Em duas línguas

A new home!

2006-09-04T22:17:00.000+01:00

After talking about it for a few months, I've finally built my new house. I'm changing to a new blog, a new life.

I started Em duas línguas on August 13, 2004 with the post "Getting started". Phronesis begins on September 4, 2006 with the post "Refresh". The underlying principlies are the same. The practice has moved on.

Always interested in process, this is how I got there:

Year: 2006

1. January, 17. Thinking about my identity and who I am in relation to my blog in "Feeling who I am".

2. March, 23. Pissed off at blogger not having categories in "Clicking on home".

3. July 2. Worrying about being forced to categorise by the technology in "Intellecutal hygiene v. messy methods".

4. July 6. Realise that I am outgrowing this blog in "I've got it. I've got the answer".

5. July 19. Consider using Drupal in "Thinking of Drupal".

6. August 19. Contemplate using Blogger in beta while "Getting ready for the next phase".

7. August 22. Think about "Este modus em rebus" as the name for the new blog in "Name of new blog - looking for inspiration".

8. August 26. Reach the name Phronesis in "Strong opinions weakly held". Nancy likes it too!

Resumindo e concluindo, my new blog is called Phronesis and is in Typepad. I feel kind of anxious about moving, although I think it's the right thing to do. I had fun making a a poll (sondagem) so you can tell me if you think the new blog is better or not - see the right hand column.

So here's the link to my new blog Phronesis. And here's a link to the blog's feed.

Here's to a new phase!

I'm not busy.

2006-09-03T08:51:00.000+01:00

Two weeks ago I started my anti-procrastination strategy and bought a diary to record where I was spending my time.

Now I've done the accounts and these were my suprises:

Excercise (cross-country cycling + walking dog) = 10 hours/week;
MSN with family/friends = 8 hours/week;
Dinner out with friends = twice/week.

No matter that the rest of the time was spend working on projects and I am on holiday - it was more time off than I thought.

Shawn over at Anecdote refers to "the busy-ness meme", which I recognise that I subscribe to:

"Hi. How's it going?"
"Soooo busy."

He wonders what would happen if we said: “I have a bit of free time at the moment. It’s just the way I like it.”

And I wonder how much I make myself a prisoner of time by constantly talking about the lack of it. I certainly make myself bored by talking about it!

So I've made my decision. I am not going to refer any more to my busy-ness; I'm going to develop alternative language that refer to pleasure and time off. Here are some of the alternatives for my new repertoire:

> Hi. How's it going:

1. Fine thanks. And you?
2. Wonderful thanks. I had a great cycle ride this morning.
3. It's going very well. I've had some time for reflection this week.
4. I'm fine thank you. The Serra is looking beautiful at the moment. All the flowers are out.
5. Very well. I've been enjoying the varanda lately.
6. I'm well, and you? Very busy? Pity ... I've been enjoying some wonderfully relaxing moments.

After all, I have all the tools, a fast computer with high-speed connection to the Internet, and applications that help me do things quicker than ever before. Therefore I must have more time!!

Tags: anti-procrastination

Howard Rheingold - collaboration and technology

2006-09-01T21:00:00.000+01:00

A great interview with Howard Rheingold by Robin Good, where he finishes with these words:

We have to spend part of our days retooling and if you don't do that you're not able to take advantage of the opportunities that are available out there.

It's not just going to come in a package on your desk. It's something you need to do with your mind.

Harold Rheingold, for who doesn't know, is worth listening to as he is one of the orginal and currently leading thinkers on the cultural, social and political implciation of modern communications media.

One of the things he says in the interview is:

It's the social part of the technology that I think is the tricky part. You can buy a manual and figure out how to make the machine work but the human communication the human working together part that involves a lot of other things that aren't in the manual.

Oh yes! "Technology" is such a concrete thing for people to get their minds round. You know how to use it or you don't. It is a unit that has a price. It has a shape and takes up space.

It's much easier to grasp "the technology" or the "how to ... " of the technology than it is to make sense of people just talking.

Only weirdos choose to move to Portugal

2006-08-31T22:04:00.000+01:00

Miguel Vale d'Almeida spells out something that I recognise in the eyes of every Portuguese that meets me:

Ninguém vem para Portugal porque quer. A não ser que seja um certo tipo de reformado inglês em busca de campos de golfe e cerveja barata.
No-one comes to Portugal because they want to. Not unless it's a certain type of retired English person looking for golf courses and cheap beer.

That's why I'm such an oddball in Portugal. I chose to live here - not because I'm retired, nor for the golf or the cheap beer (although I do appreciate the price of good wine). And it's not because I was looking for low-salaried work that no-one else wants to do. And no, I didn't come because I fell in love with a Portuguese guy.

I'm just a peculiar person!

Maybe it's because of the scuba diving I was crazy about ... on the Portuguese wreck in front of Fort Jesus, Santo Antonio de Tanna. The stories of battles between the Portuguese and Arabs, reflected in the mix of Portuguese-Arab architecture and people in Mombasa fascinated me.

Maybe it was my excitement about the lost Swahili town of Gedi, north of Watamu. Gedi was a once great civilization (in the thirteenth century) that still puzzles historians because it was isolated and unknown. It was suddenly and inexplicably deserted, with no trace of its residents and my young heart trembled when we walked through the ruins, knowing that here lay the banquet tables, the sewing, and the signs of life that had been so quickly abandoned. The story that thrilled me was that maybe the people heard that the "the fierce men from the sea" (the Portuguese) were invading.

Also I was stung badly - and survived - by a Portuguese Man o' War while swimming, another addition to my mental map of the Portuguese.

Then when I lived in England I was an anti-apartheid activist and campaigned tirelessly for SWAPO (Namibia) and with FRELIMO (Mozambique). The stories of the Portuguese from our comrades in Southern Africa were not the same as the ones I hear now in Portugal.

None of that explains why I live here in Setúbal, but maybe it helps show that my canvas - and my childhood imagination which I have never shaken off - is different to the golfing, beer lovers from England. And it might help people in Portugal to pardon me for being a little peculiar!.

Fort Jesus, Mombasa:

Castelo São Filipe, Setúbal:

Strong opinions, weakly held

2006-08-26T19:44:00.000+01:00

"Strong opinions, weakly held" is a post that jumps out at Shawn Callahan (Anecdote) which he reads in "Bob Sutton's blog. It is Bob Johansen's advice about the wisdom for moving forward in times when the future is uncertain. It's about having and testing your opinions, while leaving yourself open to listening to other people.

It jumps out at me too. And it comes as I contemplate wisdom and the name of my next blog. My current favourite blogname is Phronesis, a word I readily identify with. The easy translation of Phronesis (from Greek) is "practical wisdom", ecompassing reflection, ahieving ends, particular contexts, and experience and measure.

It also happens to relate to a small, but significant, personal story about "raining men!"

The Prato Dialogue

2006-08-26T16:55:00.000+01:00

I have set up a blog, The Prato Dialogue, in Wordpress for the conversations we are organising in Florence about memories and forgetting in communities of practice, and which I have posted about before.

The reason it's The Prato Dialogue and not the Florence Dialogue is because it is timed to coincide with a conference about constructing and sharing memory in communities organised by the Community Informatics Research Network at Monash University in Prato. Some of us will stay on for the conference and present a workshop at that conference that lead from the Dialogue.

Tags: pratodiaologue, CIRNPrato06

Transmitting information

2006-08-26T00:56:00.000+01:00

Today I bought a MacBook Pro. And within 90 minutes I had copied everything from one computer to the other, using FireWire. And when I say I copied everything I mean that everything was copied - not just my files, but all my applications, my browsers, my favorites, my passwords ... everything. My desktop, files and folders all looked exactly the same in my new computer. It was wonderful. Every piece of information transferred perfectly.

Hmm ... Could I say that with this perfect transmission of information - today was a sign of good teaching?

Tags: teachinglearning

Name of new blog - looking for inspiration

2006-08-22T11:17:00.000+01:00

Since getting more organised I've had time to start planning my new blog and mulling over what to call it. I was wondering if I could incorporate a Latin expression from a Roman poet that I have on a post-it note above my desk:

Est modus in rebus. (There is measure - a middle way - in all things).

I wonder sometimes why this quote fascinates me. I think it's partly because the story of my life has been someone who didn't measure things, I only ever fully immersed myself. But with age I'm learning the importance of measure.

And I think it talks to me in another way. While I often hear people framing ideas, concepts and solutions as if they had to be either one thing or another, wisdom actually lies in engaging in that grey area in the middle.

