Category: collaboration

Travel Budget Slashes, Meeting Crunch and Going Virtual

Flickr Photo by http://farm1.static.flickr.com/199/517610028_956361eb2c.jpg?v=0Throughout the year  I’m involved in quite a few conferences and meetings. This year, the ground is shifting. Travel budgets are being slashed (faster here than in Europe as far as I can tell) and people are starting to think more seriously about the non financial costs such as carbon emissions of the travel and the plain old wear and tear on our bodies traveling across time zones and geography.

Financially, meeting organizers have serious concerns. One US based conference coming up this Fall is seeing a 30% reduction in registrations and they feel LUCKY! One of my core communities of practice, KM4Dev, just had a call to discuss how we could meet, and scuttle our more ambitious S. Africa plan and do something more focused and less expensive because we could not get funding. Ed-Media, a conference I’ve been invited to speak at (in Hawaii – and yes, I feel both thrilled and carbon-guilty, even with offsets), sent email today announcing opening of virtual presentation submissions and participation. I say “good on ya!” Here are a few snippets from their note:

>>  Virtual Presentations included in Final Call  <<
http://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/VP/
 > Please forward to a colleague <
http://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/call.htm
_______________________________________________________________
ED-MEDIA 2009

World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications
June 22-26, 2009  *  Honolulu, Hawaii

INVITATION:
ED-MEDIA 2009 serves as a multi-disciplinary forum for the discussion and exchange of information on the research, development, and applications on all topics related to multimedia and telecommunications/distance education.

ED-MEDIA, the premiere international conference in the field, spans all disciplines and levels of education and attracts more than 1,500 attendees from over 60 countries. We invite you to attend ED-MEDIA and submit proposals for presentations.

All presentation proposals are peer-reviewed and selected by three reviewers on the respected Program Committee for inclusion in the conference program, Proceedings (book and CD-ROM formats) and EdITLib (Education and Information Technology Digital Library),   http://www.EdITLib.org

VIRTUAL PRESENTATIONS:
————————————-

In consideration of presenters who may be unable to attend ED-MEDIA in person due to funding or time constraints, Virtual Presentations have been added to the program with the same validity (publication, certification, etc.) as the face-to-face (F2F) conference and with the capability to interact with session participants.

A limited number of presentations in these categories will be accepted:
– Virtual Brief Papers
– Virtual Posters
– Virtual Corporate Showcases

Why a Virtual Presentation?
————————————
* Saves money.  No travel, accommodation, and restaurant costs
* Saves time. No travel or away time required.
* Allows you to participate when you schedule your time to do so.
* Same validity as the face-to-face (F2F) conference (publication, certification, etc.).
* Paper published in CD, book, and Digital Library ( http://www.editlib.org) proceedings.
* Publish and share all supporting media (PPT, video, etc.) in the proceedings.
* Capability to interact with your session

I love meeting face to face. But the reality is those of us who can are priveledged and soon, the ability to travel and gather may be even more restricted. We have to get better at “being together” using technology. That means better tools AND practices. That probably leads me to griping about the web meeting tools I have been using because they are what my clients use.

After criticizing SharePoint last week for it’s silo-creating, I have to ding Microsoft Live Meeting for it’s top down control model. There is no group chat (participants can only chat with the moderator or one other person at a time, thus no horizontal communication nor any easy ability to collectively take notes), there is no visible participant list (thus defeating any community building part of one’s agenda), and there can only be one moderator at a time, reducing the ability to agily collaborate. This is “I deliver content to you” style technology. Yes, it may integrate nicely with Office and Outlook, but what if you are not using or don’t focus on these integration issues?

Not far behind in its clunkiness is WebEx, which makes passing the control baton something of a high wire act. I have enjoyed using Elluninate more. I’ve had the best luck with their integrated VoIP and their breakout rooms, while still a bit tricky, are much easier for me than WebEx.

