I Just Have To Share: From Jim Benson, image by @toddaclark
I book marked this over a year ago and meant to blog it. It is still worth sharing. And as a bonus, I’m slowly chipping away at my blog draft backlog. 🙂
Source: 9 questions you can’t answer when not visualizing your work | get LIT from Jim Benson’s post.
I was attracted by the title of a 2015 opinion piece in the Observer by Thomas Oppong @Alltopstartups, 33 Websites That Will Make You a Genius. If only! Apparently so were many other people because if you search on the title and first sentence, you will see the article republished all over the place. I had tucked the url into a draft blog post that I’m finally getting to today! (Note: there are actually 34 on the list. Brainpickings did not get a number. Brainpickings, by the way, is one that I’d prioritize reading!)
Why are people interested in these lists? Are they really going to go out and working on getting smarter? Does anyone have time to read them on a regular basis? For me it is an interesting reminder that there is so much interesting stuff out there we must both use it and not let it overwhelm us. Or let lists limit us because the diversity is much richer than can ever be boiled down to 33 or 34.
The question I sit with is WHY are these 33 websites considered so valuable? Is it the website, the artifact, or the people who make them, individually, collectively and everything in between! What if instead of listing these sites, we had a chance to sit down and have a meal with the people behind them. Now THAT would be WONDERFUL! Here is the list with Thomas’ annotations – and thank you Thomas! At the end I leave you with a question similar to the one Thomas left at the end of his article.
1. BBC — Future — Making you smarter, every day.
2. 99U (YouTube) — Actionable insights on productivity, organization and leadership to help creative people push ideas forward.
3. Youtube EDU — The education videos that don’t have cute cats in boxes — but they do unlock knowledge.
4. WikiWand — A slick new interface for Wikipedia.
5. The long read (The Guardian) — In-depth reporting, essays and profiles.
6. TED — Great videos to open your mind on almost every topic.
7. iTunes U — Learning on the go, from some of the world’s top universities.
8. InsightfulQuestions (subreddit) — Intellectual discussions that are not necessarily genre-specific.
9. Cerego — Cerego helps you build personalized study plans based on your strengths and weaknesses to retain knowledge.
10. University of the People — Tuition-free online university that offers higher education in multiple course streams.
11. OpenSesame — Marketplace for online training, now with 22,000+ courses.
12. CreativeLive — Take free creative classes from the world’s top experts.
13. Coursera — Partnering with some of the top U.S. universities, Coursera offers massive open online courses for free.
14. University of reddit — the product of free intellectualism and is a haven for the sharing of knowledge.
15. Quora — You ask, the net discusses — with top experts and fascinating back and forth on everything.
16. Digital Photography School —Read through this goldmine of articles to improve your photography skills.
17. Umano—Explore the largest collection of audio articles powered by real people. Dropbox has acquired Umano. Brain Pickings is a great replacement for 17.
Brain Pickings — Insightful long form posts on life, art, science, design, history, philosophy and more.
18. Peer 2 Peer University or P2PU, is an open educational project that helps you learn at your own pace.
19. MIT Open CourseWare is a catalog of free online courses and learning resources offered by MIT.
20. Gibbon—This is the ultimate playlist for learning.
21. Investopedia — Learn everything you need to know about the world of investing, markets and personal finance.
22. Udacity offers interactive online classes and courses in higher education.
23. Mozilla Developer Network offers detailed documentation and learning resources for web developers.
24. Future learn — enjoy free online courses from top universities and specialist organizations.
25. Google Scholar — provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles.
26. Brain Pump — A place to learn something new everyday.
27. Mental Floss — Test your knowledge with amazing and interesting facts, trivia, quizzes and brain teaser games.
28. Learnist — Learn from expertly curated web, print and video content.
29. DataCamp — Online R tutorials and data science courses.
30. edX — Take online courses from the world’s best universities.