This quote is also on a really cool painting called "The Measurers" in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. There are two things I love about this painting, which is a Flemish image of mathematics in the sixteenth century. First, it shows maths as an everyday activity. There is maths in a kid beating out the rhythm, in a woman working with cloth. There's an amorous couple in the background, and I guess there is some maths in what they are doing. But anyway, it's maths as situated cognition, (and the basis for theories of learning in communities of practice).

The other thing I like about the painting is that the central character is a designer of mathematical instruments. This was, apparently, unusual. The instruments (and their maker) were normally taken for granted. I like the focus on the tool maker as a central part of the activities, in amongst - and probably in conversation with - the people about him.

Anyway, the long and the short of my meanderings is that I'm not going to call my blog "Est modus in rebus", much as I like the expression, the poet Horace (65 BC to 8 BC) and this painting! But I do find myself coming back to the Renaissance for inspiration, so perhaps my next blog's name lies somewhere there...

More anti-procrastination strategies

2006-08-21T11:36:00.000+01:00

I've been reading Suw Charman's Desk diary update, in her fight against procrastination, with interest.

I am Queen of writing to-do lists, which only ever get longer. I've got (real) post-it notes all around my workspace, I've got a flip-chart prominently placed in my sitting room. I have two or three small notebooks. And that's before I even start talking about the post-it notes on my computer desk top and my iCal to-do list that sends me reminders.

And still, my lists get longer. And still I spend a lot of time turning over in my mind all the things I have to do. And all the things I'm not doing. It makes it difficult to take time out because I'm haunted by all those things to do. But in not having sufficient breaks I can see that my continuous partial attention disorder worsens.

Also like Suw, I've tried keeping track of my hours in Excel. Perhaps I made it too complicated because I created lots of columns where I had to categorise what I was doing. But the act of categorising makes me anxious and I gave up after a month.

Now she has an A5 desk diary, where she notes how much time she spends on things, including time spent on having a shower and faffing about. And she discovered that she faffs about less time than she thinks.

As I set myself up for a very busy September and October, I have to get my systems set up right. I want to know how much time I'm spending on what. And I need to be sure that I'm building in enough time for myself.

So I'm off to buy an A5 diary. And I'll cut back to one small notebook and my iCalendar. Post-it notes, flip-chart, pieces of paper and extra notebooks are all going to bed. Hmmm ... now is this is yet another procrastination strategy or am I really about to transform my life?

Suw is a speaker at the SHiFT conference on 28, 29th September and I'm looking forward to meeting someone who understands my condition.

Tags: continuouspartialattention, anti-procrastination, SHIFT06

SHiFT - early bird registration

2006-08-20T13:03:00.000+01:00

Today is the last day for early bird registration to ShiFT (Social and Human Ideas for Technology).

They have got a really great lineup of speakers for the conference, including some friends I look forward to seeing and other I hope to meet.

There's a lot happening in September/October!

Tags: SHIFT, conference

Getting ready: next phase

2006-08-19T23:21:00.000+01:00

So I haven't been blogging much because:

1. I've had lots of reports to write and work to finish.

2. I'm starting some new projects and have to take care of them.

3. I'm working at less than half speed because I am tired and I dream of going to the beach and doing holiday like things.

4. I feel the time has come to start a new blog.

5. I've been wondering about the question: who am I?

But ... reports have mostly been written, new projects are on the schedule and I think I've got a bit of headspace to go to the beach. Who am I will change as I've decided to work only part-time in Ensino Superior and continue doing more of my own projects - related to designing for learning in distributed communities.

What's more, getting less fuzzy about my identity helps me conceptualise the transition to my new blog. And although it might not be obvious, getting clearer about my identity will also help me finish writing my doctorate.

As for my new blog I've been toying with converting to Wordpress. But yesterday I got distracted with the new Blogger in beta. What I have always liked about Blogger (unlike Wordpress, Typepad etc.) is that you can manipulate the html stuff much easier - but what has bugged me (not to mention the boring templates) is that you can't categorise your posts. Now with Blogger in beta you can categorize your posts. Another small but welcome change is that you can preview your post before sending it.

So ... here's to the small and big things that signal a next phase creeping up!

Tags: identity,, phd

Bar Camp Portugal

2006-08-19T22:35:00.000+01:00

I would like to go to Bar Camp Portugal which is taking place in Coimbra Portugal 2 - 3 September.

The idea behind Bar Camp, held in different places all over the world is cool. It's about Web2.0 and related things:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.

When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers.
When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

But I have to say that I am staggered to notice that of the thirty-four people who have signed up to participate, only one is a woman. Rita Duarte of Marciana, you've got a cool blog and I'd love to meet you at BarCampPortugal, but unfortunately I won't be able to make it.

Tags: BarCampPortugal

Today I was distracted

2006-08-09T20:15:00.000+01:00

View from my appartment ...

The fire's have started

2006-08-09T17:22:00.000+01:00

Calmly working on the varandah, but it got cut short. A reminder of things over which I have no control.

We have a fire in Viso. The sky looks eery. The sirens are ringing and the helicpoters are overhead. I hope everyone is OK.

Does this count as spam?

2006-08-06T13:15:00.000+01:00

Last year I went to the demonstration of an e-learning system being developed by Universidade Piaget. To get into the system a temporary account was set up with my name and email address.

Since early yesterday morning I have been receieving an email from the system every three and a half minutes, day and night. It tells me that the system is out of service until the 7th August and the new version will be ready on the 8th August. The email ends with this friendly instruction:
"Grato pelo vosso cuidado na leitura desta mensagem." (Thank you for your care in reading this message).

When I woke up yesterday to find the first 40 messages I set the filter for it to go into trash. But lots of people are on holiday now. I wonder how many thousands of emails they will return to when they get back!

Still thinking of feed mixers

2006-08-06T12:40:00.000+01:00

Still on the conversation of feed mixers I got a suggestion from Monica of B2B who points me to feedblender.com

"although it does not respond by itself to the tags options you would like (you could import the resulting blended feed and use a tag cloud software ;-)"

She also says: "i think the most important part is not blending the feeds but thinking how they will be displayed in the community". Joitske (in a private discussion) extends the question to "how can CPsquare leverage its members blogs for learning and linking within CPsquare?"

... which is exactly the thought that I'm chewing on.

John Smith has used feedburner to create an aggregated feed for CPsquare member blogs, suggesting that he found feedjumbler and kickrss the most viable aggregators.

But who, I ask myself, would look at feedburner to see community members' blogs? It looks like a linear set of opening blog entries from people whose shared interests aren't so obvious. Too uninteresting for words...

Another thing I did - and which doesn't feel much use - was to create a combined feed of all the blogs, put this feed in my feed reader and ... hey presto ... a bit of a disappointment. All I see is the blog headline and date (and first paragraph if I click into the headline). Visually this blurs everyone into one blob of a community - I find it much more friendly and helpful in my current individual feed system where I can see the name of each blog whose familiar shapes and logo help create a sense of the identity of the person who keeps the blog.

So now I'm coming round full circle to thinking that you might be better off having a page with a tagged list of the blogs of community members, with their feeds. And you would have a tag cloud. People could choose for themselves which blogs they subscribe to. Ideally people would list their own blog and tags and perhaps there could also be a space for individual comments to those blogs on this joint blog page.

But this starts looking like a bigger project that I had in mind. For the time being I would be quite happy to find a mixer that you could subscribe to and which would separate out the feeds in your feed-reader. When you joined the community you could subscribe to the feed mix which would give you separate feeds for the individual blogs. You could then go through at your leisure, trimming out the ones that you didn't want to follow.

Does anyone know of one of these?

Tags: RSSmix,, aggregators,, communitytools

Looking for the right RSS mixer

2006-08-02T17:31:00.000+01:00

This is a bit of a geeky post. And I realise that there are not many people in my universe who know what the hell I'm going on about. But I guess that's the advantage of saying it on a blog ... there is someone out there!

In my learning community, CPsquare, John Smith of Learning Alliances starts thinking about aggregating the blogs of all the members in CPsquare so that there is one container for all the feeds. This ties in with something else I've been thinking about for another community and so I decided to have a play.

First, what's the advantage of having one container for all the feeds? It means that anyone in the community can have just one feed (in their feed-reader) which subscribes them to the feeds of all the members of a community they belong to. It's a great way of getting a feel for who community members are and it's also reassuring to know that people in your community have a greater chance of finding your blog. After all, it's usually them you are at least partially writing for. Of course, if each individual member's feed was also tagged, then it could be a wonderful networking tool.

So I followed up on Marshall Kirkpatrick's links to RSS Mixers on Cogdogblog to get a feel for what some RSS mixers are like. They are all very different, with these being some of the main differences:

you only get a link to a feed vs. you generate a feed plus a page with the links (e.g. like Superglu);

you have to put the links in one at a time v. you can put the links in in one batch;

you just enter the feed URL v. you also enter the name and type of blog etc.

the RSS mixer has an inelegant/geeky appearance vs. it has a less than inelegant appearance.

