Month: May 2008

Lessons from failure

A couple of months ago I got a call from Lisa Junker at the ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership. She wanted to interview me about failing as a learning strategy. Out of that comes this brief article ….Lessons from failure: Unexpected Impact – Associations Now Magazine /a>. The story referenced in the article is one I have blogged about here
 and here.

How the World Sees the US

Water
Creative Commons License photo credit: celebdu
I’m back from Ethiopia and Las Vegas – talk about culture shock. I have a stack of half finished blog posts and a cold and the cold is winning. So in the interim, I’m going to post pointers to some interesting sites. (Doesn’t take too many brain cells which are not doing so well at the moment!)

First is a collection of music videos from the world music site, Calabash, which give a musical perspective on one of our US presidential candidates, Barak Obama. To get a sense of how the world sees the US, listen to the lyrics on viva música!: Obama – The WorldBeat Album.

When I work outside of my home country, people often ask me my political views. Trust is given or withheld depending on my answer. Regardless of your politics, it is really important to have a sense of how the world views the US because it is a global society and we can’t sit isolated from the world. In some ways, we are very good at playing out in the world. In others, we have a lot of ground to cover.

If you are a US voter, please think about this as you make your selection. How the world sees and understands us matters. Like it or not, that starts with our leaders! However, it doesn’t stop there. What we do to respond to the terrible losses in Burma or China matter as much as our response to losses in Oklahoma. So let’s be part of the world from the top down and the bottom up.

CPSquare “Connected Futures” week 1 blog post

Week 1 Workshop Blog Post

I’m lending a hand for the CPSquare’s (http://www.cpsquare.org) “Connected Futures” workshop which started the last week in April. As part of our collective “end of the week activity,” we are all to blog a reflection either on the workshop discussion board, or on our own blogs. Since I am currently offline while I write this, my timing will be off, but I decided to share it on my public blog as a “peek in” to an ongoing experiment.

(Why am I offline? I’m currently at ILRI in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where I’m co-facilitating a face to face element of an ongoing distributed workshop on knowledge sharing in international agricultural research. The network is down. Who knows for how long…???)

The workshop is devoted to looking at the role and impact of new technologies on communities of practice, and how we steward those technologies (or technology stewardship. If I were online, I’d be linking all these things to previous posts and definitions, but that will have to wait until later!)

This is not a workshop for the fainthearted. In the first week we are asked to register and acclimate to a fistful of online tools, from wikis to blog readers. While we have a “home base” on a discussion board, our activities will range across tools and modalities so we have some real experience to reflect upon and learn from. But all this jumping around right off the bat, before we’ve all gotten to know each other, feels pretty challenging. The brave post that they are feeling confused and I suspect others are quietly nodding in agreement in front of their computer screens.

What facilitates coherence? Especially in a complex world? What enables some of us to feel comfortable with incoherence, ambiguity and incompleteness while others take it as natural? Furthermore, how do we reconcile these differences when we are intending to act “in community?”

For me, these questions are always on my mind when I am in the technology steward’s seat. (Or on that keyboard!)