants (schmoozing encouraged!)

Don’t forget to join the community on the LearnTrends social networking site.

Post Work Literacy

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The Work Literacy online learning event is over and many of the participants are now at DevLearn08 and I might surmise that they’re connecting with some folks they met during the course.

Our learning community event spanned six weeks and had 766 registered users at the end. When Michele, Tony and I initially discussed the program, we expected perhaps sixty participants. However, the large size did not detract from the learning and was not a burden for the facilitators. First of all, we developed all activities for three levels of participation: Spectator, Joiner, and Creator. The majority fell into the first category and the Creators took on the role of facilitating where necessary. For me, a highlight was Paul Lowe’s live web presentation on his use of blogs for a Photo Journalism Master’s programme. It was good to see some early initiatives taken by the members, such as French language forum started by Stéphane Wattier. The Creators made it easier for all of us.

We decided to use Ning as the main course site because it gave us several tools in one application and it’s free, which fit in with our non-existent budget. The only missing application was a wiki, but we were able to add in a link on one of the main Tabs and connect with PBWiki. Interestingly, the wiki, which was supposed to be used to synthesize the previous weeks, was taken up by only a few people.

Participation ebbed and flowed, with 198 discussions on the Introduction forum. The first three weeks (Social Networks; Social Bookmarks; Blogs) also saw more activity on the Forums. A drop in participation may have been due to the length of the course. In my own case, I was much busier with work demands in the later weeks of the course.

So what did I learn or what was reinforced?

  • A loose-knit online learning community can scale to many participants and remain effective.
  • Only a small percentage ~10% of members will be active.
  • Wikis need to be extremely focused on real tasks/projects in order to be adopted.
  • If facilitators can seed good questions and provide feedback, then conversations can flourish.
  • Use a very gentle hand in controlling the learners and some will become highly participative.
  • Design for after the course, using tools like social bookmarks, so that artifacts can be used for reference or performance support.
  • Create the role of “synthesizer”. I found it quite helpful when Tony and Michele summarized the previous week’s activities.
  • Keep the structure loose enough so that it can grow or change according to the needs of the community.

To find out what others thought about the course, read the comments on, Was this course successful. How do we know? [Dead link, as we didn’t take up Ning on their paid service option. See more post course notes here: Tools – Social Networking – Social Media & Learning]

Blogger/Podcaster Dinner in Sackville

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Derek Hatchard is organising a regional Blogger/Podcaster Dinner:

What: Casual get-together for bloggers and podcasters

When: Friday November 21, 6:45pm

Where: Joey’s Pizza and Pasta, 16 York St., Sackville, NB

Who: Anyone who produces content for a blog or podcast (audio or video)

Why: Just cuz

No presentations, no sponsors, just good food and conversation.

RSVP on Derek’s blog post or e-mail/DM him. He is also coordinating car pooling from Moncton.

If you get into town early, stop at the Bridge Street Café with free wi-fi. You may also want to check out the Craft Gallery at the visitor information centre (off the Main Street Exit) where local artisans have unique gifts for sale. The Owens Art Gallery and Fog Forest Gallery are also worth a visit. If you’re in town for a while, give me a call.

Advice for the Training Department

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Last week I wrote about The Training Department in the 21st Century, part of a presentation I will be giving in Toronto on Thursday. This new model that I propose, which has its roots in knowledge management and wirearchy, is an attempt to take the theory and make some practical recommendations for those who have to do the day to day work.

The model is centered on Connecting and Communicating to enable knowledge flow in the organisation and is based on three processes:

  1. Facilitating collaborative work and learning amongst workers (esp. as peers).
  2. Sensing patterns and helping to develop emergent work and learning practices.
  3. Working with management to develop appropriate tools and methods for the workplace.

Here are some specific recommendations that I’m putting forward for the “new” training department:

  • Be an active & continuous learner and engage in activities that take you out of your comfort zone, so that you know what it’s like to be a learner.
  • Be a lurker or a passive participant in relevant work-related communities (could be the lunch room) and LISTEN to what is being said.
  • Communicate what you observe to people around you, solicit their feedback and engage in meaningful conversations.
  • Continuously collect feedback from the workplace, not just after courses.
  • Make it easy to share information by simplifying & synthesizing issues that are important and relevant to fellow workers.

