Category: technology stewardship

4 Meta Skills for Learning Professionals

Clouds and Water by choconancy on Flickr

Update: Part 2 and Part 3 are also available.

This month’s “Big Question” from Tony Karrer jolted me out of my sun-gardening-induced blogging lethargy to reply to this question:

In a Learning 2.0 world, where learning and performance solutions take on a wider variety of forms and where churn happens at a much more rapid pace, what new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?

My friends and colleagues already nailed most of what I would write (see links below) , addressing the full range from technical to social. So I want to focus in on three “meta” skills that may be a little harder to quantify, but which I feel are at the root of most of the other skills already mentioned. As I start to write them, perhaps “skills” is the wrong word. These are beliefs, values, and attitudes. There are skills in expressing them. Let me “lay four of them on you!”

1. Self Awareness

This is the uber skill. A learning professional (or any learner, for that fact. What the heck IS a learning professional??) cannot support or facilitate the learning of others if they don’t first understand their own learning path. Without awareness of our own strengths and weaknesses, how can we perceive others with insight? (I think strengths and weaknesses are often simply different expressions of ourselves: two sides of the same coin.) Without awareness of our biases and preferences, how can we avoid the trap of simply designing for ourselves and excluding others? Some of the skills that support self awareness are reflection, ability to ask great questions, listening, and seeking the feedback of others.

2. Generosity

For me, being a learning professional is about liberation, expression, empowerment of everyone through learning. Therefore hording, failing to surface and share what I learn feels like a violation. A learning professional need skills and practices on how to usefully share what they know, share the questions they have and share their skills both in professional/paid and spontaneous, voluntary contexts. Both are required for our development. Some of these skills include the ability to write and speak about our work (blogging! Twittering! speaking!).

3. Humility

“Professionals” and “experts” can easily fall victim to hubris and our own self inflated sense of our ideas and experiences. This is not to dismiss expertise, knowledge or experience, but to suggest that there is a danger in losing the learning when we think WE have the answer. Learning is about others’ discovery of their answer. Humility does not mean we don’t have confidence, ability or belief in ourselves, but that we put the learning of others as our goal, not the recognition of our own learning. Skills that build humility include listening, asking questions and seeking to understand the perspectives and needs of others.  It means being willing to learn new things (technical come to mind) that may not have been part of our repetoire that brought us to our current status as a learning professional.

4. Willingness to Risk

With a clear sense of self, with appropriate humility, we can take risks. In other words, we can  be professionals learning new things. Trying. Failing or succeeding, but learning and sharing our learning through the process.  Skills include ability to envision multiple possibilities, planning and reflection.

Now, if it was not a holiday here in the US and my family saying “let’s play,” I’d extract all the great skills suggested by my colleagues and see how they patterned out across my four suggested “meta skills.” But the sun is out. Family and play is precious. So I’ll leave that analysis to you or someone else. But I’ll also leave you a question. What skills do you think learning professionals need? Which of them are new beyond the technical? 😉

(Edited to add more links to respondent’s to Tony’s question)

Simon Hearn on Online Community Facilitation

simonI was going to say “online community management” in the title, because I know that is a hot search term, but I just could not do it. What Simon Hearn of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) does for his community of Outcome Mapping practitioners is facilitation, management, technology stewardship and plain old leadership. A couple of months ago Simon and I got on Skype to learn more about Simon’s community facilitation and stewardship work. Take  a listen (about 27 minutes  – it was too good to stop him) and hear the story of the Outcome Mapping Community, how Simon  fosters participation and stewardship for and by the community.

27 Minutes With Simon Hearn (MP3)

As background, here is Simon’s bio from the ODI site:

Simon joined RAPID in July 2007 as the Research Officer for knowledge and learning. His main responsibility is the coordination, facilitation, and development of the Outcome Mapping Learning Community – a global group of advocates, trainers, specialists and users of Outcome Mapping. He is also involved in research, capacity building and advisory work around policy influencing strategies, monitoring and learning, communities of practice, networks and the use of social media and online communications. Prior to joining ODI, he worked as a research assistant at Gamos Ltd, a consultancy specialising in information and communication for development. He has a BSc in Astrophysics and an MSc is Biomedical Engineering.

