Archive for personal

Looking at Online Discussion Forums

I haven’t spend a lot of time in online discussion forums. As I mentioned at the start the Facilitating Online Communities course, I find it difficult to follow threaded conversations online. I find them too volumous and over-bearing. I’ve also avoided them because I sense (and based on second-hand anecdotes), that there is quite a bit of postulating and oneupmanship. Perhaps a result of poor facilitation? Nevertheless, it is off-putting. I don’t have the desire to become embroiled in meaningless debates and arguments over semantics.

One of the lists I do subscribe to is the Australasian Facilitators Network discussion forum. The current archive is only available to the list members, although membership and the ’structure’ of the ”organisation’ is loose and informal.

The list is, in my opinion, brilliantly moderated by Bob Dick. He is a very good communicator – clear and concise; provides very good instructions on list management issues; and is mostly invisible as a faciliator, but very diplomatic and open when dealing with any issues that arise.

Is it a community? Using McMillan and Chavis (1986) well-regarded conceptualization of a sense of Community [1], I believe that it is. To varying degrees, I’m sure that there are:

• Feelings of membership – feelings of belonging to, and identifying with, the community;
• Feelings of influence – feelings of having influence on, and being influenced by, the community;
• Integration and fulfillment of needs – feelings of being supported by others in the community while also supporting them; and
• Shared emotional connection – feelings of relationships, shared history, and a “spirit” of community.

But I don’t think the list IS the community – a community has built around the list. It’s like Nancy said in her comments on my previous post: “the network holds the set of loose ties that allow community to emerge”. This has manifested in a number of ways for me.

I have built relationships with people I met at face-to-face events that are held regularly (State-based networks). Some of those people have become close business associates and dear friends. I’ve also done further training and personal development as a result of attending these meetings and understanding the pitfalls and personalities involved.

I am very much looking forward to attending the annual conference organised and attended by list participants and strengthening that sense of belonging to this community.

How the forum might benefit from facilitation services?

This is a tricky one to answer. Paradoxically, other facilitators can be difficult to facilitate. I think the community would benefit though, by having more co-ordinated events around particilar topics of interest or issues – perhaps in the form of an online conference or phone conference format. I know that there are currently shared resources, but I also think that the community would benefit from developing these further and developing a habit of referring to them and keeping them current – a wiki would provide a good platform.

1. Cited in Blogs as Virtual Communities by Anita Blanchard.

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Blogging in a Fishbowl?

A Personal Reflection on my Blog Network

I plan to divert a little from the assigned topic on blog networks for Week 7 of FOC08. This post will be a little longer than usual too. Please indulge me.

I’ve been blogging on an off since April, 2005. When contemplating this task, I began to reflect on my own experiences over the last three and a half years, and wonder whether my own blog is insular or part of some wider network.

In one sense, I feel that it’s quite insular – a lone voice in the ether where I add tid-bits of information and collect random thoughts. I wouldn’t be the first blogger to wonder: if a blog falls in the forest …

I’ve received only just more than a handful comments over this time. My blog doesn’t receive a lot of traffic – somewhere in the vicinity of 350 page views per month. And from what I can tell, there are just a few repeat visitors – mostly from some of my ‘real life’ friends like Nick and Marty. I guess this is in itself a small network or blogging community. It allows me to keep tabs on Nick as he is bobbing across the Atlantic and still feel someway connected to him. It also let’s me discover what delicious vegetarian recipes Marty has concocted and how his running is going.

On the other hand, I keenly feel how connected my blog has allowed me to be in a much wider network and community. As a direct result of blogging I have formed a number of significant relationships and joined a number of new networks.

Before I started blogging, I was following another of my ‘real-life’ friends Tony. He is friends with Johnnie and Hugh. From there, I started following other blogs and following threads that interested me. A lot of these are listed in my blogroll.

As a consequence of following, reading, absorbing, learning – I began to reorient my career towards the things I was becoming more interested in – the intersection of technology and the human side of business.

From Johnnie’s blog, I discovered Anecdote and
after reading and responding to a post on their blog, I ended up working with them. Perhaps I’m biased, but I think the Anecdote blog is one of the best examples of a niche business blog on the web. I witnessed first hand the power of building a community around that blog and the brand. I have learnt a great deal from reading it and from Shawn and Mark who write it.

My work with Anecdote extended my network and connections with other bloggers – like Nancy White, Patrick Lambe, James Robertson and Matt Moore whose work (and blogs) I admire a lot.

I was fortunate to be able catch up with Johnnie in person when he visited Melbourne on holidays recently. With Tony, we enjoyed a casual lunch by the river and chatted for a long while.

That meeting felt like a fateful event – like I’d come full circle and connected some loose ends.

Johnnie commented (I’m para-phrasing here and hopefully not talking out of step) that he also sensed a ‘community’ of like-minded people that share similar values about their work that have managed to make connections across the blogosphere. Relationships and connections which are complex, multi-dimensional, intertwined and have manifested in many different ways.

What we have by definition is the same social network: a social structure made of nodes that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, friendship etc.

I also find Downes’ argument compelling, and a useful way of describing the phenomenon that I’m trying to explain:

The community is the network. There is no centralized place that constitutes community, there are only people, and resources, that are distributed, that are all acting on their own behalf and in their own interests … where the network consists of a set of self-selected relations using a variety of contextual information … to establish meaning, and where this meaning not only defines the community but emerges from the community.

I also belong to the Melbourne blogging community. I use the term quite loosely here, but by following other local bloggers such as Cameron, Michael and others, I’ve ended up at a number of face-to-face meetings organised by other Melbourne bloggers and digital media folks and have met a lot of great people. Regular ‘community’ events take place, and I maintain contact with a number of people I’ve met through this network.

Of course, I also belong to a very big network or community of people who choose to blog – the
blogosphere. Getting philosophical: can we not agree as people, to be part of the whole? Quantumly aren’t we all related?

Blogging has also lead to my interest in using other tools and social media, del.icio.us, flickr, podcasts, facebook, twitter – each of which has increased the number of loose connections or weak ties that I have in my network. In turn, there have been many instances where these links have lead to participation in social events, conferences and work collaborations. Most importantly it has created interesting conversations.

When I pause to think about this, I find it quite amazing.

Buddha said: “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”

Through blogging, I guess I have made my own world. It has lead me to make fundamental changes to the work I do and the approach I take to it. It has also extended my personal and social network beyond the boundaries of where I was once comfortable. I am grateful for the opportunities it has afforded me and for the meaning it has created.

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My Photo on Schmap

Another one of my photos has been included in the newly released fifth edition of the Schmap Hobart Guide. It’s a picture of Eaglehawk Neck taken from the nearby lookout on our trip to Tasmania in Nov-2006. The original photo is on my flickr page. The other photo included is Adventure Bay.

I really get a kick out of seeing my photos included in stuff like this and the feeling that I’m contributing ‘value’ by being a producer rather than just a ‘consumer’ online.

My photos are released under a Creative Commons license, so people are free to use them with attribution.

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Facilitating, moderating, or teaching?

The foc08 task for this week is to try to determine the role and behavior of these three roles:

• Facilitator
• Moderator
• Teacher

And to attempt to describe these roles.

Let me say up-front that I totally agree with a comment on Leigh’s blog that suggests the word ‘facilitator’ is being used loosely by many people and institutions. This makes it difficult to have this sort of conversation without getting into semantics. The meanings will be different depending upon the context and also from different people’s own experiences.

Rather than try and come up with a definitive answer, what I’ve done is captured some words and thoughts about each role that sprung to mind when I reflected on them. The following is my summary:

Facilitator–guide; interested in process not content; independent/neutral; creates space for conversations.

Moderator–to me, this implies the role of referee, adjudicator or arbiter; someone who has control of the conversation; directing flow of conversation.

Teacher–this is a generalisation, and I recongnise that there is a shift away from this (I’ll address this later on), but my perception of the teacher role is based on the traditional ’schooled’ model: authority; structure; prescribed content; transmission-based; didactic; formal; and based upon expertise.

I want to pick up on the traditional notion of teacher as the expert imparting wisdom and knowledge. This is informed, and perhaps tainted by my own experiences - particularly in the Knowledge Management domain.

Because of the sheer volume of information and exponential growth of knowledge in the twentieth century–if you’re skeptical, I recommend you check out the Did You Know?/Shift Happens presentation–it is almost impossible to master a specific domain. In other words it is increasingly difficult to be an ‘expert’.

Further specialisation and reductionism is one response to this. However, I believe that this will ultimately lead to–and require–new ways of learning, and a change in the traditional teaching role towards a more facilitative style of learning. We need to “move from ‘Sage on the Stage’ to ‘Guide on the Side’”(Kempe 2001: cited in Australian Flexible Learning Framework guide).

If I understand correctly, this is what social constructivists argue.

So what does a facilitated learning environment look like? Here’s some quick thoughts (repeating the process I used above): networked; informal; self-directed and motivated; social; meaning-making; peer-learning; experiential.

I know I haven’t answered the questions directly, but I’ve enjoyed pondering and reflecting on the different roles and empathize with Leigh’s dilemma.

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Informal Learning

Jay Cross writes:

Corporations need to replace traditional training, knowledge management, and in-house communications with something more informal, interactive, collaborative, self-service, impromptu, and flexible. Instead of pushing content, they need to be facilitating conversation.

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