Category: knowledge sharing

Social Media in International Development – 10 min interviews

Flickr cc image from I need your help and recommendations!

I’m about to facilitate another workshop on social media in international development for the ICT-KM program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). This is the third time for this all-online workshop. In this iteration, we are trying to pay more attention to context of use, rather than focus on tools, tools, tools. The best way I know of doing this is to start the conversation with some stories of use.

To that end, I’m starting to do some 10 minute podcasts with practitioners who are  using social media in their work,  particularly those who work in international development and/or science research for global public  good (as in agricultural research.)

Who would you like to hear from? Who should I talk to?

First up, I’ll be interviewing William Anderson cofounder of Praxis101 . Bill has wrangled with the issues of sharing scientific data with his work with CODATA where he is an Associate Editor for the CODATA Data Science Journal (http://www.codata.org/dsj/index.html), and in his role as the Co-chair of the InterAcademy Panel Task Group on Digital Knowledge Resources in Developing Countries (http://www.interacademies.net/CMS/Programmes/4704.aspx ). He recently ended an eight year term as a member of the U.S. National Committee for the Committee on Data for Science and Technology and as Co-chair of the CODATA Task Group on  Preservation of and Access to Scientific and Technical Data in Developing Countries.

I already have a nice collection of longer podcasts including:

However, the value of a small library of short, engaging stories is priceless. So who should I interview? You? Someone you know of? Let me know! I’d like to harvest a few stories.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons picture, “Go Vote” on Flickr by M-C

How I use social media

Nancy's recording of Rob Cottingham's NVoice keynoteThis afternoon I’m spending a half hour on a Skype video conversation to share a bit of how I use social media. I figured it would be good to exercise my memory a bit and unearth some of the key stories that led me to to my social media use today, and perhaps surface some of my patterns. The history approach also shows that while the term “social media” was not in play when I jumped in, the social use of online media has been growing for many years – well before my online time. These roots are significant because our patterns of use, our ways of embracing or rejecting technology are grounded in this history.

Online Community
History of online communityMy first real step into what we now call social media was logging on to Howard Rheingold’s “Electric Minds” online community in November 1996.  Little did I know that this first toe-dip would literally change the course of my professional, and in many ways, my personal life. I didn’t know what an online community was, even though I have been steeped in community work all my life. All of a sudden I was in the midst of amazing, deep and human conversations with people from across the US and the globe. I remember Ran Avrahami, a professor in Israel, and how he jumped into the conversations and reached out and connected with us. He talked of his grandchildren and the orange trees on his apartment balcony as if he were next door. Of Jay Rosen, who went on to be a pioneer and scholar in online journalism. Of Bodhi in Chicago (who has since passed on) who took this newbie under his wing and who gave me my online name of choconancy.

“Eminds” was where I learned that online relationships can be real, how they get real, and  how they break and fail. It was in “helping” “save” the community after Howard lost funding that I had my first big online facilitation failure. This taught me about both the similarities and differences of group dynamics online and offline. It was my urgency to figure this out that set me on my professional path as a practitioner and learner about online facilitation. I knew from that experience that whenever we talked about technology (social media) we needed to also talk about practice and the human beings doing the practicing. It was life changing.

There are so many lessons from those early days that it is hard to pick out just one or two, but here are the ones that come to mind most quickly and which I remember “in my gut.”

  • Social media is a great place to fail. You can try something and if it doesn’t work, learn, adjust and try again. This is true of both the technology and the practices.
  • We can find, develop and utilize relationships with other humans online – and they have meaning. But for most of us, it takes an actual transformative experience of this to really believe and embrace it. The gap between the intellectual description and the experience of using social media to build and nurture relationships is large.

Online Learning Together
learningThe second seminal experience was taking part in George Por’s “Knowledge Ecology University” or KEU as we called it, and the  relationship forming event of the KE Fair. This was where I had the amazing opportunity to co-facilitate an online workshop with Mihaela Moussou (now Michele Paradise). Michele and I built on the foundational work of Lisa Kimball (then of Metanet, now of GroupJazz) and began to articulate the practice of doing stuff together online.  Just today I received an email from one of the people who took our workshop and he wrote “I still remember your course as one of the absolute best courses in my life. Thanks.”I believe our success was because we were passionate about this new form of human interaction.

  • From Michele, I learned the concept of “warm electronic communication” and developed deeper insights into the effect of these practices on the experience. Computer mediated – yes, but human driven. Over the years, this initial online learning experience formed the roots of my practice as a designer and facilitator of online learning events.
  • Now technology enables far more than the discussion forums of the late 90’s. Thanks to social media we have everything from formal courses to networks on Twitter to facilitate “here and now” learning at any moment we desire (and some we may not desire!) But regardless of the technology, how we use it always matters.
  • Conversation and content is at the core of the interactions, build on the foundation of relationship. Now though, relationship can start as a content mediated intersection and then become personal. It used to be the other way around almost exclusively. An interesting change. New social media that helps tag, sort and reuse content has been key to this change.

Communities of Practice and Learning
Through KEU I met Etienne Wenger and John Smith, who opened my eyes to the fact that I have been embracing community learning and communities of practice most of my life. I was simply unaware of the label, the research and scholarship around these things we call “CoPs.” Back in the late 90’s technology was just used for distributed Cops – folks who could not physically be together. Now technology is nearly pervasive for most communities in the developed world, colocated or not. We take it for granted that we’ll schedule, learn, work and play together assisted by social media. It has matured from an oddity and an outlier to a given.

My key learnings about social media and communities:

  • More significant that utility, social media has changed what it means to “be together.” It has changed our experience and understanding of being part of a group, a community or a network. It has created a massive multiplier of the options we now have to be with other people. This is heaven and hell. Heaven because we can access knowledge and relationship like never before. Hell because in our multi-membership, we dilute relationship, become overwhelmed, or fall into group mind narrowness by only associating with those who think like us  – just because we can. Social media enables this.
  • As with online communities, learning communities benefit from facilitation, both formal and informal, designated or spontaneous and self-generated. “Build it and they will come” continues to be a fallacy with each new wave of social media.  However, the facilitative practices must evolve in conjunction with the software. Things change on all sides.
  • The  deeply embedded nature of technologies in communities has given rise to the role and function of technology stewardship, the work of people who know enough about their community and enough about technology to help pick , configure and use technology to support community activities. This has become a central practice and learning focus in my life. See book writing below…

Global Networks & Knowledge Sharing
part of my networkIn 2000 I put it out to the universe that I wanted to work internationally. The internet was connecting me to people far beyond my personal geography and so enhancing my life, I wanted more. I was on an email list about online communities when someone in Turkey asked if anyone wanted to come to Turkey and talk about online communities. I said yes. The universe answered. Then it was Azerbaijan, Georgia (the country), Armenia, Kenya, South Africa, Indonesia, Columbia, Ghana, Ethiopia, and a multitude of international NGOs based in Europe and North America who gave me the opportunity to apply online interaction and collaboration practices in the field of international development.

The most amazing aspect of this work, going back to 2001 until today, was the different attitude of people outside of North America and Europe – people who heretofore did not have the ability to connect and learn outside of their village, town or city. While Americans would complain about the technology, the time, and anything, my African colleagues would overcome horrid bandwidth and intermittent electricity to participate. They invented ways to leap across the barriers, innovating with mobile technology, translating community and tribal practices into online environments and getting things done.

  • When the door to connection is open, watch who walks through and follow them, not those who stand at the doorway and naysay! And I’m not just talking about social media early adopters. I’m talking about people passionate about getting something done.
  • Social media offers us incredible intellectual capital opportunities to link up the best and often most diverse minds to address a problem or opportunity. The challenge is that this opportunity may lead us to feel overwhelmed and we are often unprepared to usefully use the diversity of the world and can easily retreat to our familiar territory and group think. The strategic use of social media to stretch us to our edges and immerse us in that diversity is centrally important.

Weaving  across Silos
community weavingAs I dove deeper into knowledge management and knowledge sharing in international development, social software was growing, changing and evolving. Through this work I also connected with a specific community, Knowledge Management for Development or “KM4Dev” which turned out to be one of my most important CoPs. Through KM4Dev I continued (and continue) to learn but more importantly become part of a network of people working in international development.  Our relationships – across organizations, countries, even language – became a new resource to share knowledge, learn together, and reduce duplication where it made sense (as in making a shared knowledge sharing toolkit) . I can’t prove this, but I think our network has actually contributed to more cross organizational cooperation and better use of resources.

  • Social media keep networks, their content and activities knitted together. Networks weave across people and organizations. So social software + networks = change and even transformation. (One of these days it would be worth writing about the difference between change and transformation!)

(Drawing) Pictures
processing my emotions after a visit to the West Bank w/ Tova - co paintedAfter years of words, words, words, something was beginning to dawn on me. I missed pictures. I missed art. I realized that all those little drawings and head shots I inserted into forum posts meant more to me and others than I had realized. Then I took a massive tumble offline to learn about visual thinking and visual practices, specifically graphic recording and graphic facilitation.  These new practices not only transformed my offline work, but have impacted how I use social media. Specifically,

  • I’m consciously including visual methods and practices, particularly in synchronous online work, made possible by new visual tools such as shared mind mapping, and better online whiteboards.
  • Tapping the incredible content of networks like Flickr and the practice of Creative Commons licenses to use that content.
  • Appreciating and including visual and aesthetic  elements in any social software deployment work I do. A case in point was the impact of the “baby friendly” redesign of the hugely successful ShareYourStory online community for parents with babies in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Blogging and Doing Business
Little did I think when I began this blog in 2004 that my blog would a) reveal the network I didn’t know I had and b) give my work visibility that helped me grown and deepen my consulting work. I had tried a few experimental project blogs with clients in early 2001 and 2002 and they did not root into the work. So I began again in 2004, mostly because I can’t talk and write about a social media tool until I have used it in practice. I was a total skeptic but in the first month, something happened. People who I didn’t know knew my work. They “knew” me.  The work I’d been publishing on my little hand made website was alive in the world. Now the blog gave a channel for people to respond, to critique and reciprocate. I was blow away. The blog made the network visible.

The second great value blogging gave me was a place to “think out loud” with my network, to offer half-baked ideas and solicit help to finish baking them. It is the easy-bake oven of learning. Write, hit post, and you are in the learning lab.

From this transparency, this “showing my work” in public I have gained new collaborators and clients. I have a visible track record of my thinking and work that people can peruse and evaluate. I find I now attract clients with whom I am a good fit and avoid those that would not create a productive partnership. My online identity serves me well. Flickr, Twitter and other social media tools now augment and enhance the blog – often woven into the blog with widgets.  80% of my working time is mediated using social media, from Skype, Google Docs, Twitter, Drupal, Moodle, Elluminate and an every changing myriad of other tools.

  • Social media is an amazing (and sometimes scary) set of tools to show your identity online. We have to learn more about what this means and its implications going forward.
  • Tools that help us visualize our networks is a key to tapping those networks.
  • I can’t imagine doing 90% of the work I do now without social media. Like it has for me, social media has enabled a wave of small and entrepreneurial business. I’m grateful.
  • Early supporters gave my blog exposure and me encouragement. Reciprocating the generosity of others is easy with social media – DO IT!

Cover of the Digital Habitats book

Writing a Book
As I noted, communities of practice gave a language, a name for so much of what I do. In 2004 Etienne came to John Smith and I and asked if we’d help him update a little report he wrote in 2001 on technologies for CoPs. We said sure. What started as a report revision grew slowly (and sometimes painfully) into what is now Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities which will come out this month. The book was written by the three of us primarily at a distance. Without Skype, email, Google docs, Flickr, and publishing on demand, this book would not have been born.  We had only three face to face sessions.

  • Social media provides an amazing research, testing and writing environment.

Liberating my inner geek
As the visual practice has liberated my inner artist, social software has liberated my inner geek. Particularly as a woman of 51 years of age, this enormous software playground has given me a way to bend stereotypes of middle aged white women and technology. I look proudly at my mom who at 79 is rediscovering high school friends on Facebook and enhancing volunteerism through web tools. Today’s tools are friendly enough to put hands on and just try. To experiment without high risk of either failure or humiliation. They can get a lot easier, but they have unleashed many inner geeks. This is true across generations and the impacts are significant on our culture and our world. I think if this blog post from Lisa, who I met in June at an educational tech conference in Hawaii. She wrote:

ED-MEDIA 2009 « Lisa’s (Online) Teaching Blog
My first technology-related experience, however, was on the plane getting here from San Diego. The flight was 5 1/2 hours, and during that time total strangers sat next to each other without ever introducing themselves, sharing adjacent space. Gradually I noticed some children giggling nearby. I looked over and they were, I thought, playing Nintendo. But when I peeked, I saw that they were writing on the screen, and I soon realized that many children on the plane had Nintendos and were using its wi-fi pictochat feature to write to each other. After an hour or so, children were exchanging information about their seat locations, and were getting up and saying hi. At one point there were kids standing in the aisle and the flight attendant had to ask them to sit down so she could serve food. By the time they had to shut off their devices for landing, they knew where everyone was staying in Hawaii and had arranged playdates if their hotels were near each other, forcing the parents to actually meet each other. The kids used technology to create society on the plane, where adults only endured the enforced company of others.

So what are the patterns?
First, it has been useful for me to recognize that social media has a role in my life as an individual, as a member of communities and groups, and as a participant in these wider, free-ranging things we call networks.  Individual – Group – Network -> the whole spectrum. I find this amazing.

Second, my activities can be loosely grouped into the following.

  • Learning
  • Getting work done
  • Finding and connecting with people
  • Getting stuff (search, content, etc.)
  • Exploring and pushing my own boundaries

My practices have been radically changed and shaped – yes, even transformed – by social software.

I never would have imagined this back in November, 1996. Thanks, Howard! (edited to correct date from 2006 to 1996)

(P.S. In a future post I might try and document the configuration of tools that I use in these practices. But now it is time for lunch!)

Deeper Skills for Learning Professionals…Part 4

It is fascinating to see what strikes a cord. This series on Skills for Learning Professionals and Knowledge Workers (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) have spiked the old hit-meeter and shown up on Tweets all week. There have been many thoughtful and insightful comments and the other blog posts responding to Tony K’s Big Question have been fabulous. (I keep adding the links at the bottom of Part 1).

Michele MartinToday Michele Martin posted an important amplification to  the “Four Meta Skills” from Part 1. Michele offered the caution around online  homophily. She said I didn’t go far enough with the four and she is very right. She deepened them.

Michele, your observations are so good, I’m pulling in a rather lengthy quote, but I urge everyone to go read Michele’s full post, especially the science references at the start. (Emphasis mine.)

In it she says that scanning, filtering, connecting and sense-making are critical skills.  I agree with this, but think that maybe Nancy didn’t go far enough in thinking about how we develop these skills. She offered a series of excellent questions to ask ourselves in terms of our ability to do things like scan and filter, but they don’t take into account the habits of mind and psychological behaviors we bring to the table in developing these skills.  In light of our tendencies toward homophily and pre-conceived ideas, it would seem there are deeper issues at work that we need to consider:

  • When we are scanning, how do we combat our natural tendency to only “see” information that fits with our preconceived notions of the world? The skill of scanning isn’t just about how well we are able to manage a stream of information. It’s also about our ability to actually SEE information in its raw form.
  • In developing our filtering skills, how do we ensure that we are not filtering out information that doesn’t fit wth our existing concepts and frames? I suspect that many, if not most of us, are likely to apply our filters in a way that shields us from data we may not want to consider. But this is not effective filtering behavior, particularly if we end up filtering out key data that would change our decisions or ideas about how things work.
  • Creating a knowledge network is important, but if we are creatures of homophily, seeking out like-minded connections, then are we really using this skill to its full advantage? How do we make our networks diverse? As I’ve pointed out before, social technology tends to collude in this process of connecting us to like-minded people, for example suggesting friends who share our interests. But how do I ensure that I’m connecting to people who think differently than I do?
  • How do we become capable of objective sense-making based on the actual data that is coming into us, rather than our IDEAS of what the data means? I think that the tendency to interpret information as its coming into our brains is so ingrained we don’t even realize it’s happening. That’s why “beginner’s mind” is an aspiration, rather than something most of us are able to do on a regular basis.

Again, these are not just skills for learning professionals or knowledge workers. They are literacies that most of us need in the “modern” world. Online and offline.

Thanks, Michele! Your other post, Are Knowledge Workers the New Blue Collar Workers, was also terrific. I deeply appreciated that you asked why these skills aren’t getting traction and if some of them will be subsumed by computers.

Skills for Learning Professionals Part 3

It has become clear. I’m long-winded on the topic of new skills for knowledge workers and learning professionals, even if I don’t quite understand what a learning professional is. Here is part 3. You can  check back to Part 1 and Part 2 if you feel as lost as I often do! 😉

amazing graphic from Vaxine on Flickr, creative commons

When Tony Karrer asks for 5 and 60 minute learnings on what new skills do learning professional need, clearly I’m falling well past the 60 minute mark. But here is the last batch. As I noted in  Part 2, these are biggies and probably could have fallen under the “meta skills” mentioned in Part 1. These three directly address the follow up question Tony left on Part 1 seeking more on what learning professionals  need to know how to do to leverage the learning opportunities found in communities and networks.

Community Leadership and Facilitation

This is my old stomping ground both online and offline.  A subset is online community management but I’ll confess to placing more emphasis both on facilitating vs managing and servant leadership vs top-down leadership. For this post, community is defined as a group of people with bounded membership who have some shared, congruent interest and interact with each other over time. These are seated in well known group facilitation theory and practices with the additional needs of an online environment. In essence, you are working in an environment where our “sixth sense” has moved from the physical observations of body language, to a more subtle and diverse practice of picking up weak signals in many media to  ascertain what is happening with people online. So your superpower is signal detection!

For the 5 minute conversation questions I’d ask 1) how do your practices facilitating and leading show up in  diverse modalities? (in other words, in text, on a conference call, etc.) 2)  How do you help others take on facilitation and leadership roles? (emphasis on building collective leadership capacity, distributed leadership, etc.)

Here are some resources

Network Weaving

Social networks, particularly those made possible through online tools, are changing how we learn and work.  For this post, the definition of a network is a constellation of individuals associated via fuzzy, unbounded membership and overlapping (not fully congruent)  interests.  It can include one-time or repeat interaction.

What skills are critical here? And how are they different from community skills?

My sense is they include many community skills plus some additional aspects. I used the title network weaving (from June Holley) but I actually think it is broader than the weaving. It is also about visualizing, supporting etc.

Some of the sub-skills include creating connections that are object or content centric, vs the more traditional relationship-centric mode in communities, more pattern seeking instead of linear sequencing of learning actions or activities.  It is augmented with tools such as social network analysis and other tools that help us “see” networks visually, as it is hard to hold a large number of nodes or members in our imaginations.

Network weaving asks us to contribute without expectation of one to one reciprocity, without a clear line of sight (or even the possibility) of seeing the results of one’s work. Often hard to evaluate with clear causality. So this really is dancing with ambiguity. We  might also  say network weaving may need to be a bit more ego-less. What do you think?

Here are some  resources:

By the way, if you are interested in the topic of networks of communities, you might enjoy this upcoming SCoPE seminar, Exploring Networks of Communities: July 6-24, 2009 which starts TODAY !

Farmers Market Flowers by choconancy Reflective Practice
Finally, if we don’t take the time to stop and reflect on what we are doing, we’ll miss the most important learning opportunities. A reflective practice is essential for me. In reflecting on what we do, did, intend to do, in observing what happens around us, we can learn all the time, anywhere, everywhere. Reflective practice has long been familiar to learning theorists, but there are implications new to the current “web 2” context which give us ways to have both personal and collective shared practice without being in the same place or moment in time. Here are some examples:

  • Reflective writing, through unstructured writing, blogging, learning journals , (e)portfolios and structured writing exercises. I’ll note that my blog has been a very important reflective learning tool for me, both in the writing of the posts and in the responses through comments and off-blog conversation generated by the posts. If you don’t blog, consider it. Seriously. Just look at Kenny Moore’s blog!
  • Reflective conversations, both unstructured and structured (such as After Action Review, Most Significant Change,  Peer Assists, storytelling and others). This ties closely to the other skills of community and network. Few of us can learn alone and my peers have been incredible catalysts for both my reflective practice and my overall learning.

Photo Credit

  • Please, click into this photo uploaded  on June 22, 2006 by vaXzine – it is fabulous,  it has lovely annotations and is a great example of visual thinking!

Skills for Learning Professionals…Part 2

Update: Part 3 is here.

It is hard to let some Tony Karrer disappointment persist. After posting my 4 Meta Skills for Learning Professionals in response to Tony’s July “Big Question,” he commented:

Nancy – I was super excited when I saw that you had posted on the topic. But you surprised me because I expected something quite different. I like your meta skills, but …

I was hoping that you would provide insight into the core skills and knowledge around communities and networks that learning professionals should have?

As you know, I strongly believe that in the future all knowledge workers will need the ability to effectively participate in communities and navigate networks in order to perform their work. And, this is one of the bigger skill gaps that exists.

What’s the 5 minute and 60 minute learning piece that all knowledge workers should have to go through so they will be better at this?

Then, going to learning professionals, I think there’s an additional level that is community / network facilitation. As learning increasingly happens through communities and networks, learning professionals need to be able to facilitate this.

Again, what’s the 5 minute and 60 minute learning piece that all learning professionals should have to go through on this?

Tony, I’m glad you were super excited. And I’m sorry I disappointed you! So I’ll bite. But I’m worried about the 5 minute thing.  I don’t think community skills reduce to 5 minutes. We can certainly talk about them in 60. But learn them? Uh uh. That may be blasphemy in a 140 character world. Fast is not always the best or only way. So maybe what you are looking for Tony is the 5 and 60 minute rationale pitch! 😉 Instead, I’ll offer some 5 minute conversation starter questions for each element. This might be interview questions if I were hiring… 😉

A bit more on why I don’t think this can always be  fast? Maybe it is because at their root, community skills are very related to the four “meta” skills and are acquired not just through explanation, but through practice. Like most valuable skills, knowing they exist is just the door opener.

Learning Community/Network Skills for Knowledge Workers and Learning Professionals

First, some context. I deeply appreciate that Tony distinguished between community and network learning skills. While there is overlap, my experience is that there are some fundamental differences. (See this post for more on me, we and the network).

Additionally, I pondered a bit the distinction between “knowledge workers” and “learning professionals” and in my heart of hearts, I have a bias that knowledge workers are learning professionals, but perhaps not always responsible for the learning of others.  But I do think facilitation is a key knowledge workers skill in the network era, so for the sake of this post, I’ll treat the two the same but recognize that is oversimplification. And in Part 3 I’ll look at some of the differences when it comes to facilitation…

Ok, here we go!

Scanning

In a world of information abundance, knowledge workers and learning professionals need to be able to scan, both through the discerning use of aggregating technologies and their own ability to quickly read, and estimate the quality and value of the information passing by them in this “river.” An adjunct and related to the next two skills is the ability to generally bookmark or capture material relevant to their immediate needs and work. (One simply can’t do this for everything, thus the caveat.) The five minute questions would be to ask 1) What are your daily information scanning practices? 2) How do you maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of that time but still hold enough space for the unexpected and different, that stretches your learning beyond what you think you need to know? (In other words, how do you keep from getting stuck in a particular information rut?)

Filtering

Filtering is picking and choosing from what you scan to apply it or share it with others. This is an added layer of discernment over scanning and a more systematic practice of tagging and saving, and a connecting of information to work and other people. This is also tied to the next skill of connecting. The 5 minute questions would be 1) how do you pick from the material scanned to go to the next step of using or acting on that information? 2) How do you amplify the value of your scanning and filtering so it has applied value to you and to others both directly in your communities, more peripherally in your networks? (I.e. do you annotate your bookmarks? How? Why?)

Connecting

As Juri Engstrom has noted, successful  social networks are not just about people connecting, but people connecting around content or information objects that matter to them. Today’s knowledge worker connects to people with whom she has direct relationships with and interacts with on a personal level, and with people she connects with around information or objects, where the relationship is about the content, not (at least initially) the people. It is object-centric relationship. The skills knowledge workers need is to be able to find and form connections, keep track of them, and have ways to activate them. The latter is related to community leadership and network weaving. But at this skill level, I’m talking about connecting people and information.

Note: writing and verbal communication are key skills underneath connecting. If I were to be hiring someone today, I’d want to see them read and write under pressure. 😉

Again, this is a combination of savvy use of technology, the combined application of scanning and filtering joined with the connective tissue of relationships and networks. 5 minute questions? 1) What are your key learning communities and networks and how did/do you find them? 2) What practices do you use to activate your communities and networks to achieve particular goals? 3) What do you do to give back and nurture your communities and networks?

Synthesizing & Sense Making

A river of information is only the raw material for knowledge work or learning. It is in the synthesis and sense making that it becomes useful to individuals, communities and networks. Sense making is part education, part experience and practice, and part natural talent. Some people work towards sense making in a linear, step by step fashion. Others are more global thinkers, hopping around the information seeking patterns. In our world, the global thinkers tend to be activating communities and networks  and the linear thinkers help dig deeper. We need the full range.  So if you are a learning professional who is a linear sense maker, partner with a global thinker and you then have more of the network and the thinking at your fingertips.  5 minute questions might include: 1) What are your practices and how much time do you allocate for synthesizing and making sense of the information that flows by you? 2) How do you leverage your communities and networks to help you make sense?

Asking Good Questions

This probably should have been one of the meta skills because it goes to scanning (what am I looking for), filtering (what has value), synthesizing (what does this mean), connecting (who might use this?) , reflecting (did this work?) etc. But when I talk about asking good questions, it is beyond simply remembering to ASK in the first place, but when asking others, to ask questions that deepen knowledge and learning. Questions open up possibilities both for the individuals involved, and for their wider communities and networks. They are key to innovation and ownership of learning.  Peter Block is a master at asking questions about community and commitment to one’s community. The folks at Strachan Tomlinson send out a weekly email newsletter with incredible, thought provoking questions.  Check out Dorothy Strachan’s book, Making Questions Work.

A graphic recording from NancyTechnology Stewardship
Like it or not, technology is a reality of our lives as knowledge workers and learning professionals, so we had better have basic, functioning skills that allow us to find, evaluate and use technologies relevant to our work. If we are stewarding for our communities and networks, we have to add the elements of helping others develop their technology practices, scan for and learn from the practices of other individuals and help fold that into the community and/or network practices. This means not being dogmatic about tools because “they work for me” recognizing that technology is designed for groups, but experienced – and experienced quite differently – by individuals. The 5 minute questions? 1) How do you learn about and learn to use new technologies? 2) How do you introduce and coach others to use technologies? 3) How do you integrate practices across 2 or more technologies?(integration)

Dang, this is getting long. I think I’ll continue in a part 3 tomorrow to include Community Leadership, Network Weaving and Reflective Practice. Phew! But, of course, don’t forget the Four Meta Skills.

Tony, is this more of what you were hoping to see?