For the RSS mix experiment I used the following members' blogs:
John Smith, Learning Alliances
Edward Vielmetti, Vacuum
Andy Roberts, Distributed Action Research
Nancy White, Full Circle Online Interaction
Shawn Callahan, Anecdote
Bev Trayner, Em Duas Línguas

And these were the notes I took when I tried to set up an RSS aggregator for those blogs:

KickRSS
+ gives a feed and a webpage - see experiment RSS mix webpage;
- viewing all blog entries (especially when there are many) as a webpage can be overwhelming;
- can add one feed at a time (or all via OPML, if you know how to);
- always gives error message first time you enter feed, so you have to go back and do it again

FeedShake
+ very simple - put in all the feeds and get out one feed;
- asks for information you're not sure about so can be confusing;
+ quick
This was the experiment feed.

Blogsieve
- ads right in your face
- can only add five feeds max.
- can only add one feed at a time
- annoying set of questions to answer and categories to put yourself in
- gave up because at the end I forgot to put in my email address and it wanted me to start the whole process again

RSS mix
+ very simple to use;
+ you can put all the feeds in at once
- BUT maximum of four feeds only!
However, you can make a new feed mix from your existing mix. That means you can keep mixing the feed mixers until you get everyone in one feed!
Here's the experiment feed mix with four. And it also creates a webpage.

lazytom's FeedJumbler
puts all the feeds into one feed - here was the link it generated for the experiment.
+ easy to use
+ you can enter all the feeds in one go.
+ easy to subscribe this new feed in your feed reader (i.e. has the usual feed-reader links right there for you)
- includes lots of info. that most people won't want.
- needs a good makeover.

Feedmarker
+ it has a bookmarklet making it easier to put in feeds;
+ you can tag the feeds;
- you have to enter each link individually;
- it got beyond the bounds of my patience to see how to get the link!
I had the idea that it's more for organising your own feeds and having them tagged (which seems like a great idea). I just couldn't find the generated link (getting tired by now).

Feedcombine
only gave errors

Frankenfeed
+ neat interface
+ easy to use
+ you can enter feeds in batches
This was the feed it generated for the experiment.

Wishlist for an RSS mix:
By now I was getting the general idea and didn't look at any further. But there must be others. Someone somewhere must be designing an RSS mix:

for large communities,

where it's easy to enter feeds in one batch,

where you can tag the feeds,

where members can upload/update/tag their own and others' feed,

which is visually agreeable/ not too geeky.

Let me know if you know one!

Tags: RSSmix, aggregators,

Time out

2006-07-31T01:00:00.000+01:00

I organised everything so that I wouldn't log on to the computer this weekend. These two/ three days were going to be the first time in years that I spent more than 24 hours away from my keyboard.

I didn't manage it, but ... the time was very important. The psychological business of being disconnected was important. Preparing to be disconnected was also important. Disconnected, that is, with all my tasks and feelings of accountability to online work partners, friends and truly special people.

First, I mostly slept. I slept at least 24 in 48 hours. Then, I spent time just doing the things I like to do on the computer. A bit like basic gardening. Weeding, getting rid of the bicho (bugs), enjoying the sun on your back as you do it, planting some seeds, watering .... and doing absolutely nothing ... even if it was doing nothing on the computer!

I managed, somehow, to let go of all the things that still need to be done. It was helped with a dinner party on Friday night where no-one knew of what I see as my professional identity. I felt free. Of course this is no big news for anyone who works 5 days a week or 9 to 5! It's just one of those things that some of us retards have to learn!

And then, quite unexpectedly, a wonderful thing happened to me this evening, at the end of my two/three day break. It happened before I could stop myself. A crucial chapter of my doctorate just popped out. I rushed to get pen and paper as it happened while I was eating dinner. It poured out onto the piece of paper without any effort on my part ... words that just made sense. They were words that gave me the the context for writing. Who knows, I may even discard them - but they they feel very important for what comes next.

So, maybe I still have to have my time away from the computer. But also I know that I need that time at the computer when I'm not totally overwhelmed with things I have to do. I need time when I can just wander about in the same way as I might wander about the Avenida and the baixa, gazing into shop windows, stopping for a coffee or to chat with someone at leisure.

I need a time for not thinking of that list of things on my flip chart and when my problem of bilingual continuous partial attention disorder doesn't get in the way. Some of it might have to be away from the computer but I also need to build in relaxation and play time on the computer.

Tags: phd, continuouspartialattention

The 1% rule

2006-07-30T12:55:00.000+01:00

I just read the 1% rule in the Guardian Unlimited which are figures which run parallel to observations about the types of participation in online communities of practice.

It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

Similarly, in a healthy online community you can expect 10% of people to be active and discussing. However, an initial reaction by people who post in online communities is frustration and disappointment that there is so little participation, where they equate participation with posting.

In my own research one of the findings that has surprised me the most is the number of people who posted little or nothing in an online event (e.g. a course of a workshop) but who report that they felt transformed by that event. And how much they felt part of the group even though they weren't posting.

That ties in with what Wenger says in his 98 book. Participation in an online community isn't about specific activities related to specific people, it's an accountability to a community and the meanings that are given through their participation in it (p.57) Participation is a constituent part of a person's identity, it's not an act of posting.

Tags: legitimateperipheralparticipation, lurking, communitiesofpractice, participation

Tech obsessed?

2006-07-27T09:33:00.000+01:00

The Age newspaper talks of ten signs to see if you are tech obsessed. Read the article for a funny discussion of each point.

1. You forget basic bodily functions
2. You collect ridiculous accessories
3. You check your email on Sunday... at 3 am
4. You know your mates by their online handles rather than their real names
5. Your favorite song goes "beep"
6. Instead of laughing, you say "LOL"
7. You answer your mobile phone when you're on a date
8. You change their outfits depending on their mood
9. You own a BlackBerry
10. You speak in a secret language.

I identify with many of them, but there's also sign I have which isn't there. When I can't find my car keys or my mobile phone, my finger and brain start twitching for the tag. For some brief moments I'm reassured that as long as they are tagged I'll find them.

A blog about Setúbal

2006-07-20T21:46:00.000+01:00

Now I feel happy!

I've been invited to contribte to a blog about Setúbal. My ninho.

I still have to sort out the problem I have with iPhotos ... but as soon as it's working, I'll be posting.

Tags: setubalnow,, setúbal

Designing for learning Web2.0 technologies and tools

2006-07-20T16:37:00.000+01:00

At the KM4Dev workshop in Brighton I did a breakout session with Nancy about my reflections/feedback on the workshop about Communities of Practice and Web2.0 technologies that I presented earlier this year. I am currently in the process of writing a report about the workshop, so the idea of this session was that it might help me reflect and articulate some ideas.

To my suprise I discovered that how few people involved in learning and knowledge management are familiar with social software and Web2.0 stuff. That was an important insight for me because I tend to overestimate how much sense these tools and technologies make to other people.

Some of the questions that arose for me after the session and individual conversations (especially with Nancy White) in designing a workshop for learning new (Web2.0) technologies were:

* Imagination: how do you trigger the imagination needed to make the tools meangful? Using them requires a leap of imagination and a transformation in thinking, it's not just a technical competence. How do you design for triggering imagination?

* Making it meaningful: What are the other triggers for making the technology meaningful for each person? It is not just perceived need. What's more, the need or the gap can’t be seen beforehand (i.e. there is no point is asking people: what is it that you need?)

* Risk-taking: you need to be able to take risks and to get it wrong. You need to be able to talk about not knowing. How do you help people get over a lifetime of being taught to do the right thing and being taught to show what you know rather than what you don't know?

* Different entry points: there is no one way of getting into Web2.0 tools, it depends on an individual's needs, objectives, skills, imagination etc. How do you design for different entry points for different people?

* Minimum elegant structure: What is the minimum elegant structure in order to create a space where participants can create their identity and environment?

* Recipes v. complexity: How do you find the balance between people's need for recipes and formulas for "how to do it" with the complexities, overlaps and contingencies of new technologies?

* Web2.0 Gestalt: understanding Web2.0 is more than the sum of knowing how to use individual tools. How can you zoom in and out of individual tools and the bigger picture without making it feel overwhelming?

* Accounting for time: you need uninterrupted time to be able to use the technologies and then you need ongoing maintenance. But people's busy lives don't allow for that. How do you account for time?

* Solitary v. joint enterprise: The act of sitting at the computer is a solitary one. How do you transform that act into a social one where you feel part of a shared enterprise of doing, getting it wrong, talking and learning?

