Category: harvesting

Scott Leslie on Trailfire

IMG_0798
Creative Commons License photo credit: Carnavas
As part of the online Knowledge Sharing (KS) in International Agriculture Development workshop, we are exploring KS tools and methods and then sharing our learning via the KS Toolkit Wiki. One tool that came up for review was Trailfire. I had not heard about it, so I put a query out on my Twitter network and in moments, Scott Leslie, a Northern Voice colleague, came to my rescue. Here is a 15 minute podcast with Scott about Trailfire and related tools used to share and comment on our journeys across the web.

Podcast: Scott Leslie on Trailfire

This tool is a Firefox plug-in, so if you want a defined group or community to use it, they all have to be FF users and agree to use the plug in. It would be interesting to test this in the international agriculture research community. (Or any other community.) There is also the wonderful bit about serendipity – finding trails left by others – their annotations and opinions — on sites that you are looking at.

Scott also shared his pre-call prep notes — which I find interesting. (Thanks, Scott!) I’ve put them below.

If you are interested in more blog posts like this, please let me know — and what tools or methods that might interest you.

Trailfire notes

Firefox plugin that works in conjunction with a main site

allows users to create “trails” which are made up of sequenced web sites

a trail mark also allows users to add an annotation to the page, so that when you are looking at that page
with the plugin enabled, you see a small mark, mousing over it shows you the full comment and
provides a link to the full trail

the website allows you to share your trails with others

you can also have the plugin show ALL trailmarks that have been made for a specific page, not just yours, which opens up
all sorts of possibilities for finding other users and finding other trails, other contexts in which a page can be seen

you can also add comments to other people’s trailmarks, meaning that conversations can actually break out “on” the web pages where the
marks were left without the need for any additional server software

cross between a social bookmarking and annotation tool

Educational and Other uses
obvious one is for instructors to create a trail through a series of web pages with some educational objective in mind

but as students/learners can also create their own trails and marks, it also becomes a way to connect with other informal
learners

it empowers users to connect and share with each other without requiring the individual sites to provide any facility or
containing mechanism to do so

simple way to add help commentary to websites – add a mark that leads off to further help documents and tutorials from whatever site
you are trying to use, or use the note to add help, like Greader shortkeys mark

a way to non-invasively annotate the web

a way to leave commentary for Others on websites

a virtual layer that overlays the web; this same technique is now being exploited by browser plugins like PMOG,
passively multiplayer online game, a game played ON TOP of the regular web through a browser plugin

cf. also medium (http://me.dium.com/ )

URLs mentioned in this podcast:

Haiku as Conference Capture

SXSX Image from Honoria StarbuckBill Anderson adds to the repetoire of conference capture techniques with Haiku Notes from SXSW

PRAXIS101: SXSW 2008 Reflection: Free association as a note-taking practice.

Your social footprint.
Or your ghost on the network.
You have to choose one.

Of course, to complement the text, I’ll grab one of Bill’s colleague’s visual efforts, an image from Honoria Starbuck!

Harvesting knowledge from text conversations

Km4Dev wiki screenshotThis is the second in my latest series of online facilitation method tips and mini-podcasts. John Smith asked me to write up the practice some of us have been nurturing on the KM4DevWiki to encourage summarizing and harvesting of learnings from key community conversations in our email list on to a wiki. The podcast can be found here.

There are often amazing threads on email lists and web based discussions. Often they get lost due to the tyranny of recency over relevancy. We remember what we last read. How many times have you heard people say “hey, we discussed that before… where IS that conversation?” Some tools make it easy to search within message, but then you have to reconstruct a thread. There may have had subject line changes, interruptions, etc. It is hard work. That’s why it is useful think about practices to pull out useful stuff so it can provide wider and easier benefit.

One practice of harvesting learnings from text based discussions (in email or web forums) started as a small FAQ (frequently asked questions) project a small group of use did a couple of years ago as part of the KM4Dev community. KM4Dev is a global community of practice interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing in international development.