Technology Stewardship at Libraries – Free Online Event

CC photo on Flickr by http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1261/997909242_df8c169e34.jpg?v=0June 10th I’ll be joining the good folks at WebJunction to do an hour on technology stewardship in/at libraries. The full official details are below, but I also wanted to add that I’ll have two special guests who will make the difference – two librarians who work with these issues of technology and community every day in their work. Together, we’ll “keep it real” with stories and practices from the stacks, so to speak! If you are a librarian or library junkie, join us!

Event Registration
Event Type: Webinar
Date: 6/10/2009
Start Time: 2:00 PM
End Time: 3:00 PM
Flickr cc image by http://farm1.static.flickr.com/64/227332249_0894edbc6f.jpg?v=0Description:
Join presenter Nancy White co-author of the forthcoming book Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities, (with Etienne Wenger and John E. Smith) for this free webinar. Nancy is recognized internationally for her research exploring online communities today, and in her work as a technology steward, designer and builder of online interaction spaces. In this webinar, Nancy will focus on librarians as community technology stewards. She will offer practical steps for you to begin to understand your community, assess the technology needs of your community, and how to select, configure, and support the online technologies your community uses.

Library: WebJunction
Location: Wimba Classroom
Other Information:
*Registration is required for this event.*Instructions for joining will be included in a confirmation email and follow-up reminder before the webinar.*Times listed are in U.S. Eastern Time. Use timezoneconverter.com (or a WCAG 2.0 Compliant option, thetimenow.com (Edit, 9/21/16 – thetimenow.com has asked us to remove all links so you just see the name, not the link.  NW))  to convert webinar start time to your local time zone.*If you have any problems getting connected to the webinar room, refer to our Wimba Classroom Guide.

*When you register for a WebJunction event, we use your contact information to provide you with details about attending the program. We may also follow up with you about your experiences with the session or your interest in WebJunction.

Contact: info@webjunction.org
Link: WebJunction Event Archives

Photo Credits:

Productive Strategies for Using Information Streams in Development

nullJon Thompson pointed me to a very interesting social media project at the World Food Programme, CipCip. Here is a brief bit about it.

The Life of a Project Called “Deliver”: CipCip: It is not what you do, but who you do it with
Long gone are the times where you put a knowledgeable person somewhere and she or he could do the job. Our work has become so complex, time-critical and crucial to saving lives that “collaboration” with others has become a must. Not only with external parties like donors, government counterparts and other NGOs/UN agencies but also internally within the organisation.

“Information” is a key part of the collaboration. Accessing and sharing information a must.

And data is everywhere. From corporate servers, to Access databases in field offices, to Excel spreadsheets somewhere on individual computers. There is not one bit of information that exists, which is not in a digital form, apart from the feeling of the sand between your toes on a romantic summer evening.

The data exists. But is hardly made accessible let alone shared.

With the DELIVER project we aim to make the information, essential for moving 4.7 million tons of food annually, available to all those who need it. And more.

One of the key goals of DELIVER is the collection, analysis, storage and dispatch of time critical information, generated by systems, people or by public sources.

This is a cool project and reminds me of some other efforts that are swirling around as people in NGOs/NPOs seek to understand a strategic application of social media. Look at the cool work that Tracker is doing. There is this liberating idea that no one organization or person is the central source of information. They key is capturing useful information into a flow, then use the intelligence of the associated community to pull out key stuff and connections with people who can tell more or act on the ‘stuff.’

We talk about overwhelm. It is reality now. So schemes to swim productively in the overwhelm in a strategic matter should be our focus.

