Category: graphic facilitation

Reflections on Our “Drawing Together” Session

Argh, I have been wanting to finish this blog post. Work is crazy, so I can’t be as complete as I’d like to be, but I have to get this out. There is so much incubation going on in my head about visuals, and not enough time to release it all into the wild!

This past week as part of the Future of Learning in a Networked World 08 “event” we did a session on Drawing Together Online. Leigh Blackall arranged for us to use Otago Polytechnic’s (corrected – thanks Leigh) Elluminate room. Elluminate has a shared white board. Hmmm… possibilities. Could we draw on paper then take digital photos or scans and upload to Flickr? Draw together on the white board? The key was I wanted to create an irresistible invitation for everyone to draw something during our hour together.

We started off with a few ruminations and images from me. Leigh gave us a short lesson on drawing human figures then we just jumped in. And the white board became the center of attention. At first it was chaotic. Then we played with constraints. A theme. A request to work smaller and slower. We reflected on how we felt looking at the images. How we felt when we could not find space to make our mark, or when it was erased by someone else – and not being able to know quickly who it was. We talked about our inner censors, keeping us from drawing. How they came to us as childhood melted into adulthood.

I had a great time. For me, it was a wonderful session. The Elluminate Recording is here. A montage of some of our drawings is below as well as a link to Flickr: Photos tagged with drawingtogether

I invite any of the people who played together that day to share your impressions as well. Some of us said we want to do more exploration of drawing together online. YES!

1. flnw_ambivilance_2, 2. Commute, 3. flnw_coffee, 4. My Texturized Cofee Picture, 5. cogdog’s texturized coffee picture, 6. flnw_boundaries, 7. flnw_ambivilance, 8. I Need MORE COFFEE (PicNik-ed), 9. Our first collaborative drawing, 10. I Need MORE COFFEE, 11. Coffee, 12. Our first collaborative drawingOur Images

While we are thinking about visual thinking together, here is another amazing link of a video that really uses visual thinking, from Christian Nold at PopTech. follow that link to take a look at this video. (Edited to remove the embed because it kept auto-playing, driving some of us nuts.)

FLNW Event January 16 – Drawing Together Online

On Wednesday, January 16th at 22:00 GMT (check your local time) I’m throwing in a contribution into the online portion of the Future of Learning in a Networked World 2008 gathering. Why don’t you join us?

We have a FLNW Slide Sets space on Slideshare and I just uploaded the images I plan to use for this totally off-the-cuff experiment of drawing together online. Here is what I wrote as a teaser:

This is not a talk by any stretch of the imagination. It is an invitation to draw together to exercise our visual thinking. I have been doing F2F graphic facilitation work and it taps into something that I often feel missing online. So can we talk together, draw together then share our images to add to that conversation? What might happen? Let’s play.

See http://flnw.wikispaces.com/flnw2_itinerary for the full FLNW 2008 schedule, both online and on the ground in Thailand. Here is the Elluminate URL we’ll be using for the actual session. (Thanks, Leigh!) And here are the images…

Time Lapse Mural Creation High Speed Art

As you may have noticed, I have been ranting about, practicing and exploring the practice of graphic recording/facilitation. Last week we tried to take a series of pictures as a chart was made, but I haven’t figured out how to put them together. Then comes this amazing video, Time Lapse Mural Creation High Speed Art

 (I had the video embedded, but it keeps breaking the WP site so I’ve moved it off. The link is above.) 

Stephanie Crowley’s work is amazing and this video gives a sense of how a full production chart is created. My assumption here is that this is a chart made not in real time at a conference, but something created to be shared and saved/displayed. Nice inspiration for a Tuesday.

The Panel I Loved at GK3

Ehomemakers

Flickr Photo Download: Ehomemakers for the full sized image.

Last week at GK3 there were plenty of boring panels. I’m afraid to report the panel I was on on the future of KM was probably one of the boring ones. Panels are not a good use of face to face time, especially when people have flown in from across the world. We should be sitting in circles talking with each other. But there are politics of meetings like GK3.

Some people figure out ways around them. The E-Homemakers group sure did. They organized two sessions in a row and also sold products in the main hall (I bought two baskets and some fabric!). The first was rounds of story telling by women who have developed home based businesses (mostly around craft related products) in rural Africa, India and Malaysia. Each woman told her story three times, all the while a newly minted graphic recorder created an image to capture the story. (We trained together to prepare for this last Monday.) Dimanche, Zarah and Allison were amazing. When I walked in and saw their images, I was filled with joy and a deep affirmation that we all can draw as a way to communicate and connect. It was blissful. I’m sorry I was not able to be present for the first session, but I was graphically recording for the E-Health session.

The second session was actually a panel session – sort of. The moderator first invited everyone to go see the story charts and talk about them to refresh their memory of the stories. People did not want to start talking. I overheard a deep discussion about feminism at one chart that was on fire. Eventually our erstwhile moderator, Chong Sheau Ching, Executive Director, eHomemakers, Malaysia, rounded people back to their seats and asked the project research leads questions about their projects. Then she brought in the audience. I was drawing like crazy trying to capture it all. To top it off, I kept hearing the words “beauty,” “love,” and “listen to the roots.” It was everything I wanted to share in the KM session, but utterly failed to do.

Afterwards people came up to continue talking. We had the storytellers sign the chart and invited the researchers to amend anything they saw. There was lots of conversation and a ton of photos being snapped. People didn’t’ leave. There was a lot of energy in the room, particularly because this was a cavernous room and there weren’t that many people attending the session in the first place (sadly).

The women in that room had a lot of passion and power. Large political meetings aren’t going to change the world. These women are.

Day 2 of GK3 Begins


Prepping for the Future of KM session

Originally uploaded by Choconancy1

Today I have no presentation responsibilities! Yay! I get to graphically record the panel on The Future of Access, moderated by Steve Song, and I’ll do two more sessions tomorrow. I did a yoga class here at the hotel this morning which required a lot of upper arm strength, so now I’m wondering how my arms will feel drawing on a 4×8 piece of paper!

It is amazing how moving from words to images changes my experience of a meeting or session. It helps me listen better. I figured if it helps me listen, it might help me think, so yesterday I did this sketch to prepare for the panel I was on, the Future of KM and Web 2.0 in Development.

I’m not a fan of panels. We tried to make it more participatory by limiting our remarks and opening it up to the audience, but we ended up creating moments for people to make a point or ask a question, but it didn’t get to conversation. At one point I jumped up to the flip chart and started recording the questions because they were important questions, but we were in no position to begin to explore the answers.

We need these conversations.

In retrospect, I wish I had “abandoned my role as panelist” and just started at the flip chart. I think I would have mind-mapped this conversation to look at the pattern of questions. A list in this case feels overwhelming to me.

From a content perspective, I wish I had brought up the concept of community technology stewardship. Oops!

There were two rapporteurs at our session. It will be interesting to see what they make of it for the record.

As for me, I’m so grateful to be drawing today.