We initially intended to create FAQ’s out of key discussions to answer what we thought were some of the “big questions” that often came up in the community. You can read about the project at the following links.

What we discovered was that often something wasn’t simply a response to a question, so the FAQ format started to limit us. We moved into harvesting what we called “Community Knowledge.” This is the basis of the technique I know use regularly.

Now, on the the technique. (Did I say these were going to be short? I guess I goofed on that!)

  1. Role model the harvesting behavior. Our initial FAQs gave people the chance to experience discussion summaries. But the next step was to role model it around current discussions. At first we would notice a “hot thread,” summarize it then post the wiki url back to the email list.
    • Templates can make it easier/more comfortable for people new to summarization and/or wikis.
    • Cross promote the wiki on the list to keep it in the community “line of sight.”
  2. Ask others to try the behavior. Next we started asking people to create and post their own summaries of discussion threads that they started.
    • asking in a private email is friendlier, but sometimes the public request can add some useful “pressure.”
  3. Time the request well. Usually we made the request for summarization after we saw a thread really get going — and hopefully near the end of the thread.
    • I have made the mistake of suggesting that the thread be summarized too soon and people took that as a “stop talking” signal.
  4. Expect resistance. (And I’m tempted to say “resistance is futile, but that’s not really true!) Initially people did not summarize. So I would set up a wiki page for them, send them the url and another small request. (I think I started signing my emails from “wikipest.”) Some people would then summarize and post to the wiki, and some would send me the summary to post. That was fine.
    • Reminders are often useful. I do wonder if I annoyed some times…
  5. Encourage those who adopt the practice. After about a year, others started recommending a summaries to starters of hot threads. So the initial part of the practice was being picked up by others. More people were creating pages, but it was still a very limited group.
    • Don’t expect miracles
    • Do thank those wonderful souls who will do this important community work.
  6. Make the value visible. Last year we had the need to review our technical platforms and lo and behold, the wiki was getting more page views that the community’s older, established content management based site. This validated that people were finding and in some way, interested in what we had harvested. I believe this external validation helped motivate and maintain the practice.
    • Share stories of use
    • Make pageview data available
    • If the wiki has been useful beyond the community, get the other users to send a thank you as well.
  7. Reduce barriers and support from the side. Some of us still have to go in and link pages to the index page.
    • We have had to require registration for the wiki due to wiki-spam, which creates some friction and overhead – it is not as easy as I wish it were.
    • The wiki still needs a lot of overall attention to make things easier to find. (That is on my to do list – and has been for a long time. )

All in all, the practice is valued. We are making our knowledge visible and available to the wider world and inviting them to help improve it. There are 76 entries. The entries on knowledge sharing tools and methods have been spread and reused by members’ parent organizations. Value has been amplified. I think it was worth it!

For more on harvesting:

Honaria Starbuck Paints the SXSW Experience

Watercolor by Honaria StarbuckI’m not in Austin for the perennial geek culture fest that is SXSW. But via Twitter and blogs, I’m getting some vibes all the way up here in the northland.

My friend and artist Honaria Starbuck is doing some on the spot paintings of the panels she is attending. She is also including some short poetry. It is an evocative way to share what is going on, very personally filtered through Honaria. Here is an example from Andy Beal’s panel (her picture to the right). You can see all of her painting posts here.

This is yet another example of visual conference capture. Low tech, unlike the work of David Sibbet at TED I blogged about earlier this week. When we think about “harvesting” and “sharing” what is going on at a F2F event, the options are widening. No longer are we limited to text live-blogging, or photo streams. These artistic endeavors capture a “sense” and, for me, enhance the more literal text and audio captures.

Learning Over Each Other’s Shoulders

(Note: this  blog post dates from September 13th 2007 on my old blog. It had  been in limbo since August 30th. There was so much more to add, but I decided it is time to put it in the wild and not lock the partial thinking in the “draft” queue! Now I am republishing it today as I have a coda to add and the older blog post is hard to find…)

The Original Post

I have been part of quite a few informal conversations recently about how to “learn how to do this web 2.0 stuff.” Not just learn it, but learn it in the context of it adding something useful to our work and lives. The volume, the subtleties of useful practice, can feel overwhelming. Our sense of inadequacy can paralyze.