Tags: POLEN2.0, CoP2.0, design, Web2.0, learning, KM4DevBrighton

Healing as part of learning

2006-07-20T15:24:00.000+01:00

Last week I participated in a workshop organised by the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton: "Knowledge, Learning and Change in International Development".

It was one of those events where I really felt like I learned a lot. Learning as in engaging with people and language in ways that will change my practice.

A number of my conversations were around the practicalities and politics of running workshops where community, process and trust are the drivers for learning, rather than expertise and transmission of knowledge. These workshops have messy methods where the overlaps between disciplines, researchers, practioners, consultants and organisational workers are a ubiquitous part of the whole event. Cycles of process and product, reification and participation, are how it works.

Not everyone feels comfortable with that. Where is the piece of knowledge I have come here to get? Where is the slickly presented final product? How embarrassing to see people make themselves vulnerable and get it wrong! Bring on the people who know the right answer.

During the workshop there was one word that leaped out at me and turned on the lights. It was brought up by Camilo Vila, from Columbia and doing his PhD in the Netherlands. The word was "Healing". Yes, healing is a crucial part of learning. I feel it. Among other things learning can be threatening and painful and it can squeeze and wrench at your, and a community's, identity. Does it ring bells with anyone else. I would like to think of some examples of healing. Where have I seen it integrated in the processes of learning? And I'd like to ponder more on how to integrate it into designs for learning.

Tags: KM4DevBrighton, learning, reificationparticipation messymethods

Flexible learning ...

2006-07-19T20:25:00.000+01:00

It's that time of year ...
Context: third year degree students at the Business School where I work. It goes something like this (in Portuguese):

Dear Teacher
You don't know me as I have never attended any of your classes, nor have I made any contact with you. This is because I have been very busy because I have a sick aunt/I am a working student/I can't speak English ...
Neither have I attempted either of the two Evaluation Systems we have had to pass your discipline (Avaliação Continua ou Exame). However, I will now attempt the final chance I have to pass the discipline.
Please understand that this is the only disciplina I have em atráso. If I don't pass your discipline, then I will not pass the year and I will not go to the fourth year. Please also understand that eu tenho muitos dificuldades em inglês; it is very difficult for me to do a discipline in English.
Send me all the materials that I need to study for the exam and tell me what the exam will be like. I will pass by your office on Monday evening before the exam to tirar duvidas (remove doubts).
Thank you for your understanding.
Without further ado,
your Student.

Tags: ensinosuperior

Portugal Positivo

2006-07-19T11:43:00.000+01:00

The biggest problem Portugal has - she said grandly - is that people don't know how to tell a good story about themselves. Not unless it's about football, food or male virility.

Then when I was looking for Drupal sites, or evidence of a Drupal community in Portugal, I discovered "Portugal Positivo". Great idea!

This site is doing just that - looking and telling the positive stories about Portugal. Sign me up, Scottie!

Tags: Portugal, DrupalPortugal

Thinking of Drupal

2006-07-19T11:39:00.000+01:00

Before going down to a workshop in Brighton last week I spent the weekend in London to catch up on family and also to have an informal meeting about Drupal (Open Source Content Management System). Yes, I'm thinking of converting to Drupal.

I was with Nancy White and we met up with David Wilcox and Dan, and Andy Roberts and Robert Castelo, a developer for Drupal. I appreciated the different kinds of sounds and smells as we talked in the sunshine outside the Barbican Centre in London, walked round the market for our picnic together and shared our food goodies. A different experience all together than doing things with them from my sofa!

One of the things that most appeals to me about Drupal is that if I design a space, then it can be easily copied by any groups that I'm working with, which is what I think they do in Civic Space. My recent courses/workshops have been just that ... setting it all up, so that people can then replicate (and adapt) it in their own contexts. I would like to use Drupal, which incorporates Web2.0 stuff, as either a home or a springboard for a learning event.

However, the confusing thing about Drupal is that it can do so much. So my plan is to join with friends, learn and do it together and pay for coaching from an expert once a week. An important factor about Drupal is that it has a strong community around it for getting suggestions and help.

Roll on summer!

Tags: drupal,

Participating in virtual communities

2006-07-17T21:57:00.000+01:00

That's cool. Our paper "Participating in international virtual communities" that I presented at the Webist conference was selected as one of the best papers to be published in a book by Springer publications.

I'm interested that our social perspective has made inroads into a hard-core information systems and technology conference. It's a sign of the times - well, in some places anyway!

I have put the paper in eSnips which reminds me that I have to organise all my papers in the same place and arrange the tags. I must also update my webpage ... and tidy up my blog. It's driving my crazy that my blogroll is not my blogroll! The blogroll on my blog comes from bloglines which I don't use. Instead I use NetNewsWire, which is one of the best things to have come from Mac (now taken over by NewsGator). But, in the meantime, I haven't had time to work out OPML which is what I think I need to put my bloglines into my blog.

Now that's the kind of thing that I look forward to doing in my summer holidays! How weird is that?

I've got it! I've got the answer.

2006-07-06T00:27:00.000+01:00

I've found the answer to my blog. I must write it down before it slips away.

"Em duas línguas ...some thoughts while living two languages, and all that those languages represent". That's what the title of this blog says. And in my blog video I say that it represents my thoughts while navigating through different worlds.

In this messy world I live in, my identity slips crazily in and out of focus as I cross academic, disicplinary, national, linguistic, and personal boundaries. Through my blog I've been working my way through that, helped by messy methods.

In writing this "literature review" we have just finished for the Community Informatics Research Network Conference in Prato in October I discover that those (often) confusing personal feelings I have are merely a condition of the late modern age in which we live. I even read Anthony Giddens, leading sociology writer of our time, talking about my feelings of being dislocated from my body. I thought I was "having a turn" but his chapter talks about it as "Ontological Security and Existential Anxiety" in his book Modernity and Self-Identity (pgs. 56-63)

So what does that mean, now I've found the answer? I think it might be a sign that I have to move to Wordpress. It feels like a new phase and part two of my blogging journey is soon to begin. Perhaps it means one more thing to do over summer.

In the meantime, if anyone would like to read and comment on our paper, which is only just in the review process, that would be wonderful. It also gives me a chance to try out the sSnips widgit (see below). Oh yes ... and we've got a page on our wikispaces for comments on the paper.

Prato_PA_JS_BT_Fin...

Hosted by eSnips

Tags: pratonarrative, identity, phd

Jumping into tenure with students

2006-07-04T09:49:00.000+01:00

I thought there wasn't anything about sex left to shock me, but this confession really takes the biscuit!

Unless it's a joke I understand that some young, male lecturers in the US feel that they have to sleep with students in order to get into the quadro (tenure)!

Now that's a cultural oddity, if I ever did see one.

Bilingual Continous Partial Attention

2006-07-02T11:50:00.000+01:00

I notice how much I procrastinate when I have to write something in Portuguese. And when I say procrastinate I mean really procrastinate. That's the same whether it's a short email or a report. I hum and hah and often end up just not doing it, regardless of how important it is. It's worse when I'm deeply involved in a workshop or piece of writing in English. At those times it becomes harder to write in Portuguese, maybe because of the shift in attention I need to make.

I suspect that operating with Continuous Partial Attention is harder to do in two languages because you need yet another piece of partial attention to be able to change gear between languages.

But it's not just about the language otherwise I could write what I wanted to say in English and then translate it (or even pay a translator). I can't write in English to people I have a relationship with in Portuguese. Not unless that is how our relationship developed. Saying that makes me realise how relational writing is for me, even for writing that on the surface looks quite functional.

As I write this I realise that what I'm saying is not entirely true. There are some people I can write to in Portuguese without a split second hesitation. I wonder why that should be? There are two people in particular I'm thinking of, one of whom is my orientadora (supervisor) with whom I have never had a conversation in English, who I write e-mails to in Portuguese, and who reads all my stuff in English. I have a similar linguistic relationship with the other person. If I think about it, what they both have in common is that they take it for granted that we speak Portuguese and that the sense-making is a joint enterprise between the two of us. I think they are good listeners and sense-makers.

But there must be more to it than that and now I'm curious. What is it that makes some people easier to talk or write to in Portuguese than others? And what is going on as we pay Continuous Partial Attention to things in more than one language? What do we need to be able to do in order to do it better?

Tags: bilingual, bilingualcontinuouspartialattention

Intellectual hygiene v messy methods

2006-07-02T00:26:00.000+01:00

Harry just suggested that I keep a different blog for personal, non-technical stuff. That reminded me of why I don't like Blogger. In Wordpress or Typepad, for example, you just categorise your different posts; you don't need different blogs for different parts of your life.