31. Highbrow — Get bite-sized daily courses to your inbox.
32. Coursmos — Take a micro-course anytime you want, on any device.
33. Platzi — Live streaming classes on design, marketing and code.
If you had to suggest one website that presented a more diverse perspective or represented views that don’t often make into lists like the ones above, what site would you recommend I look at?
Last Friday was a GAS! I spent the day at Sketching in Practice, an amazing offering from Simon Fraser University and led by the incredible Jason Toal. In my next post I’ll recap more of the event as a whole, but I had an amazing time offering a one hour experimental session in the afternoon exploring the impact of the arrangement of space, offering of media and provision of (or not) of task constraints in how a group works together using visual practices. This is part of my preparation for the workshop Michelle Laurie and I are offering this September in Rossland, BC, My Pens, Our Pens: engagement through participatory visualization. More and more I want more than the visual harvest of graphic recording. I want to really dig into the practices that use collaborative and shared visuals for doing real learning and work. So this was a great opportunity.
Here was the description of the session along with my initial planning sketch:
Session title: What if? An experiment to explore if/how structure, format and media influences our interactions
Session overview: Are you ready to be the principle investigator and subject for a short experiment? Join us in this hands on, fingers dirty, experiment on the impact of structure, format and media influences on our interactions with each other. You will be assigned a cohort upon entering the room, with some degree of instruction and materials. You will participate for 20 minutes with that cohort. Then we’ll do a gallery walk and debrief of the experience. Magic or mayhem? Or both? Let’s explore.
As people entered the room (about 35) I assigned them a number. The stations were preset around the room with a number showing on a card. I gave the briefest of brief introductions, as I wanted this to be about the experience, not explanations. The teams dispersed and upon “go” they turned over their cards which provided a brief set of directions (or lack thereof.) The teams then had 20 minutes. The stations included:
It was fascinating to watch. The table with just singing as the team communication directions quickly became a pretty frustrated set of people. One person made an effort at singing, but no one else joined in. The table paper became covered with words and images of frustration, along with some comments on their appreciation of the squishy markers that go on like lipstick. The trip planning team talked about their task. When one person put down the latitude demarcation, the whole flow just burst forward and everyone started drawing. The chocolate coloring folks, after a few moments of disbelief, jumped in and we all smelled the chocolate. (I have to admit, after a while the bars looked less like chocolate than some other substance…) The no directions team started out slow but got into the swing of things with a fairly broad and abstract image. The peer consultation group did not pull in the flip chart until I mentioned it halfway through but they appeared to be deep in conversation.
After the 20 minutes, teams had a few minutes to identify their key insights, then we did a gallery walk to each station to share insights. It was really interesting.
Station 1: People for the most part stuck with the area of paper they started with, and did beautiful, amazing images. One participant worked bigger and provided some marks that offered opportunities for connecting the individual areas. The team felt that if they had more time, this integration direction would have really kicked in. There were some comments about how yummy the richness of media were. (PAN PASTELS!!)
Station 2: The chocolate team had really dirty fingers! Despite the early disbelief, they embraced their medium. I think they also ate a bit of the chocolate, which seemed like a smart thing for me! Again, the initial marks by one member provided the start, role modeling that “embracing.” As we walked from station to station, this sense of the role of the “first person to make a move” proved very strong.
Station 3: The singing only table had a fascinating discussion about the fear of singing in public and we contrasted that with the fear of drawing in public. We realized that the fear of singing made the fear of drawing seem less intense, so maybe moving people WAAAAY beyond their initial comfort zones (to singing), then stepping back (to drawing) might be a way to frame and reflect on our fears. That said, there were some lovely individual marks on the paper. AND a lot more text than I’ve seen when I’ve done this exercise before.
Station 4: The trip planners said they really bonded as a team. They were worried they were going to be broken up to other teams and did not like that idea. Of all the teams, there was the greatest sense of “team!”
Station 5: The consultation team had to pull in some additional chairs which were higher than the initial comfy chairs, raising the observation about power as manifest in the set up – the higher chair people felt they had to lean in more, and the lower chairs were perhaps more quiet. That said, they had a productive peer consultation. Visuals appeared to be a minimal part of their experience. It made me wonder about how explicit we need to be with both the provision of visual tools and suggestions for use. They don’t appear to be a default.
Station 6: One tweet out of the no directions group cracked me up – something to the effect of “this is my favorite kind of direction!” They noted that there was some sense of wanting direction or leadership, but after one person made some marks, again, things flowed. However, they wanted chocolate, so they traded some markers with the chocolate folks.My sense is that most of the people enjoyed the experience in the end, even if they experienced frustration or remorse that they were not in a particular group. There was a lot of interest in both the dynamics of the space/constraint/media question, but the new element that came up for me was the role of the first mark, who makes it, and how they make it. This sets the tone.
If this intrigues you, consider joining us for the workshop My Pens, Our Pens: engagement through participatory visualization.
Here is the photo set on Flickr:
For the last 6 years we (Michelle and Nancy) have been leading introductory workshops on graphic facilitation, the use of visuals in group process. We’ve grounded the workshops in basic drawing “liberation” (I CAN DRAW), dipped into graphic recording and finished with examples of visual practices in group process. Last year Michelle took that on solo and will lead RosViz 16 again. If you are looking for a great entry point into graphic facilitation, JUMP AT THIS OFFERING for September 19-20, 2016 in Rossland BC. Add a few days and enjoy the stupendous beauty of the area!
I am grateful Michelle took RosViz on, because in true restless Nancy form, I was ready to do something new, to push my own boundaries a bit further. Often that means WITH YOU! So I wanted to share our individual and collective offerings, this year in September in Rossland on September 16 and 17. Michelle has all the details on her blog about both offerings. And I want to add to my American friends, with the Canadian rate exchange, this is a good deal!
Now, the new offering, which maybe is a workshop, but I also think it is a do-shop, a think-shop and a play-shop!
September 16-17, 2016, Rossland, BC, Canada
This year we are ready to push ourselves into some new territory from our practices and from the inspirations of other practitioners we follow and admire. We invite you to join us in this exploration.
For 2 days we will explore, share and practice participatory visualization practices which support group process. From templates pioneered by leaders in the graphic practitioner fields to ones we create on the spot, from visual exercises designed to promote relationship, thinking and sensemaking, to collaborative and collective visual harvest practices designed both for sensemaking and knowledge sharing.
We’ll start out in familiar territory getting comfortable drawing – but this year we’ll go beyond drawing on walls, and experiment with shared visualization on smaller scale paper and even, if you want, on tablets and ipads. Then we’ll progress through a series of exercises and experiments alternating with reflection and harvest. At the end of the 2 days you will have experienced, experimented, facilitated, reflected and made sense of how visuals can be part of participatory and engaging processes in your work.
This is not your traditional workshop. We are looking to push our boundaries (and yours) in terms of the role of visuals in design and facilitation. We will ask hard questions about who captures content and what is its use? Can visual methods help in developmental evaluation and results communication be more meaningful? What is the role of metaphor? It’s constraints? Where are there visual opportunities in process design? When does it make sense to use visuals and where does it detract from the process? What is the process of participatory capture and harvest of content? What are the power dynamics? How do we use visuals with approaches such as Liberating Structures?
Here are some of the themes we are exploring:
To ground us, we’ll send you some readings and maybe an exercise or two in advance to jump start our time together. I have been curating some very cool stuff! Because this is an exploration, we want to look inward AND outwards, so we’ll actively share out to the world what we learn.
Who is this for? We invite everyone, from beginners, to RosViz alumni, to seasoned practitioners to join us. You are welcome to bring favorite drawing materials and electronic devices. We will provide with a drawing journal, a set of marker pens, a sketchnote pen and 2 different colors of pan pastels with a sponge. You will have access to loads more materials to play with and use throughout the workshop. If you know us, you know there will also be healthy snacks and chocolate. We also host a very active online community of practitioners to support your practice and learning after the workshop.
Visual novices or those wanting to brush up on their drawing skills will be invited to an optional pre-session of our more traditional “drawing on walls” the day before. There is an additional fee and it includes an additional set of chalk pastels. However, this is not required and will only be offered if we have 4 or more interested people.
Dates: Sept 16, 8-5 & Sept 17 – 8-3
(Please arrive the night before if flying in. We end at 3pm on Sept 17 so people can catch flights home)
*Getting started drawing on walls optional ‘pre-day’ is Sept 15, 2- 6pm
Price: $950 CAD + GST (Intro to Drawing on Walls + $300 CAD)
*Early bird discount $800 CAD + GST (register and paid by July 15th)
*Bonus: Three or more from one organization, 4th comes free!
Location: Prestige Hotel Ballroom, beautiful Rossland, BC
Meals: All meals on your own. Rossland has several beautiful cafes and restaurants to enjoy. Healthy snacks, chocolate and drinks are provided throughout.
About your hosts:
Nancy White
“I am a learner, mom, gramma and chocoholic. I founded Full Circle Associates to help organizations connect through online and offline strategies. My practices are diverse, including online interaction designer, facilitator and coach for distributed communities of practice, online learning, distributed teams and online communities, doodler and visual practitioner. I have a special interest in the NGO/NPO sector and the emerging practice of using communities and networks for work and learning. I blog at http://fullcirc.com/wp/, teach, present and write on online facilitation and interaction, social architecture, social media and visual practices. I am co-author with Etienne Wenger and John Smith of Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities. Lately not only do I like to draw on walls (graphic facilitation), but I spend a lot of time playing with my granddaughters!!! For more about my visual practice see http://fullcirc.com/wp/about/visual-and-graphic-work/.”
Michelle Laurie
“Despite being an analytical person, I have found that visuals have brought new meaning to my practice as a facilitator and communicator. Typically I explore the interface of environment and development via strategic planning, assessments, facilitation and engagement. Lately my work has focused on supporting organizations to transform their ideas for positive change into realities on the ground. I incorporate visuals wherever I can particularly with the use of participatory graphics, templates, animation and reporting. I also use visuals in my personal life for planning weddings, family activities and travels! I am an associate with the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a member of the International Association of Facilitators, the Canadian Evaluation Society and IUCN’s Commission on Education and Communication. I will be your main contact for workshop logistics.”
To register you must email michelle.k.laurie(@)gmail.com to confirm your participation, provide your contact details and submit payment.
Payment Options:
– Email transfer – michelle.k.laurie(@)gmail.com
– Paypal transfer – paypal.me/MichelleLaurie (If you prefer to pay in USD, contact NANCY)
– Cheque by snail mail to: Michelle Laurie, PO Box 1063, Rossland, BC, V0G 1Y0, Canada
I received an email today from a kind woman named Lilly Ward who pointed out that one of the resources I often promote, http://www.timeanddate.com for planning multi timezone meetings was not so friendly for people with different kinds of access issues.
I am Lily Ward, I noticed that you link to timezoneconverter.com (http://fullcirc.com/wp/2009/05/29/technology-stewardship-at-libraries-free-online-event/) Unfortunately, it isn’t very accessible for sight impaired individuals. Would you consider adding a link to a more accessible site like thetimenow.com which is WCAG 2.0 compliant? (Edit, 9/21/16 – thetimenow.com has asked us to remove all links so you just see the name, not the link. This is interesting because Lily keeps emailing me to ADD this link, and now I have to remove it. NW)
Also, if you ever want to see how accessible a page is, I recommend http://wave.webaim.org. It is really helpful.
First, thanks, Lilly, I appreciate that you took the time to share your knowledge. Second, the web accessibility tool I used to use disappeared, so I’m happy to see http://wave.webaim.org . The only downside is realizing how many challenges my own site offers people with accessibility differences. Uh oh…
