Category: visual thinking

Graphic Facilitation Jam July 2011

I’m very excited to co-host a visual practice learning event this year with my energetic and creative co-conspirator, Michelle Laurie. (Graphic Facilitation Jam 2011) We had a great time with the first version in August of 2010 in BEAUTIFUL Rossland, BC. Any excuse to plan another vacation there sounded good to me. The first round taught me a lot. If you aren’t from the area, you can fly into Spokane, Washington and drive up.

Graphic Facilitation Jam 2011: Using Visuals for Effective Engagement

2011 Date and Time: July 13 (5-9pm), July 14 (9-4pm) and July 15th (9-4pm)
Location: Prestige Mountain Resort, in beautiful, Rossland, BC, Canada

This experiential jam takes place almost entirely at the drawing surface. We’ll start the evening of July 13th by warming up our drawing muscles and silencing those pesky inner censors. The second day, we’ll build into the basic practices of graphic facilitation and recording. We will pay attention to preparation, the actual visual work, and follow up including digital capture of paper based images. Our third day will be devoted to participatory graphic approaches, practicing and giving peer feedback. Build your repertoire of icons, ideas and approaches which you can use immediately, as well as ideas about how to hone your practice.

When might we use this practice?
Sometimes our imaginations are sparked by a visual where words fail us. Think about when communities plan and imagine their futures, when teams consider the possible outcomes for their projects, when groups create maps to track their progress.  These are all opportunities to use visuals to engage and deepen community dialogue. You can use visual thinking to improve teamwork, communications, meetings, build engagement and to plan work. Step out of the PowerPoint rut!

Who should attend?
Playful people! Newbies and experienced! Facilitators, project managers, team leaders and members, town planners, teachers and anyone who would like to engage others beyond words. Please note: You do NOT need previous experience or have to consider yourself an artist. At some level, we can all draw and use visuals to enhance our communications and engage diverse audiences.

Detailed Agenda:
Part 1: I CAN DRAW – Hands-On Writing on Walls (July 13 evening, 6-9 pm including light snacks and beverages)
Description:
Tonight we’ll touch the paper, play with the pens and loosen up our drawing muscles. We’ll address the basics of “drawing  on walls” including starting shapes, lettering and some initial iconography. We’ll cover basic techniques and tricks that enable any of us to draw as a way of capturing and communicating ideas with each other. We’ll ask ourselves some questions, such as “What if you draw your notes instead of wrote them?” “Visually captured what is happening at a meeting or in a classroom?” “Engage people beyond words and text?” How would that change the experience for you and others?

When we get tired, we’ll spend some time looking at the work of diverse graphic facilitators, see how books can inspire us and play a bit with materials.  Dress for mess!

For a sense of a very short I CAN DRAW session, here is 6 minutes from a lightening fast 45 minute workshop at Northern Voice in 2009.

Part 2: Using Visuals With Group Processes & Facilitation Methods (July 14th morning)
 Description: In the morning we’ll explore  how visuals can enhance  group  processes such as planning, meeting and evaluation. We’ll do mind maps, mandalas and simple flip chart enhancements  that you can immediately use.  We’ll look at the use of visuals with some specific group facilitation methods such as World Cafe, Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, and others. This part of the workshop includes lecture, conversation and lots of hands on experience. We’ll explore practical applications while we continue to learn to write on walls, the base elements of the practice of graphic recording and facilitation.

Part 3: More on Graphic Recording  (July 14 afternoon)
This afternoon we’ll focus on  traditional graphic recording (actively listening and capturing what is going on in a group, rather than using graphics as a facilitation device). We’ll review and practice  how to listen for key ideas, iconography, and organizing space. We’ll do a number of practice drawings then review our own work. We will hold several practice sessions in the safe space of the classroom.  This time will prepare you to record confidently in real work settings.

Part 4: Participatory Graphics and More Practice   (July 15)
Building on our drawing and exploration of visual practices in whole group processes, we’ll experiment more with participatory graphics. This is when the pen goes into everyone’s hands, not just the graphic recorder’s. When people “make their mark” it changes their experience and ownership of the experience. It can open up how they talk and think about things.

We’ll look at a range of participatory visual practices including methods such as visual icebreakers, “River of Life”, ” Knowledge Tree,” and other examples. Think about your group’s situations and needs and we can work to imagine practices that might help your real work!
We’ll intersperse our learning sessions with practice and feedback periods.  We’ll finish by looking at some of the resources available to visual practitioners!

Daily Graphic Jams!
From 4-5pm each day  we’ll offer an optional opportunity to practice visual thinking and drawing of key words and icons.