In Cali, Colombia, I led a workshop about facilitating online interaction and we used the Social Media Game to add context to this flood of “cool new tools with weird names. ” I think the most engaged moment was when people were in small groups, explaining new tools to each other and thinking about what might be useful in their work. It was still pretty abstract. We did not get hands-on. But people noted that the tool stuff was of a great deal of interest.

I always try and promote the people and process stuff, but the reality is that tools are often the “door opener” to the process conversations because they are more tangible. So being able to “look over the shoulder” as someone uses the tools in a social context would be really useful.

In Bogota, Colombia at the very well attended “Quality in eElearning” conference I had a side conversation about ways to usefully use Twitter, Wikispaces and del.icio.us with a couple of my co-presenters, and a separate conversation with Jay Cross about doing an “Over the Shoulder” camp. Inthe instance with Ulf-Daniel Ehlers it didn’t start out as a conversation. I had mentioned and showed a Wikispaces page in my presentation the day before. During the third day where we were relaxed in the “participant” role, I was sitting next to Ulf and noticed he was messing with a wikispaces page he had set up. I showed him a couple of things. He shared a few links. Together, we figured out how to embed del.icio.us links into a Wikispaces page from a great blog post I had found a while back. In the mean time, Virginie Aimard was looking over from the other side, following silently along on our digital journey. Back and forth.

A few weeks later I was the guest for a “10 Minute Lecture” for Leigh Blackall’s Online Learning Communities course, centered in New Zealand. (You can see the slides, audio and Elluminate recording here.) The theme was peer learning – a communities of practice perspective. Leigh had initially asked me to talk specifically about Peer Assists, but I felt a larger issue tugging at me – this “over the shoulder” stuff.

We talked about this mode of learning from each other. I really enjoyed the conversation and poof, the hour was up. But then the blog posts from course members started showing up – those who were in the live session and those who viewed the recording. There the themes of inadequacy, of the pressure of time to do this learning, of possibility. I felt this little frisson of learning, that was a bit of learning over each others’ shoulders. For me, it was then important to comment on each of the blog posts that mentioned my name, thus showing up in my feed reader, because learning from each other has that back-and-forth quality. It is iterative. Conversational.


And so this thinking, doing, experiencing, advocating for over the shoulder learning comes back to a reflective blog post. Because reflection is the final piece that cements it together.
Comments from the original post on Blogger:

2 Comments:

Anonymous Beth Kanter said…
Nancy: I love the idea of “over the shoulder” camps. At one point, durin my circuit riders – we used the term “shoulder-to-shoulder” to describe informal, small group computer instruction. So, what you are talking about is the network effect of this type of learning?

3:20 PM
Blogger annelizbeth said…
Fascinating…absolutely fascinating. I am currently engaging in an effort to provide a perspective on the state of “learning” for a npo client…will be sure to include your futuristic thoughts around where we are headed…!

7:43 PM

Today’s Update

I have been sick with the flu the last 10 days, eliminating any chance of finishing my year end work and having time for reflection. I have an RFP that I have to respond to this week so I was reviewing some of my pertinent materials – particularly those related to peer learning and online facilitation.

I realized I have never classified much of my work as “peer learning.” More often this has come under the rubric of learning from and with each other in networks and communities (i.e. communities of practice, etc.) I have had a bias for on-the-job, in-the-moment, just-in-time and informal learning, supported with appropriate formal and structured learning. These peer based options give us the opportunity to learn both in context and with the give and take that reveals the texture and nuances of those contexts.

It is beyond obvious to state that digital technologies have expanded our possibilities for these peer learning forms. So the reflective question going back, and the learning agenda question going forward is what will advance and deepen our ability to learn with and from each other in the coming year?

What do you think?