Week 1 Workshop Blog Post
I’m lending a hand for the CPSquare’s (http://www.cpsquare.org) “Connected Futures” workshop which started the last week in April. As part of our collective “end of the week activity,” we are all to blog a reflection either on the workshop discussion board, or on our own blogs. Since I am currently offline while I write this, my timing will be off, but I decided to share it on my public blog as a “peek in” to an ongoing experiment.
(Why am I offline? I’m currently at ILRI in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where I’m co-facilitating a face to face element of an ongoing distributed workshop on knowledge sharing in international agricultural research. The network is down. Who knows for how long…???)
The workshop is devoted to looking at the role and impact of new technologies on communities of practice, and how we steward those technologies (or technology stewardship. If I were online, I’d be linking all these things to previous posts and definitions, but that will have to wait until later!)
This is not a workshop for the fainthearted. In the first week we are asked to register and acclimate to a fistful of online tools, from wikis to blog readers. While we have a “home base” on a discussion board, our activities will range across tools and modalities so we have some real experience to reflect upon and learn from. But all this jumping around right off the bat, before we’ve all gotten to know each other, feels pretty challenging. The brave post that they are feeling confused and I suspect others are quietly nodding in agreement in front of their computer screens.
What facilitates coherence? Especially in a complex world? What enables some of us to feel comfortable with incoherence, ambiguity and incompleteness while others take it as natural? Furthermore, how do we reconcile these differences when we are intending to act “in community?”
For me, these questions are always on my mind when I am in the technology steward’s seat. (Or on that keyboard!)