None of these require Web tools or techniques but they can all be enhanced by the Internet.

Behaviour Online

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Michele Martin, in looking at our Work Literacy online course, concludes that Online Negative Behavior is a Product of Culture:

This is the conclusion I’m drawing from using social media for learning. If people have negative experiences with using social media in their organizations–if people are behaving unprofessionally or inappropriately–I think that there’s something a lot deeper going on that social media is simply bringing to the surface.

We assumed that this would be an environment for civil, professional discussions and never put in any limitations or rules. It seems that this approach worked through modeling appropriate behaviour by both facilitators and members. I have found this group of over 700 members to be polite and even caring for each other. It has been a real pleasure following the learning paths and stories in the blogs and discussion forums.

So why do we see many instances of bad behaviour online? Perhaps some of these forums with nastier comments are just places to vent. Maybe people cannot freely express their opinions at work or at school, or perhaps they feel that no one is listening.

Are social networks within organisations more difficult to nurture because 1) the organisation itself may be dysfunctional and 2) individuals recognize this dysfunctionality and 3) this tension may become evident in an online social network. Therefore, when management decides to create a place for an online community they naturally put in rules and workers naturally won’t open up because of these rules. These same workers/students/citizens vent their frustrations in the more open and wild discussion forums such as YouTube comments or CBC news stories (both of which I’ve given up reading).

Of course, this is a completely untested hypothesis.

Source?

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There are some ideas that capture our imagination and provide us with a way forward or a framework for further action or study. For me personal knowledge management (PKM) and wirearchy are two such ideas. These are not my ideas and even though I may not cite the original sources in all cases that I discuss them, I give credit where it is due. I learned this many years ago as an undergraduate. I remember my History professors demanding, “Source?” whenever we made a bold  statement of fact or brought in some new line of thought. I have a link to wirearchy on my header and I ensure that I add references when I publish or distribute any work that mentions PKM. I will mention work by Lilia Efimova, Denham Grey and Dave Pollard on PKM or Jon Husband on wirearchy.

*** Update: There are some “self-corrections” in the comments pertaining to this next section [how’s that for speed?] ***

On a related note, George Siemens posts that The Rhyzome Project fails to even mention the published work of Dave Cormier on Rhyzomatic Education. With the simplicity of adding hyperlinks to web pages, citing your main sources should not be a problem, and this is something that the project could rectify quickly. I wonder how long it will take to give the appropriate citations? This could be an interesting case study of the self-corrective nature of the Web and blogs.

Quantifying relationships, or perhaps not

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Jay Cross has often discussed the return on investment (ROI) on learning and knows that you can’t properly measure much learning anyway, at least not to a direct cause-effect relationship and then to some monetary calculation:

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure” is nonsense. The vast majority of what senior executives manage is immeasurable. They make judgment calls; they play hunches. How else do you select the right people for key jobs? How else do you choose your partners? How else do you divine the future? Organizations pay senior executives handsomely to buy their ability to make wise choices in the absence of simple measurements.

I liken learning ROI to military morale. The military puts a lot of stock (and money) into the maintenance of good morale but there is no morale indicator scale in real life. Good commanders know when morale is high or low and they how far they can push their troops. They don’t waste time trying to put an ROI calculation on every effort to build a cohesive team.

Charles Green says that we should stop measuing ROI on soft skills training and gives several reasons why. Here is one to add to your notebook, so that you have a good response when someone asks about your ROI calculation:

the perversion of individual measurement. Most soft skills deal with our relationships to others. The drive to individually behavioralize, then metricize, has the effect of killing relationships—an ironic outcome for relationship-targeting training.

As much of our work moves online and becomes more collaborative and via multiple social networks, we should remember that quantifying these relationships may be detrimental to the very same relationships that help our organisations prosper.

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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