What is your scheme? (Or is that the wrong word?) 😉

Update: Digital Habitats Presentation Recording

Thanks to Jeff Lebow, there is a recording, synched to my slides, of Friday’s presentation as part of Webheads in Action Online unConvergence. Sweet! I have also copied in the text with some of the slides below. I also learned the slide set on Slideshare was featured today! Fun!

Notes:

  • Slide 5 : These roles and practices create the conditions that enable people to….
  • Slide 6: This activity comes out of a chapter in our book that looks at the activity orientations of communities of practice and how this might drive both the technology stewardship and the overall community nurturing and leadership activities. In this context, we are using it to explore the application of social media to a particular goal you might have.
  • Slide 7: In our research of CoPs we noticed 9 general patterns of activities that characterized a community’s orientation. Most had a mix, but some were more prominent in every case.Image: Wenger, White and Smith, 2007
  • Slide 8: Before you do the Spidergram exercise, read through the orientations and think of some examples from a number of contexts. I’ll offer two examples as well in subsequent slides.
  • Slide 9: Here is an example drawn from the book “Red-Tails in Love: Pale Male’s Story — A True Wildlife Drama in Central Park” by Marie Winn. Vintage Books, 2005. The book tells of a community of bird watchers in Central Park and exquisitely describes their practices. This is a predominantly face to face group that might use some social media, but not as their central way of interacting. They are a large, diverse group, but tightly geographically bound to Central Park in New York City. They might fill this spidergram differently than I might, but this is just an example! Image: Wenger, White and Smith, 2007
  • Slide 10: KM4Dev (http://www.km4dev.org) is a global network of practitioners interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing in international development. Over 800 members are subscribed to the email list which had it’s origins in July 2000. It is both a well established but loosely bounded network that interacts primarily online, with once a year meetings that a small subset attend.
  • What was interesting was that these orientations had implications beyond communities. They could be a useful analysis, diagnostic and measurement tool for the application of social media to an organization’s work. What was interesting was that these orientations had implications beyond communities. They could be a useful analysis, diagnostic and measurement tool for the application of social media to an organization’s work.
  • Slide 12: You can see how different groups have different priorities. It is a bit like a community activity “finger print.” The next step is to think about what tools support the different orientations.
  • Slide 13: Here are some examples of social media tools that support the orientations. Keep in mind that while a tool may have been designed for a specific purpose, people regularly and imaginatively use them in different ways.
  • Slide 14: A tech steward may be called upon to make sense of all the offerings of the market, scanning and selecting for her community. They start paying attention to working with the tensions between the individual and the group, synch and asynch group, interacting and publishing. Image credit: Wenger, White and Smith
  • Slide 15: Sliders – as we think about how we pick, design and deploy technology, what sort of intentionality do we want with respect to these tensions? More importantly, how do we use them as ways to track our community’s health, make adjustments in both technology and practice.
  • Slide 16: What would your Spidergram look like? Think of a specific group or project that you want to explore. What activities do you need to support? Which are more important than others? Put a mark on the arrow to indicate how important a particular orientation is to your community. The more important the orientation, the further out on the arrow the dot should be placed. Then draw a line between the dots. Clarification: For context, towards the middle means a more inward (private) orientation and towards the outer edge a more public/open orientation.Discuss the spidergram with your group or community. Do they see it differently? Adjust your image to get the fullest view possible. Then, and only then, start thinking about tools. Always start with WHAT you want to do before the HOW!
  • Slide 17: Here is a blank template for you. You can do it in PowerPoint or print it off, do it by hand then scan or take a digital image to share back online with the rest of the group. Put a mark on the arrow to indicate how important a particular orientation is to your community. The more important the orientation, the further out on the arrow the dot should be placed. Then draw a line between the dots. See the next example.
  • Slide 18: Let’s brainstorm some  examples of social media tools that support the orientations. Keep in mind that while a tool may have been designed for a specific purpose, people regularly and imaginatively use them in different ways.