Category: reflection

Reflecting Slowly on Slow Communities

Slow snailsI promised earlier this week that I would post a follow up about my offering Tuesday night on Thinking about “Slow Community” (particularly online). Before it all (slowly) leaks out of my brain, here are some notes, comments and pointers to the ongoing Twitter conversation about “slow community.”

First, the host of the evening, Ryan Turner, wrote:

Nancy,

You ROCKED it last night. I knew you would. Thanks so much for making the time.

I think your talk pretty much blew everyone’s mind. It certainly got mine spinning, and I really think you’re on to something with the slow community idea. I too question whether it’s really slower or actually less–and I also wonder whether there’s a combination of those that ends up making sense. Do we partition our relationships? Our conversations (across relationships)? How do we manage work, where project groups form, dissolve, and re-form, but relationships (personal, intellectual, thematic) persist? Doesn’t seem to me anybody’s yet invented the social router, which could manage our cross-channel traffic in meaningful ways … though I do have some ideas … not to say a prototype ….

It was great to reconnect with you, just a bit, and I hope we can continue.

Best,
Ryan

Phew. And here I thought I was babbling and incoherent. 🙂 Thank goodness the other folks were all interesting. I enjoyed the offerings from Brian Fling of Flingmedia – Brian, did you talk about slow community at FOO Camp?; Justin Marshall of ZAAZ, Samantha Starmer from REI – Samantha, I have added “metadata strategy” to my online interaction checklist!; and Wendy Chisholm, who has opened my eyes to accessibility – even on a little old blog post – in a way that I needed. Thanks, Wendy!,

After the talks, I had the chance to have conversation with a few folks – unfortunately I did not write down names. I should have. Oi. Here are the points that came up that I can remember.

  • If everything is so overwhelming and fragmented, what are the solutions? (The young guy who loved the chicken wings). I started to babble about a systems approach, but I need to actually understand better what that means. But I SENSE that this is important. True to my style, it usually takes me a while to figure out intellectually what I intuit.
  • What is the role of information FLOW in creating a useful community experience, rather than overwhelm (the guy from Boeing).
  • What is it we are really asking about – slowness, volume, simplicity?
  • What should businesses be thinking about if they are in this crushing phase of “must have community?”
  • What is the role of identity in all of this?
  • And of course, Ryan’s “social router” which has MY head spinning.

On the Twitter front, besides the tweets already posted on the wiki, here is the latest round… thank you my TweetFriends. Oops, can’t do a screen capture. Since Windows did its last update, some of my old programs aren’t working. I was wondering when this was going to happen. Grrr. I’ll come back and edit it in. In the meantime, you can see them on Summize. I’ll go download Snagit and be right back!

(Later… here are the screen captures of the Tweets)

Slow Community Tweets 1

Slow Community Tweets 2

Slow Community Tweets 3

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?