On the free and lower cost side, Vyew is getting higher marks from me, but I’ve not tested it with a larger group and have not taken a run at the latest version of Dim Dim. Both currently offer 20 person rooms for free!

Skype – audio and chat – is still at the core of my small group meetings, often augmented by a quality phone/Skype bridge when I have larger groups (which costs me $40/month).

However, without clear purpose and useful practices, these tools are useless. We need to make gathering time serve our purposes and to be useful, functional and ENJOYABLE. Not a torture test. Friends and colleagues in my circle have all acknowledged we need to start thinking, working and practicing together to both better understand and manipulate the tools and improve the meeting processes themselves. Clearly, I need to make time for this.

Photo credit (and yes, I’ve used this one twice!) by stephentrepreneur

Take out your earplugs

Simply worth quoting….

37days: Take out your earplugs and sing together
Our last question was about that idea of “handing one another along.” “What would you like to teach young people today?” we asked as we ended our time with them. It was Candie who answered: “We live in such an individualist culture today,” she said, “but great change is communal. The power of song is a vast instrument to draw people together and deliver a message. I think we need to take out our iPod earphones and begin to sing together again.”

Tom Vander Wall Nails My Sharepoint Experience

Azul DeCobalto vs. Touchez LaSurfaceFor a number of years I have cringed every time one of my clients tells me that have or are planning to deploy Microsoft SharePoint as a collaborative platform. They say it is their “social media” deployment. SharePoint is many things, but it misses the critical element of social media which is networked connection between people and ideas, easy discoverability, makes visible and allows people to act on weak ties, and support for other network-like interactions rather than closed group performance.

I am not an IT manager, nor would I say my main competence is in portals and intranets. My focus is on what people DO with these tools, and very often I’ve seen people struggle with SharePoint.

Recently Tom Vander Wall has posted a really thoughtful blog post that says what I have experienced. SharePoint is a silo builder, not buster. (Thanks to someone in my Twitter network for Tweeting the link and I’m sorry I did not note who this was!!)

In SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools :: Personal InfoCloud, Tom quotes one of his informants:

“We went from 5 silos in our organization to hundreds in a month after deploying SharePoint”. They continue, “There is great information being shared and flowing into the system, but we don’t know it exists, nor can we easily share it, nor do much of anything with that information.” I heard this from an organization about 2 years ago in a private meeting and have been hearing near similar statements since. This is completely counter to the Enterprise 2.0 hopes and wishes they had for SharePoint. They were of the mindset that open sharing & having the organization and individuals benefit from a social platform.

Clearly, the challenges of any platform is not just the platform, but how and WHY it was used. Driving from real needs, not simply IT convenience or standards alone. But there is something critical here that is missing from a social interaction perspective. Horizontality.

Without extensive customization (and addition of external functionality), SharePoint requires you to dive into an area, then back out of it before you dive into another area. It is built on a tree-branching model. To maximize the power of networked interaction, you need a networked architecture. If you are trying to reify and support a hierarchical reporting and accountability model based on the org chart, SharePoint fits like a glove.

Our mental models and values permeate the very coding of the software we use. When people say technology is value neutral, I say people have values and people build software, therefore the software carries the imprint of the designers’ values. SharePoint is a perfect example.

If you read the excellent comments to Tom’s post, there is some great insight as to what Sharepoint is good for and some ideas about how and why it stumbles in other areas. One of Tom’s own replies stands out for me:

There is a lot of understanding of how social tools should work and need to work in enterprise (deeply based on how people interact with others and with interfaces) that must go on top of the technology platform. I have deep interest in that story and that understanding, as it is one I rarely see inside enterprise, but I see with in the makers of the social tool products.

The point I hear over and over from those trying SharePoint to accomplish enterprise 2.0 functionality (open social interaction, ease of use, ease of working in the flow, sharing collectively, aggregating in context, and eventually getting to collaboration) is not the platform on its own to do this without very deep pockets for development. Lockheed and Wachovia are the only big deployments I know that went down this path..