Preparation:

  • Come prepared to get your hands dirty.
  • Dress is comfortable clothes that can get dirty and you won’t be sad if they are stained.
  • Bring a pad of paper or journal to take notes – unlined is terrific.
  • Bring a digital camera to record the fruits of your labor.
  • We’ll bring paper, tape, some pens and chalk. Bring along your favorite supplies.

Location
The beautiful alpine city of Rossland, BC. Accommodation options have been suggested below.

Jam Hosts:
Nancy White is the workshop facilitator.  “I am a learner, mom, gramma and chocoholic. I founded Full Circle Associates to help organizations connect through online and offline strategies.  My practices are diverse, including online interaction designer, facilitator and coach for distributed communities of practice, online learning, distributed teams and online communities, doodler and visual practitioner. I have a special interest in the NGO/NPO sector and the emerging practice of using communities and networks for work and learning. I blog at http://fullcirc.com/wp/, teach, present and write on online facilitation and interaction, social architecture, social media and visual practices. I am co-author with Etienne Wenger and John Smith of Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities (http://www.technologyforcommunities.com).  Lately not only do I  like to draw on walls (graphic facilitation), but I spend a lot of time cooing over my new grandbaby!!! For more about my visual practice see http://fullcirc.com/wp/about/visual-and-graphic-work/.”

Michelle Laurie is hosting the workshop and is your key contact for more information. “As the workshop host, I draw on over ten years of experience helping local and international organizations and partnerships communicate as well as improve the way they create and share knowledge.   I have been successfully incorporating visual thinking into my work particularly with the use of participatory graphic exercises and visual aids.  My areas of expertise include sustainable development, collaboration and learning.”

 

Accommodation

There are several nice B&Bs in Rossland.

B&Bs

http://www.visitred.com/ private 2 bedroom suite and 1 single room, call Angela to discuss details, she always gives great service and great rates, 250 362 7790.

http://www.sweetdreamsheritageinn.com/rooms.html ($80/night ($85/double) with breakfast for workshop participants, Nancy says the breakfasts are AMAZING!)

Prestige Mountain Resort – www.prestigehotelsandresorts.com
We’re looking into a deal… stay tuned!

Food/Snacks/Lunch
There are several places in the workshop vicinity to eat a quick lunch.
Nancy promises to bring chocolate…

More info
For more information email Michelle Laurie michelle.k.laurie@gmail.com

Visual Social Media Aids

Gwyneth Jones, the Daring Librarian on Flickr, recently posted a terrific visual aid for using Twitter. Humor, color, something other than a long list – Brava. This is too good not to share (and she had put it as Creative Commons for sharing. Excellent.

Building awareness of, skills for using and discernment of how and when to use digital tools has become a pervasive part of my work. We are all serving as technology stewards for each other as well. So having different ways of “telling the story” of a social media tool practice is useful. We learn in different ways. Thanks, Gwyneth!

Take a peek and click in for other sizes.

Twitter_At_A_Glance – IMPROVED! | Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

Questions: a thread through current work

Life has been a whirlwind of work. Keynote and workshops for the Girl Scouts of America Leadership and Development Conference,  iterative design work on a bunch of client projects, from planning to post-event evaluation, a large global e-consultation followed by a large face to face decision making meeting, and coming up this week a lovely two day graphic recording/facilitation workshop up in the mountains of Central British Columbia.

While whirlwinds are deep experiential times, they leave little for reflection (including blogging). This morning I took a few moments before ramping up to full production mode and I was skimming my blog feeds.

I love Palojono, the blog of Jono,  a designer who is a great writer and visual thinker.Jono helped me reflect, to see the thread through my current work. My practice right now is very focused on using questions. We have really spent a lot of time designing the questions that sit underneath consultations and meetings. I build questions into my talks. Thank you Jono, and here are some of your tips I’d like to share out and amplify with my network. His are related to giving a talk, but as I read them, I could easily pull them into other contexts.

via palojono: Asking great questions at talks.

