From the Archives: Nice Attention Assessment Activity

Many colored post its with tiny, illegibile writing on them.

These 2011 tips on assessing attention in an online learning context could work for any of our Zoom/Teams meetings now a days. It reminds me of the red-green-yellow cards that Jerry Michalski used to use at his F2F retreats. (Green – keep going, Red – Stop, enough! Yellow – I have a question). I’m going to try this next online meeting I host!

Howard has been working with his students on something that he calls “Infotention” (yup!  there’s another one!) – developing your attention skills, training your attention span, and learning how to use IT skills (RSS feeds, persistent news search, and dashboards) to support your attention. As Howard put it, it’s critical to use the information that’s flowing into you in a way that allows you to make faster and better decisions.  Asking yourself, for example…Ignore or attend? Open a tab for later? What are the right spatial arrangements (highest priority on the left, most frequently updated is on the top).  He tries to help his students match their attention to the tool set, to start small and cultivate habits. He also cautions that there are days we must recognize that we need to get something specific done and therefore must be mindful of how your attention is spent.  Set a goal and then regularly, through the day, ask yourself, is what I am doing now bringing me closer to my goal for the day?

He described an interesting (very low tech) activity he does with his students using  yellow, orange and red post-it notes.  A gong goes off at irregular intervals and, at that point, students write down what they were thinking about on the appropriate colored post-it notes.  Yellow if the thought was on task, orange if it tangential to the task at hand, and red if it was off task. The post-its get assembled in a common spot on the board (this could be done online as well) so that the entire class can track its collective “infotention”.

via Meeting Howard Rheingold « virtualworldnmfsfall11.

The Lessons of Endings: Part 1

I was in an email conversation last week about endings. Endings of collaborations. Endings of communities of practice. Something I want to ponder and write about. It seems to me, like in any other part of our lives, we do little to build a literacy and practice of endings. Endings provide an amazing place for reflection and harvesting of insights. Things dawn on us that we might have been too busy to notice.

A soft spread of dawn colors of pink, orange, purple and gray over two small islands in the Skagit River Estuary, January 22, 2022.

When I dove back into the draft archives today, I dug the quote below out of the 2011 and it rose to the surface. And shockingly (yay Scott Rosenberg’s personal blog), the post is still web-viewable. TT refers to Table Talk, the online community hosted by Salon.com.

Two things stand out. First, Scott’s important note that we should not confuse community with content. Still true.

Don’t think of “conversation” and “community” as subsidiaries to “content.” They aren’t after-thoughts, add-ons, or sidebars. They are the point of the Web.

Scott Rosenberg – fuller quote below

Seems we still do worship content over conversation and community, albeit now in the guise of simply “social media.” (I’m talking to you, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, et. al…)

Here is what the Salon community staffer wrote of the Table Talk (TT) community closing, quoted from Scott’s piece, because Salon’s is no longer online…

Over the years in TT, we occasionally had members who said they were suicidal, and their virtual friends rushed to offer very real assistance. We had a few members meet and fell in love. Some even had kids. There are people living now in the world because of this funny place, and of that I am proudest. And though this is the end of a nearly 16-year adventure that I adored being part of, it’s not the end of the friendship and the wisdom and the sass that made this, truly, one of the very best places to be on the Net. We’ll see you around, I promise.

via Au revoir, Table Talk – Inside Salon – Salon.com. (DEAD LINK – see, Salon.com didn’t thing this was worth saving… nw) 

Did we still see each other “around?” That brings me to the second thing that poignantly comes up for me is how we honor – or don’t – conversation anymore.  It is diluted by breadth, rather than nurtured, contemplated and developed in depth. Not to get maudlin or talk about the “good old days,” but if I’m spending my time skimming posts on FB, Instagram, Twitter; leaving drive by likes or comments, how much conversation am I really part of? Not much. 

As I continue my sabbatical, my “fallow period,” I’m luxuriating in the availability of time to go a little deeper. And maybe cut out some of that breadth. 

Here is Scott’s fuller quote: 

I don’t second-guess Salon’s leadership for deciding to end TT today — I might well do the same in their shoes. I do think there’s a lesson here, though, not just for Salon but for all the other enterprises out there today that dream of doing what we tried for so long to do at Salon. (Hi, Arianna; hi, Tina.)