From a global perspective, there are some additional challenges which I brought up during a live webcast (recording of Part1) and web discussion (on Ning) that Tony Karrer hosted on SharePoint a few weeks ago. (If you are interested in some on-the ground conversations about SharePoint, dig around the Ning site):

  • SharePoint is not low-bandwidth friendly. Between page load times and the need to navigate up and down, people in low bandwidth areas struggle with SharePoint.
  • SharePoint does not have many offline options for those who have intermittent connectivity, but the tie in with MS Office can offer some opportunities for work-arounds.
  • For global organizations, IT tends to make the software choice without a lot of insight about field conditions and social interaction/working patterns AND are often lured to use any software offered to them free as an NGO. The false economy is the customization costs eat up any savings and then some for these organizations.
  • Global NGOs often do not have the support team to help with implementation and roll out, leaders rarely use the software themselves, setting poor examples and middle managers have little incentive for creating the culture change to adopt the tool. This is NOT a SharePoint problem, but it is a factor that increases the failure rate.
  • The organizations that have successfully implemented SharePoint have good connectivity, robust IT and support teams and usually have a strong content management (file sharing) practice. Not network collaboration.

See also on SharePoint

And related, a Maise Center report on learning platform adoption which has some interesting parallels!

Creative Commons License photo credit: d.billy

Tinkering and Playing with Knowledge

cc flickr image by System One GangThe word “tinkering” keeps coming up to my radar screen, and it makes me happy. I love the idea of tinkering and find it central to the practice of stewarding technology for ourselves, our communities and networks. Imagine. Create. Reflect. Share. Adjust and go at it again. Experiment. Mash-up and recreate. Build upon the work of others.  It is for me a deeply ingrained practice of learning both by myself and with others, particularly in my communities of practice. 

Last week, on one of our many, many, many calls in creating the Digital Habitats book, Etienne Wenger noted something about a blog post I had here and on the book blog about experimenting with the community orientations we write about in the book. it was about using the orientations via a spidergraph to explore and understand one’s community. I wrote about how Shawn Callahan had taken the idea in one direction, and I in another. Etienne mentioned on the call that he had been doing this for a long time. I stopped short, feeling embarassed that I had not recognized that I had tinkered upon HIS work, and our work, and then Shawn tinkered upon it in his own way. It made me more aware of recognizing the substrate upon which we tinker. The shoulders upon which we stand.  Etienne said something to the effect that despite the hours we spend working on the book together (along with John Smith), we often don’t know what each other is working on. We are tinkering more alone than together. 

This made me realize I had been focusing on tinkering as an individual…

John Seely Brown was recently interviewed about education and he focused on this role of tinkering. He says in the video linked below, “Let me take my imagination and build something from it. Does it work? If not, why not. If it does work, can it work better?” Be open to criticism.  Brown talks about a networked world as an open source world that facilitates this tinkering. And about how our identities are now bound up in what we have created alone and with others. And how others have built upon what I have built. New social capital.

 Take a peek.

www.johnseelybrown.com “I am what I create” says John Seely Brown addressing the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching – Stanford, CA, Oct. 23-25, 2008

So we have the idea of tinkering as a way of creating our identity in the world. Tinkering as a way of learning and creating with and for others. 

cc Flickr image by kafkanAlex Soojung-Kim Pang looks at the origins of tinkering and why it feels on the rise again. (Go see the whole post – it is fabulous.)

Think of the historically contingent forces shaping tinkering first. I see several things influencing it:

  • The counterculture. Around here, countercultural attitudes towards technology– explored by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said (here’s my review of it), Theodore Roszak (his Satori to Silicon Valley is still one of the best essays on the historical relationship between the counterculture and personal computing) are still very strong, and the assumption that technologies should be used by people for personal empowerment. Tinkering bears a family resemblance to the activities embodied in the Whole Earth Catalog.
     