Great questions…
1. Build a relationship between you and the speaker
A good question is an effective way of telling someone, yes, I get it, and what’s more this is interesting to me. It allows them to recognize you and increases the chance and ease of meeting up after a talk to discuss in more depth through the common ground created.
2. Let other’s know who you are
Asking a question in a room of strangers is an opportunity to share a little of yourself, what you’re interested in, who you are, and what you know about the subject. On many occasions, strangers have introduced themselves to me after a talk simply because I asked a question. In case you can’t tell, I think great questions are a great networking tool. (Nancy’s Note: relationships, trust, “entry doors…”)
3. Start conversations
In very many talks there is as much to be learned from the audience as the speaker. Asking a great question invites others to chime in and start a natural dialogue that is often more revealing than any prepared presentation. (Nancy’s NoteThen shut up and listen! ListenNote?)
4. Buy others time
There are many times when the bell sounds on a talk and “Any questions?” shoots round the room before I’ve barely had a chance to process the last thing that was said. A first question plays the invaluable role of giving others a little chance to think about what they want to ask once the speaker has finished. Sometimes we just need a little processing time before we’re ready to share. (Nancy’s Note: the basis of improvisation – make the other person look good!)
5. Relate the content to what you care about
Questions beget answers. Many people forget that a question of a speaker really allows you to learn an answer to your situation. When it’s a talented and experienced speaker it’s really an incredible opportunity. A great question plays the useful function of steering the talk towards what’s more relevant to you. (Nancy’s Note: from a communities of practice perspective, this hooks into the importance of finding shared domain!)
6. Force you to engage in the talk
Challenging yourself to think of great questions also forces you to think through the content of the talk and compare it to what you already know. It’s too easy to let a good talk wash over you, and a bad talk not even enter. I typically write a big question mark in the corner of my page at the start of a talk and use it as the seed for a question mindmap. Setting myself the responsibility of asking a great question means I not only have to pay attention, but I have to think critically about the talk all the way through. What a great cheap way to max out your value.

Graphic Notetaking at IST Africa

Last week I was in Durban, South Africa, for the IST-Africa conference where Tony Carr, Maike Schansker and I ran a workshop on professional development in the networked/Web 2.0 era on behalf of UN University. One of the things Maike and I did during the second day was take graphic notes of the presentations.

The Purpose

We did visual capture for a number of reasons.

  • First, from an academic conference perspective, note that there were 90 minute sessions with 5-7 papers presented each session in dark rooms with lots of (mostly) traditional PowerPoint. In a context of learning, the track we were following, it is interesting to see us yet again do what we tell teachers not to do. 😉 We wanted some form of participation for ourselves, beyond sitting and listening. (There was very limited opportunities for questions and dialog.)
  • Second, we are both nurturing our graphic facilitating and recording practices, and in fact are part of a graphico’s community of practice! Maike was also practicing recording on her new electronic tablet.
  • Third, the visual  recording helps me listen better, and to focus. (I have difficulty with this!)
  • Finally, the practice provides a way to share some of what we learned out to the world.  It is a form of social reporting. We can share what we learned both with our own internal communities and (via things like Flickr) to the wider network.

I brought the sketches home, scanned them and uploaded them to Flickr, tagged them so I could group them together, and linked to our workshop’s wiki page (more on that in a subsequent post). Then I promptly forgot about them and moved on to the rest of my “been on travel” backlog.

Yesterday Stephen Downes picked up the photos and commented on them in his fabulous and widely read OLDaily. Hm… someone noticed! That is always interesting so I figured I should blog about the work and respond to some questions and comments I’ve gotten since Stephen’s post.

The Images…

…and a little self critique. I’ve embedded them below, but it is much easier to see if you click into Flickr itself! The drawing on pad on one’s lap leads to smaller, more detailed images than the large scale “drawing on walls” produces.

You will notice the different sketching styles of Maike and I, and the volume differences. Some presentations were jam packed. Some left us wondering what the key points were. I actually have three other pages with titles and the rest blank since I either could not follow, concentrate or I just “didn’t get it!”

As we looked at our pictures, we both noted we struggled to use more images and less words, and that for me, particularly, my images often got over-crowded. We were going so fast that most of the coloring work was during breaks or afterward. The presentations were so time limited that people talked fast and tried to pack a LOT into their 10 minutes. 😉

The Method

Here are my materials:

  • Nice, smooth and fairly heavy paper, left on the pad as  a hard writing surface
  • Colored pens, Staedtler triplus(r) fineliner pens, 10 color set. Nice firm tips, fine lines and plenty of ink
  • A small 12-color set of chalk pastels, Prismacolor Nupastel firm pastel color sticks. These are smaller and a bit harder than the low-cost chalk I use on my big, wall sized drawings. They give me a bit more fine control and I like the colors! Downside is they break easy so I try and pack them deep in my clothes in my suitcase!
  • An old, grotty eraser.

Maike was using a new portable tablet PC and I’ll need to get the tech information from her if any of you are interested. We have been having some interesting conversations about both the tech and practice of electronic graphic recording.

Early on I decided on a “flow” template with the presentation title and presenter name in the upper left and cascading the notes to and fro down the page with arrows (later colored orange) as the connecting bits.  When I did the finishing touches later, I chose a fairly limited palette and used little “cloud thingies” to highlight key topics. You will also see that some images also used some mind-mapping techniques.