But then, that reminded me. My problem is the act of categorising, especially in the traditional, hierarchical way. How do I know what's personal and not personal? How do I distinguish between technical and non-technical? They cross over, change and are often both at the same time. It's those kinds of dilemmas that have got me interested in autoethnography (and also what fascinates me about tagging).

Lilia, making her doctorate reflections on Mathemagenic, writes a post about "Defining expertise and messy methods". She points to a great article by John Law, Lancastar University, called "Making a mess with method". I follow up John Law and see that he's written the next book I have to buy: After Method.

Most current methods look for clarity and precision. It is usually said that only poor research produces messy findings, and the idea that things in the world might be fluid, elusive, or multiple is unthinkable. Law's startling argument is that this is wrong and it is time for a new approach. Many realities, he says, are vague and ephemeral. If methods want to know and to help to shape the world, then they need to reinvent themselves and their politics to deal with mess. That is the challenge. Nothing less will do.

I also see Shawn on Anecdote talking about "wicked problems" that you have to be sufficiently intelligent and well-informed to remain undecided about. Wicked problems aren't easily categorised. Wicked problems need a mindset for working with patterns and meanings, where you have to be comfortable not knowing, yet still have a desire to know. With this mindset you find ways to explore patterns and meaning through your story and through narrative approaches.

Wicked problems and method are foremost in my mind as we work at finishing our paper for the Prato Conference. I'm very excited by what we've done. Messy method makes most sense to me, although it's still a bit on the fringe in academia. I must say that I am happy and impressed that my doctorate orientadora in Portugal (Universidade de Aveiro) is encouraging about me using it.

The very long title of our paper (a literature review) is now:

"A conference paper about narrative, community memory and technologies - or from piles of books around a sofa to an ongoing collaborative literature review in a wiki".

Tags: pratonarrative, autoethnography, CIRNPrato06, messy, methods, phd

Multitasking Attention Dexterity - I want some

2006-07-01T21:32:00.000+01:00

Nancy said I would love this post from from Jeffrey Treem about Fifty Ways to Take Notes and she's right. I love it! It's like opening the toy box - familiar and new toys, just waiting for me to play with them.

But here's a confession. I must be the only person in the world who keeps a flipchart with my to-do list in her sitting room. Yes, yes, I use Netvibes, ... and .... I also have post-it notes all over my sofa and on my screen. But the one tool I can depend on to keep order in my life is .... a flipchart.

I thought of my flipchart as I read an interesting article by John C. Tang called "Ubiquitous computing: Individual productivity at the expense of social good". He worries about designing tools that consider the social context around us as we use them and research about designing for the invisible vs. 'in-your-face'. Well, you can't get much more in-your-face than a flipchart opposite your sofa, but he doesn't mention that!

I know I have a serious case "Continuous Partial Attention" (Linda Stone) but Tang also refers to the "Multitasking Attention Deficit" (Hillman Curtis) of overcommitters and of Parker Torrence's counter notion of "Multitasking Attention Dexterity".

That brings me back to Nancy who must be the Queen of Mulltitasking Attention Dexterity. I'm still struggling through a serious case of multitasking attention deficit.

(Post-edit: Atribution of Continuous Partial Attention changed)

Tags: tools,, design,, articles

Is there a football match going on?

2006-07-01T17:35:00.000+01:00

Feeling irritable with all the big and small things I have to do this weekend I thought I'd take a break and go to the gym. Not until I got onto the streets, where there's not a sound or a person, did I remember that Portugal is playing England today in the quarter-final of the World Cup.

As I got closer to the gym there was a roar of ... something ... inside. I deduced that everyone is watching the football and decided not to go in. If Portugal is winning, I don't want to have to explain that I don't mind at all - as that sounds like sour grapes. If England is winning, I also don't want to have to explain that I don't feel anything - as no-one will believe me.

I did wonder about buying a t-shirt or underwear with the Portuguese flag or football emblem on it - to see if wearing it close to my body would influence my allegiance to the Portuguese team. Apart from the fact that they don't sell t-shirts or underwear in Jumbo with the British flag, I wouldn't do the experiment with something that had the Union Jack on it as I associate those kind of things with the National Front.

So, just for the record and in case you see me in the next few days. I hope that Portugal wins because that affects my local environment. But I hope that England wins so that I don't have to keep saying ... "I really don't mind who wins the football".

Various notes

2006-06-27T22:43:00.000+01:00

On the 28th of each month João Vasconcelos Costa and I choose a post from the others' blog and translate it and put it on our own blog. When I'm so busy I wonder where I'll have the time to do it, but it feels like something important to keep up ... This month I chose the post "Notas várias or Various notes. His first note reminds me of a post I wrote back in October.

"1. Failure. In the Público, 6th June: “The Minister of Science and of Higher Education opened a contest for universities and polytechnics to study the reason for students' bad results. They are also invited to come up with some activities that will promote success.” This piece of news has a particulalry instructive table to go with it. Average failure rate in higher education: 35.1%. In ublic Higher Education, 36.9%; in private (except the Universidade Católica), 31.4%. Breaking that down in sub-systems, public university: 33.6%, private university: 35.9% . Then, big surprise, the polytechnic: 41.2% in the public, 22.3% (!) in the private. Are there perverse factors influencing these rates? The reader can try and imagine. There I go, about to receive an avalanche of offensive messages …

"2. BCG. This isn’t something about vaccines, but about the Boston Consulting Group matirx. Everyone knows it, the distribution of evaluation by four quadrants defined by two axes, horizontal and vertical. The D Day, of the Público, always has one of those delightful examples, like the matrix of “pathetic-brilliant” and of “irrelevant-relevant”. A few days ago, a blog – I’m sorry that I lost the link – also used a funny BCG for the evaluation of Ministers. I would like to see this method applied to HE institutions. What would be fun is choosing the parameters of the axes. I leave that challenge to the imagination of you readers.

"3. Plagarism. These days, this (plagarism) is within the “competences” of our students’ work, thanks to the net. It’s worth reading this article in the Guardian. But also there is a plagarism detector for lecturers. Visit Turnitin.

"4. E pur si muove. An advertisement a couple of days ago, by an unidentified public university in the Lisbon area for the recruitment of its director: first degree candidates with or without connection to public office may apply. OK - fine.

"5. In the name of rose. I read an article by a Mr. Dr. X who signed himself as “university lecturer”. When I see this, I know what it means, but I wanted to take a look. Confirmed, Mr. Dr. X is a university assistant. By the looks of things he seems to be ashamed to be one.

"6. Worrying. According to the Guardian, "The elaborate research assessment exercise (RAE), in which the work of every active researcher in British universities is assessed by 67 different subject panels ranging from astrophysics to art history, will be carried out for the last time in 2008. After that, the quality of research - and hence the amount of funding universities receive from the government - will be judged largely on the basis of statistics such as grant income and contracts. (...) Bahram Bekhradnia, director of Hepi, fears the increased competition for research grants that will result could lead to more compliant behaviour by academics and the suppression of unpopular research." I hope that this fashion doesn’t get here, where we have an uncritical acceptance of bibliometrics."

Tags: universidade, ensinosuperior, educaçãosuperior, politécnico, edublog, blog

A sticky mind and a great voice

2006-06-26T14:21:00.000+01:00

The regular feedback form I have to give to students (3rd year business undergraduates) usually brings very similar types of comments. But this semester I got a new one (ponto fraco):

"Very sticky to her mind."

I'd love to know what it meant to that person, but the feedback's anonymous. The same person made another comment I haven't had before (ponto forte):

"Great voice."

I'm not sure how helpful they are in terms of feedback, but as post-it notes for my identity I aprreciate them all the same!

Honouring the emergent: desenrascanço

2006-06-25T12:42:00.000+01:00

I'm grateful to Nancy White who has been blogging the CTC2006 conference in Boston and my ears pricked up with her blogging of John Seely Brown's presentation. He's talking in the context of companies and his question is: How do you tap the creativity of the Global Mind?

This paragraph stands out for me:

Deep collaboration goes way beyond coupling business processes. If you look at any kind of organization, it has a formal, authorized part, formal biz process and the emergent part, the social fabric where work gets done, new ideas and groups form. The power is the interaction between the authorized and the emergent. How to weave them together to create a whole new view of how the organisation works. Ironic that IT has been designed to support the authorized, not the emergent. It may be the emergent where all the ideas come from, the business processes structure the work.

That dance between the authorized and the emergent is one that fascinates me in design - both in designing my own learning and in designing for others. I often reflect on it in relation to Portugal where you have to be good at both the authorised (and the accompanying interminable bureaucracy) and the emergent (desenrascanço) to be successful.