The lesson is simple: Don’t think of “conversation” and “community” as subsidiaries to “content.” They aren’t after-thoughts, add-ons, or sidebars. They are the point of the Web. Here’s how I put it in Say Everything:

[Interactivity] is just a clumsy word for communication. That communication — each reader’s ability to be a writer as well — was not some bell or whistle. It was the whole point of the Web, the defining trait of the new medium — like motion in movies, or sound in radio, or narrow columns of text in newspapers.

Editors and publishers keep crossing their fingers and hoping to find some new platform that reverses this principle and puts them back in the comfortable realm of piping content out to consumers. They think this stuff will finally settle down. But change keeps accelerating instead. Today we are feeding one another stories, passing links around, telling friends what we’re fascinated by or excited about or steamed over. My Flipboard is more useful and interesting to me than the front page of the New York Times (sorry, Bill Keller). The conversation isn’t an after-thought. It’s interesting in itself, and it’s how we inform one another.

So Table Talk is dead: RIP. But Table Talk is everywhere, too — on Facebook and Twitter, all over the blogosphere, and in a billion comment threads. Table talk is what we do online. It’s not what comes after a publication’s stories. It’s what comes before.

BONUS LINK: If you haven’t already, go read Paul Ford’s wonderful essay on the nature of the Web and its fundamental question — “Why wasn’t I consulted?”

via Salon’s TableTalk shutdown: What we can learn from the story of a pioneering online community — Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard.

Social Media Did Us In?

This snippet from my draft posts from mid 2010 still rings true. I did not get around to writing much more, but as I reflect on it in 2022, I think about the societal fragmentation we are experiencing in the US and one can’t avoid thinking about the role of social media in that fragmentation…

Photo of a sunrise over water, blurred and distorted.

“The cohesion or sociality that hold an online group together are far less explicit than I recall even a decade ago (Yahoo groups, or prior to that, online bulletin boards, the Well (I never joined)). The enabling structure of engagement is no longer the group or network. Instead, it’s a tweet, or a single picture.”

Nancy

Someday again? Random Act of Culture

Monday Video: From the draft archives.

In our divided, socially distanced times, it is both refreshing and poignant seeing this video from 2010. We are in a different world. So I’m here, singing to you, even though you can’t hear me.

via YouTube – Opera Company of Philadelphia “Hallelujah!” Random Act of Culture.

Draft Archives: Threads, Connections and Costs

From 2010, this draft is ironic as we enter another year of staying home with Covid. My wide-spread life is becoming a little more locally dense again, but isolation, like leaving town, doesn’t do a lot for community connections!

image of sand on a beach in waves with two rocks as "eyes' and a semi circle of rocks as a smile.

Anyone who follows my Flickr stream knows that I love my garden and the projects my family and I cook up in that little space. Our latest addition is a chicken coop and some crazy little chicks. I can’t wait for sunny summer weather to sit on my little circular patio with my new granddaughter.

While travel often takes me away from home, the gravitational pull to stay is strong. When I’m away, I miss my walks to the local yoga studio, passing familiar homes, often waving and saying hello to some of the habitual neighborhood walkers (and their dogs.) Right now a couple of blocks from my house they are breaking ground for a community garden and I hanker to go by, to volunteer this Saturday. But yes, I’m on the road. So it is a great pleasure to be able to follow my neighborhood blog, to read about the city wide urban gardening projects IDEAD LINK!) and, of course, to stay in touch with my family online.

So last night over a lovely dinner and relaxed conversation with Dave Pollard and his brother Alan, we started talking about the impact our online interaction/time/investment has had on our lives. For both of us, it has entirely changed the trajectories of our lives.  Dave brought up the question that (in my words) asks us “at what cost?”  It has a cost and Dave has me thinking and wondering – which is a good thing.

One cost to me was that I went from very densely connected in Seattle because of the nature of my past work, to very widely connected across the globe. I have a huge network of connections of varying strength that I treasure. But I can’t even conceptualize them, let alone keep them all in my head and even keep a reasonable number of them in my heart. When I’m connected to them (online or F2F) that connection reignites. But the amount of “out of sight, out of mind” is actually very discomforting when I examine it. What does that say to the quality of the relationship, to the amount of caring we can muster for each other when our networks become very large?

Lots to think about.