  • Agile software. Mike sees some similarities between agile software development and tinkering; in particular, both are attempts to break out of traditional, hard-to-scale ways of creating things.
     
  • The EULA rebellion. The fact that you’re forbidden from opening a box, that some software companies insist that you’re just renting their products, and that hardware makers intentionally cripple their devices, is a challenge to hackers and tinkerers. Tinkering is defined in part in terms of a resistance to consumer culture and the restrictive policies of corporations.
     
  • Users as Innovators. The fundamental assumption that users can do cool, worthwhile, inspiring, innovative things is a huge driver. Tinkering is partly an answer to the traditional assumption that people who buy things are “consumers”– passive, thoughtless, and reactive, people whose needs are not only served by companies, but are defined by them as well. When you tinker, you don’t just take control of your stuff; you begin to take control of yourself. (John Thackara talks about user innovation wonderfully in his book In the Bubble. As C. K. Prahalad argues, this isn’t a phenomenon restricted to users who are high-tech geeks: companies serving the base of the pyramid see the poor as innovators.)
     
  • Open source. Pretty obvious. This is an ideological inspiration, and a social one: open source software development is a highly collective process that has created some interesting mechanisms for incorporating individual work into a larger system, while still providing credit and social capital for developers.
     
  • The shift from means to meaning. This is a term that my Innovation Lab friends came up with a few years ago. Tinkering is a way of investing new meanings in things, or creating objects that mean something: by putting yourself into a device, or customizing it to better suit your needs, you’re making that thing more meaningful. (Daniel Pink also talks about it in his book A Whole New Mind, on the shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The geodesic dome is a great example of a technology whose meaning was defined– and redefined– by users.)
     
  • From manual labor to manual leisure. Finally, I wouldn’t discount the fact that you can see breaking open devices as a leisure activity, rather than something you do out of economic necessity, as influencing the movement. Two hundred years ago, tinkering as a social activity– as something that you did as an act of resistance, curiosity, participation in a social movement, expression of a desire to invest things with meaning– just didn’t exist: it’s what you did with stuff in order to survive the winter. Even fifty years ago, there was an assumption that “working with your hands” defined you as lower class: “My son won’t work with his hands” was an aspiration declaration. Today, though, when many of us work in offices or stores, and lift things or run for leisure, manual labor can become a form of entertainment.

 

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Anne Balsamo, who has written quite a bit on tinkering,
reflects…

 

1) Why is tinkering and “hand-making” important at this historical juncture?
2) What are the key sensibilities of a tinkerer?
3) How is an interest in tinkering stimulated or provoked?
4) What new tinkering practices are emerging in contemporary culture, especially in light of the rise of makers’ culture?
5) What is the relationship between tinkering and knowledge formation?
6) What research has already been done on tinkering as a mode of learning?  What research might be needed to understand it better?
7) How should we rethink the notion of tinkering in light of digital media?

Anne’s post has more video’s of people talking about Tinkering that were created with the Seely-Brown video shown above. Again, if you are interested in tinkering, it is worth clicking into Anne’s piece. (As a side note, Anne is also interested in the “corporeal (body-based) dimension of digitally mediated learning ” which pings on my recent note on the kinesthetic!)

So are we in the age of tinkering? Should we be paying more attention to our tinkering practices and patterns? How are YOU tinkering these days? 

 

More recent posts on Tinkering, many inspired by the John Seely Brown video.

Remembering our bodies when working online

While I blather on about visual thinking, it is important to remember we have bodies. I saw this great quote from Gabriela a while back and have been meaning to share it out. photo by pablosanz on Flickr CCGabriela on Coniecto

How is distributed collaboration affected by the lack of movement and space awareness? People tend to assume that their counterpart works in a similar place, in similar conditions- and this is most of the times false! People tend to guess each other’s reactions in call conferences. People in the same room express through gestures unknown to their counterparts. Is a video channel a solution to this? I don’t think so, although it is very useful in some circumstances.