I'm sure that the potential in this tension between the authorised and emergent is not one that is being sufficiently tapped in Portugal. Desenranscanço is all about honouring the emergent. There are also other buzz-words of Web2.0 - like mashups - that seem second nature if you live and work here. But the problem is that the weight of the authorised and of the hierarchy kills this wonderful potential of the emergent.

I bet productivity and innovation would increase if there was a way of of honouring the emergent. Or rather, recognising desenrascanço as a strategy and supporting the creativity and synergies that it offers, rather than just letting it slip by as a reaction to inefficiency, or killing it off at school or University in the struggle to adopt the practices of other countries in Europe.

Tags: desenrascanço, emergent, creativity, learningdesign

Some wiki links

2006-06-24T22:29:00.000+01:00

Wikis jumped into focus the last couple of days in different ways:

1. From the e_Learning Centre Library about Wikis that "provides links to resources that take a look at the use of wikis for e-learning". The e-Learning Centre is a really helpful resource from Jane Knight.

2. Another link was about Wetpaint for "free click-and-type websites you can share with like-minded people". It's really easy to use and looks good visually (I like the way the ads are slightly more discrete than, for example, Wikispaces). But I couldn't see any way of integrating feeds into the Wiki - nor or generating a feed that I could subscribe to ... so it's kind of like what's the point?

3. The third is a "booki" about "Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration" by Jane Klobas (a friend). The book is available in Amazon, but the wiki that goes with the site is also a helpful resource. I think there is one short example in the book about how I used a Wiki with my students last year.

4. And finally, a link from Techsoup ("The technology place for nonprofits") about Exploring the World of Wikis that I got because I subscribe to Nancy White's del.icio.us tag for the Techreport.

Tags: wikis

Blogoforum and tagging

2006-06-24T19:20:00.000+01:00

Wow ...that's the way to go with discussion forums. There are no forums or sub-forums or theads in Blogoforum - you post your message and tag it. So you don't follow a discussion thread in the traditional linear form, you follow a tag - which may or may not lead to the linear steps of message with reply with reply etc.

Any one message has several tags, so you could get to the message through different routes.

I've long felt limited with your normal discussion forums which don't enable you to tag message. But what they are doing in Blogoforum goes further in that your post begins by you setting it up with a tag. To try it out I set up my own testing tag bevtrayner. It felt a bit sort of exposed in such a public forum, but the same principles inside a more personal community online environment would be just great.

I also liked the tag cloud for what "we are talking about" on the front page of Blogoforum which directs you to the tags with most posts. And "our people" directs you to the people who are posting the most. It currently doesn't have RSS feeds, which would make it even doubly potent. Imagine, you subscribe to the feeds for the tags that interest you. You would be informed as soon as someone posted something in a discussion and used that tag - you wouldn't have to either go look for the forum or subscribe to particular threads. Another feature is that, like in Flickr, you can also add tags to someone else's post.

There's such amazing potential in this kind of folksonomy and I can see some great uses you could put it to with multilingual discussion forums. But I think it's going to be a while before it catches on - it is such a whole different (subversive) mindset.

In one of my future lives (post-doc) I would like to see how tagging affected the types (and depth) of dialogues. And also I want to experiment in putting it to use with posts in different languages.

Fascinating stuff.

Tags: tagging, multilingualtagging

Blogistas e caracóis em Setúbal

2006-06-23T11:44:00.000+01:00

Confidências

Hoooray - another bloggers jantar (dinner) on Friday 3oth June ... another opportunity to push forward a secret agenda of making Setúbal a cool and networked place to be. So don't believe the stories you hear about Setúbal - just believe what you read on my blog.

Confidências, the restaurant, is not your normal Setúbal grilled fish restuarant - it's more like somewhere in the Bairro Alto. It's a place for lovers and illicit affairs (so some of us have to use our imagination...) The food has erotic names and the atomosphere is romantic.
(Price 15 Euros/pessoa).

Later we'll go to the new Galaria Art Kafé - not another Luisa Todi Bar. All welcome! There are 18 signed up to come including:

Centopeia and /Var/Log/ .
Songo's Place
Vitriolica turned Lucy.
Para inglês ver
São em Timor
Raquel Martins
Riot the world or else
Em duas línguas

If you want to join us, write in my comments or send me an email.

P.S. Caracóis (snails) doesn't refer to what's on the menu, it refers to friends without blogs who are coming.

Tags: Setúbal,, SetubalNow!

Me and Anthony

2006-06-22T23:00:00.000+01:00

I know it might look like I was enjoying living by the sea today. But the truth is I was curled up with "Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age" (Anthony Giddens).

Giddens, who I got to through structuration theory, and who some describe as Britain's best social scientist, had me hooked on what he had to tell me about my life and my blog.

Not that he mentions my (or any) blog - and he doesn't mention my name, of course. But of all the quotes, this is one that sums it up:

"...self-identity today is a reflexive achievement. The narrative of self-identity has to be shaped, altered and reflexively sustained in relation to rapidly changing circumstances of social life, on a local and global scale. The individual must integrate information deriving from a diversity of mediated experiences with local involvements in such a way as to connect future projects with past experiences in a reasonably coherent fashion."

This quote is one that just has to go in our paper...

What kind of life do I lead that the only way to get an uninterrupted reading of seminal writers is to go on a ferry ride to Troia-Comporta and spend a couple of hours on the beach!

Tags: pratonarrative, PratoCIRN06, phd, identity

Memory and forgetting - H. Masud Taj

2006-06-18T12:43:00.000+01:00

In relation to memory and forgetting Taj jogs my memory with another of his wonderful poems that send me into a labyrinth of squiggley thoughts like this one: "no bigness/ is big enough/ when you have/ fogotten/ how to forget."

ELEPHANT

Inarticulate
Blob of ink;
Nose and tail out of scale,
Ears that would be wings.
White tusks precede
The body’s darkness
Scanning eyes
Record the world.
Mind does not erase,
Does not overwrite;
Celebrates the excess
Of memory
With the memory
Of excess:

No bigness
Is big enough
When you have
Forgotten
How to forget.

- H. Masud Taj

Tags: memory, blackcube

Reflexive project of the self

2006-06-18T11:11:00.000+01:00

My paper with Patricia and John has, at last, found its way. There is a critical moment in a writing a paper when things start to flow. This one took us a long time as we spent many months reading, talking and writing bits of largely unconnected text. It got desparate as the deadline passed and we asked for a month's extension.

In our work we are purposefully stretching and crossing academic genre conventions by, among other things, presenting a paper in conjunction with a Wiki. The Wiki will be an ongoing text about remembering and forgetting in communities and supported by collaborative web2.0 technologies. It's a text that walks the talk as we remember and forget in our own community, supported by collaborative web2.0 technologies. The Wiki is an invitation for readers and reviewers to become collaborators of the text.

Inspired by the work of Carolyn Ellis we are using autoethnography as our research method. In the meantime I'm interested to trace my interest in autothnography which began last year when Lilia Efimova recommended a book by Ellis and where I went through the steps of being: curious, inspired, stimulated and resolved. Read Ellis and it's difficult to go back to being the same author you once were.

As I'm writing I am also cruising (again) through Anthony Giddens "Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age" His words resonate with our conversations about our process of writing the text:

"In the post-traditional order of modernity, and against the backdrop of new forms of mediated experience, self-identity becomes a reflexively organised endeavour. The reflexive project of the self, which consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives, takes place in the context of multiple choices as filtered through abstract systems." (p.5)

And my body tingles as I get one of those rare rushes where everything in life all falls into place!

Tags: pratonarrative, CIRNPrato06, PhD, autoethnography

Relationships, visualization, contactivity

2006-06-17T15:22:00.000+01:00

Recently I've lost a couple of blogposts. I don't know how, but they just disappeared because I'm doing too many things and trying to do them when I'm tired. It's very disheartening. Here's my second go at Ton's reflections on the Reboot 8 conference in Copenhagen. (A big thanks Ton for sharing your experience of Reboot - I really appreciate it). The three themes he identified were ones that resonate with my own practice

Relationships above Information/Technology
Ton talks about knowledge in organisations and the need to build stronger relationships around it, but it's a similar observation I have about learning in online communities. Participants and sponsorers of courses or learning events have high expectations of the information and the technology. It's not so easy to convince them that designing for interactions and relationships will bring better results than merely focusing on information and technology. I am still looking for a language to be able to talk about this dynamic between relationships and information and technology.

Visualization
Visualization is a way of seeing patterns. "Pattern watching is much more important that the individual pieces of information when you are trying to make sense of the world around you". Pattern watching is an integral part of my teaching repertoire but I haven't got good enough yet creating visuals. Next on my own list of personal and professional development is to do do a course on drawing and visuals. If anyone knows of one, please tell me.

