Blog comments that make you say “wow!” | BlogHer

Read the comments on this post Blog comments that make you say “wow!” | BlogHer (which of course, I found because Denise linked to me otherwise I would not have seen it because there are not enough hours in the day.) How do you feel about comments?

People ask me if comments in blogs are important. If you want to connect to others, and hear what they think, then they are. There are also terrific blogs that either have comments turned off, or create an experience where we don’t feel compelled to comment. For instance, people who post things that are just so darned complete and full cause me to simply take it in. And shut up!

Comments, like linking to other people, is an act of reciprocity. Give and get. So if you want comments and links, go forth and comment on things that others post – things the inspire, move you, make you want to offer a different perspective or just thank them for something they wrote that matters to you. And link, link, link to the beautiful work of others. Even ones that haven’t fully emerged yet – keep them on your radar screen!

Photo Credit:

http://www.linkbacklove.org/

(And grr, now all my right aligned photos are not right-aligning!)

Tips for Chat/Talk Show hosts

No, I’m not offering advice to Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, nor to Connan O’Brien, nor Oprah. What I’m talking about is an alternative method to boring presentations. It is called the chat show or talk show format. It brings panel presentations a step closer to life. I’m still a strong advocate for more participatory forms, but if you are forced to put something “up front,” this is an option.

First, for a full description of the method, check out this page on the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit:kstoolkit » Chat Shows

Second, read a story of this method in action from Michael Riggs.

Finally, inspired by Michael’s post, I thought I’d share the tips I had for hosting one of these little gigs. I am often asked to be the host, so here are some of the things I try to do. (Yeah, sometimes I fail!)

Re Hosting skills — I agree that a good host is really crucial, so much that I like to run practice groups with potential hosts to give them experience, have the test group offer peer feedback and switch roles (host, panelist, audience) and offer those perspectives.

The key things we have identified around the host role are: (hm, I should blog this)

  • Study up on your panelists so you can give a brief introduction that focuses on th relevance of the guest to the topic at hand – not everything they have done.
  • Remember, you are there to help everyone learn something and to make the panelists as successful as possible.
  • Create a comfortable, welcoming context. I like to sit in chairs without a podium or table and instead have an informal coffee table (with coffee!) in front of the chairs which are arranged in a semi circle so each panelist can see each other and the host. I usually suggest the host sits in the middle to allow good eye contact.
  • Think in advance of good questions that aren’t yes/no questions, and are specific enough so that the panelists don’t have to give long preambles. Questions that go right to the heart of the matter being covered.
  • Use follow up questions to elicit details and specifics. Interrupt politely to do this if needed. Don’t let people ramble. It does no one any good.
  • Face the panelist who is speaking. Turn your body, REALLY face them, and listen very carefully. When you are clearly listening, speakers are more willing to let you interrupt and this can be the moment to help the speaker focus.
  • DO NOT promote your ideas or story. You are the INTERVIEWER, not the SUBJECT of the interview.
  • Make sure everyone gets fair airtime. This does not mean EQUAL airtime, but that each person’s idea or point has been clearly presented.
  • Summarize briefly during and more fully at the end.
  • Allow speakers one final SHORT comment that you frame by asking a specific “wrap up” question. Don’t say “is there anything else you’d like to say.” Uh uh.
  • Where culturally appropriate, use humor. I recently hosted a chat show with a “bigger than life” chat show personality and we had fun with it. It was a more informal gathering, so it was in the appropriate context.

On an unrelated note, why does the picture show up nicely right aligned in my WordPress composition page, but then show up at the top when I post? It used to work so nice until the last WP update. Sigh

CoP Series #2: What the heck is a Domain and why should I care?

This is a reblog of a guest blog post I did on Darren Sidnick’s Learning & Technology Blog: What the heck is a Domain and why should I care? (CoP with Nancy White). I’m republishing them here with Darren’s blessing! Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6,  part 7 ,  part 8 , part 9 and  part 1o  are all here on the blog.

What the heck is a Domain and why should I care?

Flickr photo by IdeaideiaIn the first in our series on communities of practice, (CoPs) I briefly mentioned Community, Domain and Practice. In this blog post I want to dive a little deeper into Domain. Because Etienne Wenger does such a great job of defining domain (and he really helped me understand it) I’ll start with his definition, and use his definitions later for Community and Practice as well:
The domain: from http://www.ewenger.com/theory/

A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. (You could belong to the same network as someone and never know it.) The domain is not necessarily something recognized as “expertise” outside the community. A youth gang may have developed all sorts of ways of dealing with their domain: surviving on the street and maintaining some kind of identity they can live with. They value their collective competence and learn from each other, even though few people outside the group may value or even recognize their expertise.

So Domain is what we care about together. It is what is important enough for us to make time to participate, to learn these crazy online tools if that’s how our community connects, and makes us prioritize it over the many other things we have in our busy lives. So it has to matter! So if a learner is taking a course because they “have to”, we need to think carefully about if a community is the right approach.

Domain is not static
Domain is also one of those things that seems obvious at first — we are interested in learning about how to become entrepreneurs — but ends up being a bit more subtle. In large communities, there may be a big, overarching domain, with smaller, more specialized subgroups. In some communities, the domain may be relevant for only a short period of time and then the community naturally comes to the end of it’s life. The domain may shift when new people join or initial core members leave. Not all domain’s are “eternal!” So the first lesson about Domain is that it is not static and it has to reflect and respond to the interests and needs of the member. So we might start a CoP on entrepreneurs coming out of a business course offering, but it may turn out that the core of the group is really interested in marketing for small businesses, or developing a horticulture business. Then you get to that “ignition” point where the interest and passion is sufficient to get the community going. That “commitment” that Etienne describes in his definition. Over time, the domain focus might shift again — and responding to that shift is critical for community sustainability.

