Archive for May, 2008

Practice vrs technology focus

May 30, 2008 at 8:04 am · Filed under Musings ·Tagged , , , ,

In the just-completed CPSquare “Connected Futures” workshop many of us have struggled learning, and learning to use, new Web 2.0 technologies. Exposure to these new technologies was part of the point of the 5-week workshop. But other important goals were to examine the part played by technology in supporting community groups and consider the characteristics of the role of “technology steward” (a term coined by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John Smith) in selecting and promoting appropriate technologies. While these other goals were addressed, I was struck by how much time and energy was consumed by the technology use. I wondered if there is a certain, inevitable churning and learning with technology at the early stages of new technology use in a community (what the workshop participants considered “entry practices”). This churning may always make it difficult to focus on larger goals.

I am reminded of my experience supporting instructor use of online course management software (such as WebCT, Blackboard, Angel and Moodle). It was difficult to get new users to think about the effective pedagogical uses of the technology while they were learning the technology. I found that the pedagogical discussions were much more effective after a certain level of facility with the technology.

This suggests to me that learning the technology may need to be an explicit focus in the early stages of community use of the technologies (or for new members of a community). This could be formalized for ongoing, stable communities (e.g., by creating a series of tutorials and exercises to assist new users). How best to foster the learning of the technology while, at the same time, introducing community practices to the new members? That is another topic for another day.

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Disorientation using new tools

May 20, 2008 at 1:11 pm · Filed under Musings ·Tagged

Well, I’ve been challenged by John Smith to provide some concrete examples of the disorientation that I’ve felt learning new tools this past week in the CPSquare Connected Futures workshop. He makes a good point that discussing disorientation without examples puts the action at a distance (from myself and others). That may have been part of my hesitation to write about it more specifically. The disorientation is uncomfortable and difficult to understand in ways that allow me to work through the disorientation. Thanks to Jeffrey for consistently speaking about this in the last few weeks (see his blog post). So I’ll attempt here to describe some of my disorientation.

Considering individual tools, my experience with Facebook is illustrative. Creating an account was no problem. Soon after I had a number of “people you may know” with each having a “add as a friend” link. What is a “friend?” Of course I have a real-world reference to that concept. But what is the Facebook concept of Friend? What does “adding a friend” make available in terms of interaction? What of my Facebook items can Friends see that others might not?

OK, I didn’t need to answer everything about “friends”, after all, part of the point was to try it and see what happens. But a problem arose immediately. Before I add a friend, how do I know if the person is legitimate? I cannot figure out how to easily find out details about the possibilities posted. Clicking on the picture or clicking on the add a friend link does not give me any more information about the person. Do I have to search for this person? Well, OK, that seems like a lot of work (why can’t the application simply give me the information when I click on the thumbnail–already I’m a bit frustrated by that lack of functionality). But I try a search. Nothing but the same information I already have (picture and name). I try a profile search. Nothing but a cryptic message that ” Profile search will only search your friends and profiles you can see from Portland, OR.” What does that mean? Can’t I see profiles of people throughout the world? What does it mean profiles I “can see from Portland”? That makes no sense to me.

OK, not being able to see a potential friend profile is frustrating. I think that if I understood more about how Facebook worked I might be able to figure out why my confusion. I don’t have a mental model of how it works. I’ve been trying things based on my experience with other such tools (e.g., clicking on a name or picture to see details), but that hasn’t gotten me anywhere.

Clearly, I don’t yet have a workable model of how to use Facebook. But I press on. I still don’t know how to determine if someone is legit. So I ensure that I can verify the person from other sources. Either I know them directly or they are in the list of people who are currently taking the workshop. I can do that. So I dutifully add those people I can verify.

But I also find two features new to me of Facebook that delight me. First, someone in the workshop has recommended a friend to me. Not only does this bypass much of my concern about a person being legitimate, but I realize that it is a nice feature to allow people to network. This seems a real benefit for discovering interesting new people, ideas and possible collaborators. The other feature new to me is the friend-of-a-friend feature. Again, this solves the legitimacy problem and also seems useful for gathering a growing community of people.