Contactivity
"Technology helping you to be a social animal while on the move. Staying connected to your existing relationships and being able to spot the opportunities for new ones." This is such an important part of the mindshift with new technologies. I see in my practice how people view technology as an improved way of shifting more information. People talk of new technologies as a way of "exchanging" and "sharing" more information. But using technologies for shifting information is quite a different issue from using technologies for social connectivity. And social connectivity is where the learning is. Back to the need for developing the language for that.

Tags: reboot8, communitiesofpractice, sociallearning

Waiting for the creative power

2006-06-13T14:48:00.000+01:00

I can't believe I took (almost) a whole weekend off. It's the first time in years - with no exaggeration. I just did a normal thing and went to Porto. No touristic rides up the Douro ... just self-indulgent, hedonistic pleasure exploring Porto nightlife ... the clock went back 20 years. And nope, I didn't feel guilty either for not working nor for not doing anything that would make me more cultured. It's the longest I've been without a computer - and that's what it took.

Now I'm waiting for for the creative power to hit me. In Presentation Zen Garr Reynolds is writing some posts about cultivating your creative side. Quoting from Brenda Ueland's little book he says:

"...the creative power is in all of you if you give it a little time, if you do not always keep it out by hurrying and feeling guilty in times when you should be lazy and happy."

He could be talking about my own obsession when he says : "Idling or 'doing nothingness' is important. Most of us, myself included, are obsessed with 'getting things done.' We're afraid to be 'unproductive.' And yet, the big ideas often come to us during our periods of 'laziness,' during those episodes of 'wasting time.'"

Hey ho, that's my sickness. I cannot stand to waste time. Even lying on the beach has to be because I have to catch up on a sleep. And when I've caught up, then it's time to go home!

But what I want to know is ... how do I do nothing and also get all those things done? Oh dear ... I'm clearly not over it ... I need more training in unbusying myself.

Tags: time

Online Research Toolkit

2006-06-02T23:11:00.000+01:00

A neat Online Research Toolkit from Rebecca Hedreen, the Distance Education Librarian at Southern Connecticut State University. The toolkit is free Web2.0 tools and resources grouped in: Online Searching, Note Taking, Collaboration, Citation, and Presentation.

Tags: onlinetoolkits, Web2.0

Reflection - what's that?

2006-06-01T23:15:00.000+01:00

My curious realisation of the year has to be that lots of people in my face-to-face habitus - Higher Education, Portugal - don't know how to reflect. I only started to see that after one more person said to me - "But what do you mean 'reflect'. Tell us what to do."

It got me thinking (again) how the entire education system is geared up to teaching people formal or propositional knowledge (i.e. the state rather than the process). All the way through school, university and into professional practice your knowing is the result of what is theorised for you rather than by you.

I notice how my son thinks that being a good student means to estudar a máteria. When I challenge him on that, he says ... "Hey, if you want me to get a good nota (mark), then I have to be able to decorar a máteria (parrot the material)."

At the end of each of module in my own discipline (3rd year business sutdents) I spend 30 minutes with them reviewing what we did. Then they do a self-evaluation and share suggestions for improving their performance. It's rare, without prompting from me, to get them to offer suggestions other than study the máteria better, or assistir as aulas (attend the classes).

In contrast when I ask my daughter, who is at University in England how she'll get the First she wants, she says things like ... "We (our group) have to learn to focus more", or "I have to organise my notes and time better." Of course, their evaluation is quite different and much more varied. It includes group productions, take-home exams, open-book exams and a learning log.

This dedication in Portugal to reproducing the right answer, to looking for correction when things are "wrong", helps explain why I see more reflection-on-action, rather than reflection-in-action. Reflecting-in-action is part of the (learning) process of rethinking and even abandoning your theories and knowledge when things go "wrong". But in a positivist paradigm being "wrong" is about being wrong. And learning is about knowing what you do wrong so that you can correct it.

Now, with Bolonha, we see lots of seminars and workshop that use this same techno-rational discourse that views improving our professional practice as a step in solving the "problem" of deficência . Becoming better lecturers means selecting the "correct" (more advanced) technical means to achieve those certain ends - of correct teaching. For example, here is some information that I received today:

O curso destina-se a Docentes do Ensino Superior Universitário e Politécnico e pretende agir sobre as suas práticas, com sugestões concretas e de fácil aplicação para melhorar a qualidade e gestão da Docência.

("The course is aimed at lecturers in Universities and Polytechnics and aims to act on their practices, with concrete suggestions and easy application to improve the quality and management of Teaching.")

This focus on techniques that will be passed on by experts to improve our professional performance is a far cry from Schon's reflective practice in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them" (p. 40) Reflection is stimulated by surprise, it's an invitation to name and re-frame our practice.

Reflection is an opportunity to breach our own paradigms.

A reflective practitioner generates her own theory which speaks back to and revises her action. She is a skilled and informed designer of techniques - not an applicator of them.

But the Behaviourists have left their mark here. Learning is as much to do with correcting wrong behaviour or successfully studying the material. And applying the correct techniques will get you closer to the correct result. And that's what we want, isn't it?

Tags: ensinosuperior, educaçaosuperior, portugal

The literature review

2006-05-31T23:47:00.000+01:00

The Internet was down most of today so there was no getting away from it. I got stuck into the CIRN Prato conference where I'm co-writing a paper with Patricia Arnold and John Smith about "Memory and Forgetting: a review of narrative and technologies". The conference theme is: "Constructing and sharing memory: community informatics, identity and empowerment".

The deadline was today, but although we meet regularly on Skype (PT, DE, US) to talk about it and take notes, things didn't really start coming together until last night - and we got our request for an extension. It clicked once we framed memory in terms of voice and power. Who's voice is being heard? Whose story is being told? And whose is being left out? So whose memory is it?

My favourite quote from today came from Robin Usher et al (who clearly don't know my local universe):

“The quest for a ‘God’s eye view’, a disembodied and disembedded timeless perspective that can know the world by transcending it, is no longer readily accepted. What has taken its place is a loss of certainty in ways of knowing and what is known. What we are left with is not an alternative and more secure foundation but an awareness of the complexity, historical contingency and fragility of the practices through which knowledge is constructed about ourselves and the world.” (p. 210)

And these were some of my reflections on memory with this post-modern lens:

• Memories are produced through a process of languaging. Language is not a mirror held up to past experiences, it’s not a transparent vehicle for conveying memory. Memory can’t be separated from language, discourses and texts at work within culture. Language, discourses and texts are both the carriers and creators of memory.

• Memory is always partial and perpectival; it’s always shaped by language and discourse; it’s always situated within specific cultures which provide meaning and significance.

• We have to be self-reflexive about memory. We have to consider the implication of memory and power and unspoken values and the effects, or politics, of memory.

• Memory is a kind of story-telling – “constructing” and “reconstructing”. The advantage to seeing memory like this is that it foregrounds the illuminative, insightful and emancipatory possibilities of story-telling. But it can also be oppressive and dangerous.

Usher, R., Bryant, I. & Johnston, R. (1997) Adult Education and the Postmodern challenge: learning beyond the limits.London & New York, Routledge.

Tags: CIRNPrato06, pratonarrative, memory

shortText - saveTime?

2006-05-31T00:48:00.000+01:00

A friend asked me what I thought of shortText today. I've had a play with it before but had put it in the Web2.0 toy basket and forgotten about it.

Then I got it out again today as I head-scratch over ingenious ways to manage lots of different projects at once and stick to deadlines!

One thing I'm learning about managing projects is to scoop and do things up as you go along rather than putting them on lists or waiting 'till the right moment.

For example, I always have to write an evaluation report at the end of a course. One of the worst things to do is to wait until the project is over before I start collecting feedback on the process; the second worst thing is to say I'll keep observation notes of the process; and the third worst thing is to go back and wade through the course documents and conversations looking for comments and feedback that people made during the process.

So at the moment Nancy and I are keeping a Whiteboard in Basecamp where we just copy/paste the feedback or reflections people are making. We also jot down our thoughts (finished or not) as we go along. By the end of the course we'll have a Whiteboard full of the things we scooped up during the process. That will make it easier - and more informative - in writing up the final report.

But I want to experiment now with shortText. With shortText you get a unique URL for a short text you write. So, this is my idea. We scoop up feedback and thoughts during the process of the course, putting each one into shortTexts as we go along. Save the shortText in del.icio.us with relevant tags e.g. Projectname, ProjectEvaluation ... Then at the end of the course all thoughts related to Project Evaluation (for example) will be neatly filed in del.icio.us under its own tag.

You can also make comments on the shortText and it has RSS.

I think I might have found a time-saver!

Tags: shortText, projectmanagement

Bunker Roy in Lisbon

2006-05-29T22:44:00.000+01:00

Bunker Roy of Barefoot College will be talking publicly at two places in Lisbon this week about "Learning competences for sustainable technologies".

