Category: knowledge sharing

What can we do for our friends in Kenya?

(Note: Updated to add additional support options, 9:32 am Friday – I’ll keep adding as I find them, so check back if you are interested)

Ethan Zuckerman’s insightful post, Kenya: heartbreak and hope reflects my feelings as

I think of both my friends and colleagues in Kenya on a personal basis, and the larger picture of impact of the events in Kenya on Africa and the world. If you care about the world, about the role of citizen journalism (particularly the interface between online and offline and the bearing of witness to events), read Ethan’s article. He links to many sources of on the ground news, which is critical both to the work in Kenya and our understanding of how we can best be of support.

That brings me to our role in the “hope” part. What do we do to lend our energy to others trying to find peaceful solutions to the unrest in Kenya? Again, our membership in this global village made possible by online connections gives us each a chance to amplify the news from Kenya and bolster the work of the peacemakers. And for me, I am trying to always ask myself how can we do this in a way that does not impose our will upon them, but simply offers our support and resources and they choose what and how to do it. I support peace and you, on the ground, have the knowledge and wisdom to figure out how you want to do that. That’s the beauty of Andrius’ approach for activism and Ethan/Global Voices’ approach for communication.

To that end, here are a few things you can get involved in.

Tireless activist Andrius Kulikauskas of Minciu Sodasoffers a page of ideas here.

Ways to help include:
* making phone calls to Kenya:
http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?KenyansToCall
* write to your foreign minister:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/kenya_free_and_fair/
* join our chat: http://www.worknets.org/chat/
* join Samwel Kongere’s email group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mendenyo/
* help us create peace songs and videos for Kenya
* share this letter (posted on the Yahoogroups site)
* contribute money for Kenyan “independent thinkers” by PayPal (details at http://www.ms.lt/ – Andrius is updating the Kenya work at the top of his page.)

The Yahoogroup offers you a chance to get updates from activists on the ground, including a project to build a human acrobat pyramid as part of a peace march. Art and beauty as activism. Read the stories from the ground. Then decide what you can do.

What I find interesting is the use of SMS as a communication and activist tool, but what happens when you can’t afford the phone bill? Andrius is seeking and delivering funds to pay for phone cards for peace activists in Kenya using PayPal.

Other Options

  • Ory Okolloh, the Kenyan Pundit, is blogging all the news she can find, even though she has had to leave Kenya and go back to S. Africa. In this post, she is looking for some coding help to do a mashup to record damage on the ground using Google earth – documentation that can be used later in reconciliation processes. (Sending beams, Ory!)
  • Donate to the Kenyan Red Cross.
  • For getting the latest and amplifying that news, keep an eye on Global Voices.
  • List of bloggers covering the situation.

Hoosgot: Reciprocity and Community Indicator Rolled into One

Dave Sifry is filling the quiet end-of-year time with a project that makes it easy to ask and answer with and for each other online in a variety of ways. Sifry’s Alerts: Announcing Hoosgot: Resurrecting the Lazyweb

Today I’m unveiling a new service that I put together over the last 48 hours. It’s called hoosgot.com. Hoosgot (pronounced “who’s got…”) is a simple way to ask who’s got what you’re looking for. Just put “hoosgot” in a blog post or a Twitter tweet and it’ll show up on Hoosgot. Send a twitter to @hoosgot, it works as well. You can tag a post with hoosgot or lazyweb, and we’ll pick it up as well, as long as your blog is indexed by Technorati. It’s meant to give you a place to send the requests for all of those things that you’ve wanted, but just can’t find – chances are, what you want already exists and someone else out there in the ether knows about it (or has built it!)If someone’s got what you’re looking for, or a clue in that direction, they post a comment. RSS feeds flow from the posts and the comments.

For example, you might ask:

hoosgot an easy-to-use pencil sharpener that has suction cups on the bottom so I can stick it anywhere?

or:

hoosgot a simple camera bag that you can stick a laptop in, and still carry over your shoulder without knocking over pedestrians? Note I’m not looking for a knapsack or a backpack, I want it to act like a messenger bag…

And so on.

It works if you work it: Give back to the web

Of course, you should subscribe to hoosgot, it has RSS feeds (the main feed and the comments feed) so you can watch and participate – for Hoosgot only works if you comment on the questions posed. Happen to know where someone can find the information they seek? Interested in collaborating with them on creating that invention described when the person invoked hoosgot or the lazyweb? Leave a comment on the entry, and give back to the web that has given us so much.

Hoosgot is a great community indicator in that it has its roots in the work of an earlier community (Lazyweb) and many individuals, it is offered as a gift to the world, and it lives that value in the very service it offers. Pretty sweet. Thanks, Dave.

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?

Safety, Inclusion, Contribution, Play and the Culture of Love

Take a minute to read this great post from Bob Sprankle (who says he is an elementarytechnology integrator – wow, that’s a new one on me!) What We All Want. Bob shares the results of his deployment of the Pew internet student survey (the online NetDay Survey by “Speak Up,” a national research project conducted by “Project Tomorrow” ) in his classrooms, and with his family. What’s coming out of the survey? That kids care about safety, inclusion and contribution. Spot on!

For me, this is the same thing I hear people wanting from their work groups and their communities of practice. What the words mean in context varies, but the pattern is consistent. Well, the adults also want some relief of the giant to-do lists and endless expectations their work puts up on them. They want safety in that they want to be able to be heard, to have time for reflection and quality in their work and learning, despite high output expectations. (This is not to be confused with the culture of fear that has taken hold of my country. The word ‘safety” has been pretty warped lately!) They want to be part of something and to be a contributor to that “something.” They want their work to matter.

Bob then goes on to talk about the importance of play in learning. Again, this shows up in the adult world, but we still seem resistant to talking about it using that old “P” word. As if it were wasting time and keeping us from the giant to-do-lists that are eating us alive.

As we roll towards the end of the year, it is useful to remember that learning, knowledge creation and sharing, innovation, yes, even productivity, relate back to these four things: safety, inclusion, contribution and play. Together, these make great descriptors of a culture of love.

I’m not sure I’ll be blogging much over the holidays. I have one post that I’m working on, but just in case, Happy Holidays – may they be filled with safety, inclusion, contribution, play and a whole lot of love.

Hat tip to Stephen Downes for spotting Bob’s post.

Repost: Blogs and Community, Launching a New Paradigm

One of the hassles of moving between blog software is the difficulty of finding old stuff in the archives. Today someone was looking for this article, Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community? and it was really hard to find. So I’m “reprinting” it here on the WP part of my blog for easier future finding!

Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community?

First published 2006 in the Knowledge Tree
Edublog award winner, best paper, 2006

In September, the following article of mine was published on the The Knowledge Tree. I decided I’d like to have a copy on my website, so I’m reproducing it here. I’ve added a little postcript to the end. Plus I learned yesterday that the paper was nominated for an Edublog award. More on that in a separate post.

Just a note to those seeing it as I first put it up, I have some work to do to put the graphics on my site, so it may be funky till I work out the tweaks. The tables about 3/4 of the way down are easier to read in the word/PDF versions. I’ll also get a PDF up here as well, but in the short term I’ll link to the copies on the Knowledge Tree site!

For downloads of hard copies (word and pdf, go to the Knowledge Tree site. Click to access the recording of the live gathering and conversation in which we furthered this exploration.

Continue reading Repost: Blogs and Community, Launching a New Paradigm