It seems clear that I’ve learned about these two features most effectively through the actual use of the tool. Someone could have explained those to me in some “introduction to Facebook” but I think the actual learning experience was more powerful given my previous frustrations with adding a friend. In effect, my frustrations probably led me to ask more significant questions about these features so I was predisposed to look for solutions. Note that one of the features was invoked by someone in the workshop community while the other was a feature invoked by the software. In other words, I learned about the first feature from a more experienced user who took the time to illustrate that feature to me. The second feature was an automatic function of the software, a kind of automatic social network analysis. Nice.

This post is already too long so I won’t continue. Suffice to say that I still have no answer for how to easily find out if someone is legit. And I also have new sources of disorientation (e.g., someone just asked me to share an application–what is that about?). And that’s just the start, I’m still struggling to get Netvibes working properly for me. Oh well, more food for thought.

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How do we learn tools, apply them in community?

May 19, 2008 at 3:44 pm · Filed under Musings ·Tagged

When we encounter a new tool it if often difficult to understand what it does and what good might it be for use in addressing some community (or personal) need. There seem to be two key cases: 1) New members of a community learning tools that are already in use by a community (or core members of a community); and 2) New tools which are not well known in the community but may have applicability. Are there necessary stages that individuals or groups have to traverse to learn new tools? What strategies might help facilitate that learning?

Focusing on the first case for now, it seems that someone learning a new tools must simply try it. Some things that might help would be descriptions or explanations that help frame the key features of the tool and examples that show the tool being used for do various things valued by some individual or group. For a tool used by a community, watching others use the tool (and the practices around the tool) are useful. All of these take time for the learner (and for those supporting that learning, e.g., creating clear examples). And these elements of learning are not linear by spiral. In other words, it is probably most effective for a learner to try some of the tool features, then see an example, try to apply the example for themselves, see how others use it, and then return to exploring the tool features, and so on.

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Knowledge capture

May 8, 2008 at 5:06 pm · Filed under knowledge building ·Tagged , , ,

I am obsessed with capturing knowledge, both for myself and for the knowledge generated by groups. This blog entry relates my belief in the importance of filtering and sorting information in order to be more effective at using and acting on that information.

For personal knowledge-building, I take a lot of notes for fear of losing some important idea. Then I like to organize those ideas into categories that make sense for what I’m trying to learn. I’ve played around with multiple technologies and processes to capture ideas and information. For example, I often find it effective to take handwritten notes when I am away from my computer and then re-read and process these notes into digital form by entering the notes into various design documents, todo lists, and calendar entries. The design documents are meant to capture ideas, evolve existing ideas, record decisions, record things that I have learned (such as design principles), and generally advance my thinking on the various projects on which I am working. I find that translating my initial notes is more akin to sifting through the information for the most valuable parts and discarding the rest. It is not unusual for me to discard many of the original notes. The important part is extracting the information into the tools most suitable to handle the type of information. For example, things I have to do go into a todo list with dates and reminder mechanisms or directly into a calendar entry. Where to store the other information (e.g., ideas and resources that might help me do something on my todo list) is more of a problem. I’m constantly in search of better ways to handle this. That problem deserves a deeper discussion, but not now.

The main point I want to make here is the importance of taking unstructured information and categorizing or organizing it in various technologies where it will be more likely to be acted upon. Leaving these notes in a Microsoft Word file, for example, is a poor technology to use since it requires an imposed process to make it work (e.g., one has to remember to keep looking into the file to remember what is to be done).

A similar problem of capturing useful knowledge occurs when groups work together. The problem is compounded by the different views of what is useful versus what is not useful but it seems important to have a process that extracts useful information from the ongoing work of the group.

Meetings are one of the events where extracting information is important but which rarely occurs. Some meeting notes simply summarize the decisions made, or conclusions drawn, and the next actions. Often, these items get buried in meeting notes that are relatively inaccessible. To be most effective, these decisions and conclusions ought to be made visible within the contexts in which they are important (e.g., as new policy posted on a web site). Action items ought to be placed in a calendar, todo list or other project or task-management system so that they can be addressed and tracked. Again, follow up processing is about translating the information into appropriate technologies that enable better collaboration.

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