"Sanjit "Bunker" Roy is a product of Doon School and St.Stephen's College, Delhi. Since 1972 Bunker has been living in Tilonia, a village in one of India's largest, driest and poorest states, where he is founder and director of the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC), a voluntary foundation better known as Barefoot College. "Barefoot" refers to rural people and the poor.

Barefoot College was founded to provide basic needs such as drinking water, health and education services, employment and energy to a population of some of 100,000 people spread among more than 110 villages in the Rajasthan desert state. The college provides nine different areas of specialization: drinking water, night schools, health centers, solar power, environment, income generation, traditional media, people's action, and women's groups. All students are equipped with basic literacy, health and first aid skills and are then urged to move from one area to another, understanding their inter-relationships and learning the principles of community building and sustainability.

Over the years Barefoot College has become more oriented towards the use of traditional knowledge and skills by the local people in the villages to develop their communities. The college has set up 150 night schools in 89 villages for children who work during the day to help their families. To date, 15,000 children have passed through these schools, where village culture, history and skills appropriate to the regional context are privileged subjects.

Bunker and his wife the noted social activist Aruna Roy have won many awards including the Arab Gulf Fund for the United Nations (AGFUND) Award for promoting Volunteerism, The World Technology Award for Social Entrepreneurship, The Schwab Foundation for Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs, The Stockholm Challenge Award for Information Technology, The NASDEQ Stock Market Education Award, and the Tyler Prize."

ISCTE - 30th May in Sala B204 - Edifiício II (18h00);
Alameda Universitária, Rorre do Tombo - 31st May (14h30). Simultaneous translation English-Portuguese.
Entrance - free.Information in Portuguese.

Doctorates in Portugal

2006-05-28T16:18:00.000+01:00

Last month João Vaconcelos Costa and I didn’t manage to our blog translation, but we are now back on the case. I was interested in this article by Miguel Araújo (a guest on JVC's blog) because I have never given much thought to the different ways you defend your thesis in different countries. I’ll be defending mine in Portugal. I already find it interesting that I gave the name of an international seminal writer in my area who would like to sit on my Board - but I was told this was only possible if there was no-one in Portugal working in this area. Does that mean I must aspire to the Portuguese academic community and not the international one?

So this is my translation:

Doctorates in Portugal
Miguel Araújo

The discussion of a doctoral thesis has two objectives. The first is an academic evaluation of the work. The second is a public presentation of the results. In Portugal (as in Spain, France and other countries traditionally Roman) the defense of doctoral theses mixes both these components. The result is that neither one nor the other actually gets done.

The defense of theses are protocoled sessions where an excessive number of evaluators – one of whom, astonishingly – is the supervisor – puts forward half a dozen questions of no consequence. Rarely does a thesis fail and the key question is if the thesis deserves a “distinction and laudem”. As there are no objective criteria to classify the thesis the laudem is arbitrary, undermining its value and mostly indicating the sympathy and strength of relationship between the supervisor and members of the jury. So the defense of a thesis becomes a sad, formal ceremony devoid of content. Even more serious, they promote the practice of a “gentlemen’s agreement” which is fine in politics but not so good in Science.

In the United Kingdom the procedure is the opposite. The public presentation of the results is relegated to academic meetings and congresses for which the defense of the thesis is a discussion behind a closed door, with two evaluators where the supervisor can’t participate. The discussions are hard and without the formalities of protocol (I say from my own experience). In these discussions recommendations are often made to change the thesis, which could be one-offs (when all goes well) or more substantial ones (when things don’t go so well). To avoid being arbitrary the result of the evaluation is to pass or not to pass. The concept of “distinction and laudem” doesn’t exist.

The British system has the advantage of requiring work from fewer evaluators. It’s an advantage as it reduces the pressure on the market of evaluators. On the other hand you don’t invite evaluators just to make up the numbers. Those who are there have something to say. Getting rid of the “show” component reduces the unnecessary pressure on the candidate and encourages a more conducive atmosphere for a substantial evaluation of a thesis; an evaluation with consequences as it’s not common for a thesis to pass without alterations. The sad side of the defense of theses in the United Kingdom is the loneliness of the act. Countries with a Latin tradition like the show and the defense of the thesis is an important day in the life of a candidate.

To be sure of the seriousness of the evaluation and to give it some sense of show there is a third way: the Finnish one. In Finland the evaluation and the public presentation are separate events. The evaluation is done in writing. That is, you send your doctoral thesis to three evaluators. They have to read it and make the necessary suggestions. The candidate then has a certain time period to incorporate the evaluators’ suggestions. The editing work is reviewed by the president of the jury who could decide to resend the thesis to the evaluators. Once the final version of your thesis is accepted you can organize your public presentation. This presentation is started by a speech given by the doctoral candidate, followed by a debate with a world specialist of the theme. Their role is not to evaluate the thesis but to facilitate a public discussion about the thesis. The specialist’s role is to make the candidate shine. Never to humiliate.

Separating the process of evaluation from the show guarantees that each of these acts is productive and gratifying. It also reduces the costs of the ceremony, as there are only the travel and accommodation costs of an external academic. The evaluators are in written contact. With this process you also ensure the quality of the evaluators, as the criteria of geographic proximity doesn’t always coincide with the criteria of academic relevance of the evaluators.

A change in the system of the defense of theses is important to ensure the credibility of the act. Securing the credibility of the act would be contributing to the health of the Portuguese academic world and with it the quality of people doctoring in this country.

(Published inAMBIO)

Tags: ensinosuperior, Portugal, highereducation, blogtranslationcarnival

Technology - a woman's thing

2006-05-28T14:13:00.000+01:00

The other day I was invited to suggest more women speakers for the SHiFT conference in Lisbon to take place in September.

Even though I had a million things on during that day, it doesn't explain why I didn't find it easy to immediately locate potential women speakers. And that got me wondering why I imagine that technology is a woman's thing.

Well, I have three sisters. The youngest is a senior interactive designer for the BBC website. She's a rare designer in that she was once an expert HTML coder. My other sister, since ever, has been installing computer hardware and software for large companies in UK and providing backup technical support. Years ago my third sister used to be a software developer for a company in Australia, but living now in the sticks outside Mombasa doesn't have access to Internet.

And of course, there was my mum. She had her personal webpage up before I had even heard of the Internet. Those were the days before Front Page - and when I look at what she did with photos, wallpaper and blanking out my face (*) I'm just gob-smacked at what she was doing ten years ago.

(*) Historic note: I was horrified at her for putting a photo of me on a WEB page, so she compromised by blanking out my face!

In fact my mum picked up her initial technology skills from me. Twenty-four years ago (gasp) I had an ALTOS computer with WordStar (and no mouse, of course) and my mum wanted to learn to use it. Separated from my dad she had made a big step going to live in UK and was looking for work. It was tough as her only work experience was as a telephonist for the Kenya police during the time of the Mau Mau in the 1950's. In her late 40's in Britain she didn't feel like she had much to offer. But she had put in a job application for a secretarial job which required good knowledge of WordStar. WordStar was an early word processing software, which she knew nothing about - so she came to stay with me so I could teach her. I was pregnant at the time and I will never forget us at the computer, me starting labour, and mum crying: "No, not yet Beverly, I've got to know know how to use WordStar first!"

Well, she did get the job and over the years moved on from there, eventually working for the British Red Cross in Devon, responsible for their office management and technologies.

None of us were trained in technologies - we all just fell into it. My designer sister studied as an artist, my technology sister studied child-care and sign-language, and the other trained in life experience. I'm in social sciences. When we get together - and stay away from political arguing - we talk people, food, cooking, clothes, sports and books - not technology.

So, I guess it's hardly surprising that in my mind - using and experimenting with technology has all the familiarity, warmth and tension of being a women's thing. That just seems obvious!

Tags: women

I heart Netvibes

2006-05-28T12:20:00.000+01:00

While I was enthusing about Netvibes to Nancy I realised (again) how each person's experience of tools is so different. And if we don't talk about it, we don't know how other people are using them.

My browser opens straight into Netvibes where I have the feeds for my calendar, photos from Flickr contacts, del.icio.us feeds, and headlines from the BBC, Guardian and Publico. I love it when I open my browser and the first thing I see is the latest photo from my flickr contacts.

However, the life-saver for me in Netvibes isn't all the feeds that greet me as I start up the computer - it's the "Bookmarks" and their tags.

I have at least five different projects on the go at any one moment and each project uses tools that are the same as or different from the other projects. In the past I used Prototype, an Ajax start page, where I kept different panels for each project. So each panel has a project and quick links to each tool in that project. But it just became a big mess with lots of panels. