Category: events

The Harvest: After Event Reflections

While it feels more like winter than Autumn here in Seattle (22 F and -8 C I think, 6-8 inches of snow on the ground) I watch the last of the leaves falling off the big horse chestnut at the end of our driveway. Harvest time. While I’ve put my garden to bed for the winter, the chickens are still giving us a few eggs and all the pickles and chutneys we cooked up earlier in the Fall are looking beautiful on the shelf. The harvest.

I posted a few days ago about reflective teacher practices. Reflection is a form of harvest. Debriefing an experience is another form that I am particularly appreciating these days. Each of these processes has a potential internal and external value. I wanted to point out some examples of how people have shared out their harvest on blogs, tweets, and other social media to create external value.

Via Nadia Manning-Thomas of the CGIAR ICT-KM program shared two after event reflections on their blog, one on a particular activity design and debrief of a social media workshop. Nadia’s posts were thoughtful and probably took a fair amount of time to weave together – full of links, photos and content.

Chris Corrigan has an amazing range of harvest approaches from the very deep to the light and poetic, haiku-like practices.

Harold Jarche who is great at sharing his reflections, captured a quick post workshop blog post.  Not everything needs to be polished and for busy people, sometimes the quick share is the quick win for the rest of us.

Immediately after the workshop, I wrote, 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.

Having worked with many other online communities in the past two years, I would say that the role of “synthesizer” remains important, and it is a critical part of being a good online community manager.

I’m currently coming to the final phase of a formal evaluation which has lots of reflection, tons of things we’ve harvested, and now we are trying to figure out how to make them valuable. How can this “harvest” feed, rather than rot in a pile? Any inspirations for me?

Stories, Flash Mobs and Community Matters

I’m in Denver this week at the “Community Matters” conference from the Orton Family Foundation.

This is a new network for me: town planners, small town advocates, and people who care about the heart and soul of their community. I’m engrossed in getting to know their work and them. The intellect and attention to detail of the planning perspective melded with the recognition of the power of relationship, connection, passion and emotion is a powerful mix. In fact “powerful” is a word I’ve been hearing a lot.

For some reason, many of the people I have conversed with are also paying attention to transitions – to their own, their organizations and their communities. I’m quite taken by this pattern and wonder why it has show up so vividly for me here, at this conference, at this time. Something to think about.

My roles here are delightfully diverse, even if the switch ups make me dizzy here in the “mile high” city. Tuesday I facilitated an all day workshop on “Online Media and Your Neighbors.” We were two town planners, a journalist and online neighborhood community facilitator, a deep thinker on communities for elders and the differently abled, and a community organization “jill of all trades.” We learned with and from each other about how online tools can be of value (or be avoided) for local communities. I am now thinking more about the intersection of technology in elder communities — mmmm!

Yesterday I did small scale graphic recording for the opening plenary, large scale graphic recording for for the session on “The Power of Stories” (Image above) facilitated by my dear friend and conspirator, Barbara Ganley. Tim Merriman, Holli Andrews and Josh Schachte (how could you not love a man who loves pie!) were terrific – telling real stories about the real power of stories. There are two other panels from the graphic on questions and tips for storytelling that you might find valuable here and here.

But it doesn’t stop there. Then I facilitated two 30-minute “Tool Flash Mobs” – one on Twitter and one on YouTube – to provide a brief introduction and practice with social media. In the Twitter session one woman talked about a very unusual Twitter adoption challenge. Her puppet, Suzie, needed an account. So I invited the two of them for a quick peer-to-peer consult later in the day. Talk about mind-blowing. More on that later…

In the YouTube session I decided to go out on a limb (as usual) and suggest that we not only learn about online video in a half hour, but to actually make, upload and view one. Yup, we did it. Take a peek:

The takeaway for me from the two flash mob sessions were:

  • When introducing a social media tool in a community context, think about the inflow and outflow aspects. Inflow: listening, learning, getting ideas, bringing diversity into a local community. Outflow: sharing knowledge, disseminating information, publicizing community events, helping the world see (and perhaps validate) good community work that may not be perceived as so important because it is so “everyday” for the community itself.
  • Think small, time-delimited experiments with measurable outputs so that we can think strategically about what “social media” work we want to add to our lives, and what value can accrue to our communities.
  • Remind ourselves we all don’t have to learn and work with everytool. In fact, imagine what it would be like if we ALL tweeted! NOOOOO!

Those sessions all continued informally so when I looked up it was after 5:30 and I ran off to a dinner with friends. ZOOM! Had a great dinner/conversation then walked back, did a little prep and crashed.

So here I am today – a graphic recording of Chip Heath’s keynote! WOW, I’ve been practicing drawing elephants. Tomorrow I record Frances Moore Lappe, so lots of excitement, plus one more Flash Mob and pinch-hit moderating a panel. Off and running!

Questions: a thread through current work

Life has been a whirlwind of work. Keynote and workshops for the Girl Scouts of America Leadership and Development Conference,  iterative design work on a bunch of client projects, from planning to post-event evaluation, a large global e-consultation followed by a large face to face decision making meeting, and coming up this week a lovely two day graphic recording/facilitation workshop up in the mountains of Central British Columbia.

While whirlwinds are deep experiential times, they leave little for reflection (including blogging). This morning I took a few moments before ramping up to full production mode and I was skimming my blog feeds.

I love Palojono, the blog of Jono,  a designer who is a great writer and visual thinker.Jono helped me reflect, to see the thread through my current work. My practice right now is very focused on using questions. We have really spent a lot of time designing the questions that sit underneath consultations and meetings. I build questions into my talks. Thank you Jono, and here are some of your tips I’d like to share out and amplify with my network. His are related to giving a talk, but as I read them, I could easily pull them into other contexts.

via palojono: Asking great questions at talks.

Great questions…
1. Build a relationship between you and the speaker
A good question is an effective way of telling someone, yes, I get it, and what’s more this is interesting to me. It allows them to recognize you and increases the chance and ease of meeting up after a talk to discuss in more depth through the common ground created.
2. Let other’s know who you are
Asking a question in a room of strangers is an opportunity to share a little of yourself, what you’re interested in, who you are, and what you know about the subject. On many occasions, strangers have introduced themselves to me after a talk simply because I asked a question. In case you can’t tell, I think great questions are a great networking tool. (Nancy’s Note: relationships, trust, “entry doors…”)
3. Start conversations
In very many talks there is as much to be learned from the audience as the speaker. Asking a great question invites others to chime in and start a natural dialogue that is often more revealing than any prepared presentation. (Nancy’s NoteThen shut up and listen! ListenNote?)
4. Buy others time
There are many times when the bell sounds on a talk and “Any questions?” shoots round the room before I’ve barely had a chance to process the last thing that was said. A first question plays the invaluable role of giving others a little chance to think about what they want to ask once the speaker has finished. Sometimes we just need a little processing time before we’re ready to share. (Nancy’s Note: the basis of improvisation – make the other person look good!)
5. Relate the content to what you care about
Questions beget answers. Many people forget that a question of a speaker really allows you to learn an answer to your situation. When it’s a talented and experienced speaker it’s really an incredible opportunity. A great question plays the useful function of steering the talk towards what’s more relevant to you. (Nancy’s Note: from a communities of practice perspective, this hooks into the importance of finding shared domain!)
6. Force you to engage in the talk
Challenging yourself to think of great questions also forces you to think through the content of the talk and compare it to what you already know. It’s too easy to let a good talk wash over you, and a bad talk not even enter. I typically write a big question mark in the corner of my page at the start of a talk and use it as the seed for a question mindmap. Setting myself the responsibility of asking a great question means I not only have to pay attention, but I have to think critically about the talk all the way through. What a great cheap way to max out your value.

InkWell.Vue Digital Habitat Conversations

(Reposted from the Technology for Communities blog)

Starting June 23rd for a couple of weeks, John Smith, Etienne Wenger and I will be part of a discussion about Digital Habitats on The Well’s Inkwell.Vue conference. Inkwell is a cool, public facing bit of the well (the rest is paid membership) that gives folks a chance to have an asynchronous conversation with book authors from or associated with the Well. We invite you to join into the conversation.

For those not familiar with the Well, it is one of the original and most enduring online communities. (I host the Virtual Communities conference there with Jon Lebkowsky!)

Inkwell is a great example of a “public facing space” for a private communities which is reflected in Digital Habitats chapter six as the “context” orientation. It gives outsiders a taste of the Well, which may invite them in, and it gives the Well a way to add value out to the world. Plus a few Well member volunteers get free review copies and encouragement to help stimulate the conversation, along with one or two designated conversation hosts. There have been some amazing conversations in Inkwell over the years, and it is now a Well tradition.

In preparation for the two weeks, the three of us thought it might be fun to record a short conversation to introduce ourselves. This is not what usually happens on Inkwell.vue, so we’ll see how it goes.

Some of the questions we raised and which might be fodder for the Inkwell conversation include:

  • Do you recognize yourself as a technology steward?
  • And if you recognize yourself in the role, does it make a difference in practice?  Are there consequences in terms of relationships, labels, or intentions that change as a result?
  • In your community do you see the tech steward  role as more individual or more distributed across community members?  What are the consequences?
  • What can we learn from long-lived communities like The Well?
  • How do technology stewardship practices vary across different socialcontexts?

Graphic Notetaking at IST Africa

Last week I was in Durban, South Africa, for the IST-Africa conference where Tony Carr, Maike Schansker and I ran a workshop on professional development in the networked/Web 2.0 era on behalf of UN University. One of the things Maike and I did during the second day was take graphic notes of the presentations.

The Purpose

We did visual capture for a number of reasons.

  • First, from an academic conference perspective, note that there were 90 minute sessions with 5-7 papers presented each session in dark rooms with lots of (mostly) traditional PowerPoint. In a context of learning, the track we were following, it is interesting to see us yet again do what we tell teachers not to do. 😉 We wanted some form of participation for ourselves, beyond sitting and listening. (There was very limited opportunities for questions and dialog.)
  • Second, we are both nurturing our graphic facilitating and recording practices, and in fact are part of a graphico’s community of practice! Maike was also practicing recording on her new electronic tablet.
  • Third, the visual  recording helps me listen better, and to focus. (I have difficulty with this!)
  • Finally, the practice provides a way to share some of what we learned out to the world.  It is a form of social reporting. We can share what we learned both with our own internal communities and (via things like Flickr) to the wider network.

I brought the sketches home, scanned them and uploaded them to Flickr, tagged them so I could group them together, and linked to our workshop’s wiki page (more on that in a subsequent post). Then I promptly forgot about them and moved on to the rest of my “been on travel” backlog.

Yesterday Stephen Downes picked up the photos and commented on them in his fabulous and widely read OLDaily. Hm… someone noticed! That is always interesting so I figured I should blog about the work and respond to some questions and comments I’ve gotten since Stephen’s post.

The Images…

…and a little self critique. I’ve embedded them below, but it is much easier to see if you click into Flickr itself! The drawing on pad on one’s lap leads to smaller, more detailed images than the large scale “drawing on walls” produces.

You will notice the different sketching styles of Maike and I, and the volume differences. Some presentations were jam packed. Some left us wondering what the key points were. I actually have three other pages with titles and the rest blank since I either could not follow, concentrate or I just “didn’t get it!”

As we looked at our pictures, we both noted we struggled to use more images and less words, and that for me, particularly, my images often got over-crowded. We were going so fast that most of the coloring work was during breaks or afterward. The presentations were so time limited that people talked fast and tried to pack a LOT into their 10 minutes. 😉

The Method

Here are my materials:

  • Nice, smooth and fairly heavy paper, left on the pad as  a hard writing surface
  • Colored pens, Staedtler triplus(r) fineliner pens, 10 color set. Nice firm tips, fine lines and plenty of ink
  • A small 12-color set of chalk pastels, Prismacolor Nupastel firm pastel color sticks. These are smaller and a bit harder than the low-cost chalk I use on my big, wall sized drawings. They give me a bit more fine control and I like the colors! Downside is they break easy so I try and pack them deep in my clothes in my suitcase!
  • An old, grotty eraser.

Maike was using a new portable tablet PC and I’ll need to get the tech information from her if any of you are interested. We have been having some interesting conversations about both the tech and practice of electronic graphic recording.

Early on I decided on a “flow” template with the presentation title and presenter name in the upper left and cascading the notes to and fro down the page with arrows (later colored orange) as the connecting bits.  When I did the finishing touches later, I chose a fairly limited palette and used little “cloud thingies” to highlight key topics. You will also see that some images also used some mind-mapping techniques.

The Comments and Observations of Others

Stephen Downes  wrote:

These graphic lecture captures are invaluable teaching aids. Not simply because they represent the content of the lecture in an accessible format. But also because they make clear the structure of the presentation, a structure that should be very familiar to people who heard about the ‘the rule of threes’ I talked about in Argentina. Look at this one, for example. You can see the author employing some techniques – a pyramid, a four square diagram – to construct the overall presentation. Nancy White, Flickr, May 26, 2010 5:40 a.m.. [Link] [Tags: , , ]

Wow, I never thought of the images this way. This is why we don’t work alone! I do want to be clear that some of the images, such as the one’s Stephen notes, are just my sketches of what the presenters had on their slides – so they get full credit AND I recognize that their device was useful to me as the listener. So great observation, Stephen, which you helped me see.

Emma Duke-Williams wrote:

But what fabulous diagrams, Nancy! I see they’re ‘public’, so I’ve passed them (& this page) on to some of our Study Skills folks – to see if they can use them to inspire students.

(I’m also wondering about the possibilities of creating something like that on a tablet, rather than having to remember the pencil case – and all the colours in it!)

Yes, Emma, they ARE public and that is an important part of our practice. A UN Agency funded my presence and participate, so in my eyes, what we learn, reify and produce goes back out to the world which funds the UN! But more fundamentally, it is a waste of resources and unsustainable to think that the benefits of conference participation in topics that are in the global public good are limited only to the privileged who can be face to face.

And yes, we can do this electronically. See these visual captures from Rachel Smith and Rob Cottingham (more) at Northern Voice earlier this month! I’m embedding one as an example from Rachel’s Northern Voice set on Flickr.  I try not to rush out and buy new electronic toys, but after playing with Rachel’s iPad, I’m VERY tempted. It was easier than Maike’s tablet PC. 😉

So that is, as they say, the story as I know it! I’ll encourage Maike to chime in!