Community and personal identity
Domain also has to do with something else important in communities of practice: identity. The domain gives the community as a whole an identity, and it also is part of the identity of individual “members.” Shawn Callahan from Anecdote often says a useful test of a domain is to be able to identify with it personally. So in a community of entrepreneurs, you would say, yes, I’m an entrepreneur. But it may have a lot more personal meaning if it was “yes, I’m own a small horticultural business” and thus the more specific domain has more meaning.

So if you are thinking about a communities of practice approach with your e-learners, ask yourself, what might be the domain of my community? Try it out on some of your learners. See what they tell you. If it resonates… keep going. If they look at you like you are crazy, keep refining your ideas about domain WITH them. Because after all, it will be THEIR community. If you do this little experiment, leave a comment here and share a story of what you learned!

Here is another story about domain: http://joitskehulsebosch.blogspot.com/2008/07/communities-of-practice-and-bulldozers.html

Flickr Photo Credit:

view photostream Uploaded on July 10, 2008
by ideaideai

Catch up strategies in online courses

Flickr photo by Simon Pais-ThomasMy friend Bronwyn Stuckey wrote a blog post this week that rang bells for me. She was essentially asking, how do we catch up when we are lost or left behind in an online learning course/class/workshop? This hit home because right now I’m facilitating a workshop and have totally fallen behind in two online courses I’m ostensibly “taking!” Ha!

Here is a snippet to get us started. Lost or left behind in online learning? « Bron’s Spot

Flickr photo by JagginLast week I was facing what many of our online learners must face – a guilt trip about not devoting enough time to a course and being overwhelmed by decisions. Do I try to catch it all up after being inattentive for a few weeks? Do I try and contact someone, perhaps a buddy, and try to get the abridged version of what has passed me by? If everyone else is keeping up why am I so inadequate? Do I just pick up from here and ignore or let slide what has passed me by? Or do I just give up because I feel too far behind?

I know in the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop in which I am a leader and coach, we have have been acutely aware of this kind of problem. How do we allow people easy reentry into the hub of the learning when they have been absent (physically or mentally)? This is particularly important when courses like Foundations and the FOC08 and CCK08 have a frequent phase changes that make returning your attentions like picking up a movie plot part way through the screening. We have never really found a satisfactory answer. How do other online programs deal with this?

Flickr photo by Ric e etteFirst, for those not familiar with term “phase change” in the context of a course, my interpretation is a phase change is when the group shifts from a focus or topic, shifts from one form of interaction to another (going from online to offline, for example, or shifting to using a different tool or modality.) Sometimes the shift makes us feel that there is no going back to previous phases, or that if you missed the previous phase, you were out of luck. Bron, is that your interpretation?

OK, let’s start brainstorming strategies for facilitating catch up and reentry. I started to sort some initial into two lists – strategies for the workshop designer/instructor/facilitator and strategies for the learner/participant, but in a collaborative or community setting, some of these might be interchangable. So they are all in one and you can infer which are more design strategies for the facilitator and which are more ongoing learner coping strategies. I’ve included those suggested by Bronwyn!

Design and Practice Strategies for Catching Up in Online Courses

  • Offer synchronous meetings to reestablish engagement through a focused moment in time.
  • Design “phase changes” (as Bron calls them in her blog post) that are also reentry points, rather than “left behind” points. (I should write a whole blog post on this one alone.)
  • Create or encourage the creation of summaries for both content and process where appropriate.
  • Design “Forgiveness” points in time where you tell the learner to ignore everything that came before and just dive in.
  • Encourage learning buddies to help each other – “personal bonds to keep us on track” (Bron).
  • Don’t go overboard in a designing “self directed learning” recognizing that learners are busy and may need/appreciate more scaffolding than “do your own thing, baby!”
  • Contact another learner and ask them to give you a quick update.
  • Offer to do a summary – you will learn more than anyone else and catch up at the same time.
  • Forgive yourself and let go of what was not done and focus on what can still be done.
  • Mark time in your calendar for the course and treat it like a “real appointment.”

What else?

P.S Edited on Friday, Sept 12 – Sue Waters’ comment reminded me it would have been helpful if I referenced the workshops I was referring to:

Photo Credits – creative commons on Flickr

view photostream Uploaded on November 20, 2006
by Simon Pais-Thomas
view photostream Uploaded on January 5, 2007
by jaqian
view photostream Uploaded on December 8, 2006
by Ric e Ette

WestPeter blows my mind

Flickr photo by stephend9If you are interested in knowledge management, knowledge sharing, collaboration and a passel of other topics, following WestPeter on Twitter is worth every second, every character, every bit and byte.

Why? Because Peter is a generous scanner and filterer. His tweets link to articles with a quick annotation. Look  at this bibliography on his website!

WestPeter is also known as Peter West at Continuous Innovation, which appears to be his consulting firm. I’d say if I were looking for a consultant, I’d sure look at his company because of the tremendous contribution he makes day in and day out via Twitter.

So Peter, thank you. I hope this little bit of link love will share your value even wider out in the world.

Photo credit on Flickr:

view photostream Uploaded on January 28, 2007
by stephend9