RöCô Ilizaliturri has posted a simple, visually intelligent and sweet video on Facebook. I was totally captivated. Maybe it is the frame of mind I’m in, but the juxtaposition of images, music and text (in this case in Spanish, which causes me to pay attention differently) just caught me.
It doesn’t appear to be embeddable, so you’ll have to wander over to Facebook to see it.
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?
With nearly two months between posts, one starts to wonder, “what is Nancy up to?” I tweet occasionally, I have been blogging a bit on the Network Weaving Community of Practice blog, but mostly I have been heads down, working. We had a rare early snow here in Seattle and my afternoon face to face appointment was rescheduled. So instead of diving back into the to the to do list, I thought a quick update on the blog was in order.
This fall I have been helping design and coach an internal online facilitation workshop, run some online peer learning events for a group here in my own Washington state, continue some low level consulting for 3 different UN agencies and two US funders, work with an agricultural sustainability group, a community building group, a running club, an online language learning group, an evaluation for a European NGO, a global evaluation project, a Washington state coalition for young children and at least 5 online presentations. As I look at my calendar I have been BUSY. In this economy, that means I have been blessed by work, income, but far more important, I have a lot to be thankful to for my learning partners and clients.
The US Thanksgiving holiday is this week. It is a lovely holiday for more than just over-eating. It is a holiday for reflection. So I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all the people who are my friends, colleagues and learners all around the world. You are clients. You are collaborators. You are friends. You are perhaps even distant network nodes who have touched me, but in a way that shapes who I am and the path I walk.
Thank you all!
When I’m designing or coaching design of learning experiences, including “classes” or workshops – any form – I like to include a reflective activity for whomever is teaching, facilitating or leading. And I like it to be visible to all the participants. This role models reflective practice in learning and removes some of the distance (power and participation) between the teacher and the participants. I believe in some way we are all on the learning path, even though our roles may vary.
In that vein, I wanted to point out Howard Rheingold’s Teacher’s learning journal | Social Media CoLab.Howard starts his reflection with goals:
My teaching goals:
I want to create the conditions for the class as a whole to make something magical happen. I want students to take away from this course all the learning outcomes I explicitly describe, but I also want to achieve much more: I want to awaken those who have been lulled to semislumber by so many years of desks arrayed in rows and “will this be on the test?” — I want to awaken them to their own powers to use online tools and their thinking skills to not only cope, but to thrive in a world that requires continuous learning. I want to grow more aware along with my students. I want to model and facilitate exploration of and reflection about the impacts of our own media practices. I want to induce student teams to outdo each other in coming up with fun, thought-provoking, incisive, profound, ways to engage with the texts and ideas. I want to inspire so much interest in social media that students read all the required texts and even some of the recommended texts.
Why I teach this way:
The subject itself has compelled me to teach about it: I have personally explored, observed, exploited, and analyzed media since internet-based communication was in its infancy, but when social media grew from a playground and laboratory for a small group of enthusiasts into a worldwide platform for commerce, politics, sociality, I became convinced that knowing how to use and think about social media could influence the final shape of the emerging infosphere. What you know and do today matters because it will be part of setting the rules for who can use these media, how they can use them, who will profit, and who will control tomorrow’s media. When I started teaching, students were starting to use Facebook — and they were already accustomed to surfing the web during class. The same media I’ve been using and which I’m now teaching are also directly challenging traditional methods of teaching and learning. Believe it or not, the ability to find out in real time whether the professor knows what he is talking about — and to silently share what you’ve discovered with the other students in a class — is a relatively new thing. When I started asking around about how teachers and students were using social media for learning, and started asking the students themselves about what was working and what wasn’t, I began to learn that students thrive and learn from conversation among peers as well as the traditional public performance of whole-class discussion, that students’ collaborative projects amazed me and the other students with their ingenuity, that some risk-taking was exhilarating. Much of the structure of this class comes from the explicit feedback, experiment, and risk-taking of previous classes.
Given all that I’ve said so far, this description of the ideal 21st century teacher makes sense to me. I believe I fulfill some of these requirements. I strive to fulfill others. I vow to adapt, communicate, learn, envision, lead, model, collaborate, and above all, take risks. I take risks because I’ve learned that if you try something larger than your capabilities, you’ve learned something about doing something big — even if you fail. If you succeed admirably at doing something that you know you can do, you’ve learned something about doing something small. There’s nothing wrong with doing small things well. But I’m here to help those who want to go for it. This century requires thinkers who know how to take on significant challenges.
What happens, what changes when we share our intents? Does this bias participation? Seed the idea that the intent behind our actions shapes those actions? How do you as a teacher or leader show your intent?
Via a tweet today from @HHG I came across a blog post from author Susan Piver on Buddhism and Relationships: 3 Stages to Heal a Broken Heart. I was taken by the post not because I am currently experiencing a broken heart, but because her three bits of advice seemed incredibly relevant to the practice of facilitation.
It is so easy to get blocked by our own feelings of wanting to both succeed in facilitating and to be accepted or “do right” as the facilitator. It is easy to get caught in the emotions of others in moments of heat and fire. It is easy to beat oneself up – and that rarely makes us better facilitators!
Open but still largely unread on my desk is the book, “Standing in the Fire: Leading high-heat meetings with clarity, calm and courage,” by Larry Dressler. It too, is about how we accept what is happening around us as a way of staying usefully engaged, rather than consumed and frankly, burnt out and hurt.
I am deeply interested in these practices as I feel I have finally begin a phase in life where I am breaking free of old “please the people” habits and finding more comfortable ways of holding disagreement, conflict and dissent. I want to find practices that bring in critical thinking, use the heat instead of pouring on water at the first spark.
Here is a bit from Susan’s post. I have edited out the specific material about heartbreak and out of respect for her full text. So click in and read the rest.
I have three suggestions for figuring out how to accomplish this very mysterious feat of feeling without attaching a narrative as to what it might, could, should, or dare not mean.
1. Develop a non-judgmental relationship with your mind. …When you’re under the sway of strong emotion, you come into contact with a state of being that I like to call Insane Obsessive Thinking. If only, I should have, what I really meant was, how dare she, I am a loser, you are a loser, love stinks… .Without addressing a mind run amuck, the chances of skillfully working with your feelings is kind of limited. So I suggest introducing a note of discipline to your everyday life, beginning today. Spend some time everyday, not squashing your icky thoughts and promoting your good ones, but simply watching your mind in a relaxed way—no matter how wild it gets, you can remain steady. This is what meditation teaches you how to do…
2. Stabilize your heart in the open state. When you regain some sense of dominion in your own mind, naturally your attention will turn toward that raging, screaming, 24/7 searing thing in the middle of your chest—your heart…
3. View your whole life as path. With a sense of clarity in your mind and stability in your heart, the third stage becomes something altogether different. There is no practice associated with this one. With mental clarity and emotional stability comes the ability to see your entire life as path. You have created the foundation for an entirely authentic life, one full of joy and sorrow, meetings and partings, giving and taking, and deep meaning. ..
via Buddhism and Relationships: 3 Stages to Heal a Broken Heart | Susan Piver.
How do you stand in the fire? Accept and move forward as a facilitator?
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/flavor32/248040902/