The Comments and Observations of Others

Stephen Downes  wrote:

These graphic lecture captures are invaluable teaching aids. Not simply because they represent the content of the lecture in an accessible format. But also because they make clear the structure of the presentation, a structure that should be very familiar to people who heard about the ‘the rule of threes’ I talked about in Argentina. Look at this one, for example. You can see the author employing some techniques – a pyramid, a four square diagram – to construct the overall presentation. Nancy White, Flickr, May 26, 2010 5:40 a.m.. [Link] [Tags: , , ]

Wow, I never thought of the images this way. This is why we don’t work alone! I do want to be clear that some of the images, such as the one’s Stephen notes, are just my sketches of what the presenters had on their slides – so they get full credit AND I recognize that their device was useful to me as the listener. So great observation, Stephen, which you helped me see.

Emma Duke-Williams wrote:

But what fabulous diagrams, Nancy! I see they’re ‘public’, so I’ve passed them (& this page) on to some of our Study Skills folks – to see if they can use them to inspire students.

(I’m also wondering about the possibilities of creating something like that on a tablet, rather than having to remember the pencil case – and all the colours in it!)

Yes, Emma, they ARE public and that is an important part of our practice. A UN Agency funded my presence and participate, so in my eyes, what we learn, reify and produce goes back out to the world which funds the UN! But more fundamentally, it is a waste of resources and unsustainable to think that the benefits of conference participation in topics that are in the global public good are limited only to the privileged who can be face to face.

And yes, we can do this electronically. See these visual captures from Rachel Smith and Rob Cottingham (more) at Northern Voice earlier this month! I’m embedding one as an example from Rachel’s Northern Voice set on Flickr.  I try not to rush out and buy new electronic toys, but after playing with Rachel’s iPad, I’m VERY tempted. It was easier than Maike’s tablet PC. 😉

So that is, as they say, the story as I know it! I’ll encourage Maike to chime in!

Debrief: the role of visuals in online community management

Today I was a guest of the Community Roundtable, sharing some ideas about the role of visuals in online community facilitation and management. This is the first of two such gatherings this month. The second will be in the context of online learning for the Knowplace event next week. Screenshot of shared drawing

We used my free Vyew.com space plus Slideshare.net (since my visual slides created a humongous file size and I was too lazy to break it apart.) I like Vyew’s white board, simple set up and the ability to easy make every participant a collaborator with access to the white board tools.

I offered a bit of context on the general role of visuals in group processes, then some stories about translating those ideas online. After that, the fun really began as we drew together. First I asked them to draw without talking. Then there is a little tool in Vyew where you can make your cursor invisible, so people could not tell WHO was drawing what.  I asked them to activate that feature. Then we debriefed. The comments ranged from feeling free to collaborate on an image, to struggling a bit with the tools, to drawing off by oneself in a corner. Some liked the anonymity, some didn’t. Then we talked about how such exercises could be used, particularly in a work context where this might otherwise be seen as frivolous.

Afterwards my hosts, Rachel Happe and Jim Storer were kind to offer (and allow me to share) their feedback. I appreciate that in return for my time in being their guest.

Rachel’s Notes:

I thought it went very well given that most of the people on the call were completely new to the idea of drawing online or together.

The different chairs as an opener gave people a framework/context that they could relate to in order to get started.

I thought the slides plus the playing were a bit hard to fit into an hour but given that I was surprised how active people were – most people seemed to jump right in and unlike the phone, people didn’t have to take turns so everyone – even if they were not collaborating per se – could participate right away which is often really hard to get them to do verbally even if you do call on them and give them time on the call.

Intentionally cutting off talking was also interesting – kind of an odd sensation since I rely so much on getting explicit confirmation from people. Really interesting to watch how collaboration unfolds without voice.

It’s definitely given me some things to think about for our own use.

Jim – other thoughts?

Rachel

Jim’s Notes

Great session! I was trying to observe and participate, which was a bit challenging. I eventually just gave in and participated. Gave me a lot of ideas on how to introduce people to one another. Since using tools like that feels a little silly, it breaks down conventions and barriers pretty quickly. I loved to see how people co-created with each other.

Too much to digest so soon… I wish more members had joined in. They would have enjoyed it.

Thanks again Nancy. I just wished I’d had a chance to tell everyone how I started following you back in 2002 (I think) when I first found your Online Community Toolkit. 🙂

I’ll return with the debrief after the Knowplace event on the 23rd!

Here are the slides:

Thinking About Visuals in Online Communities and FacilitationView more presentations from Nancy White.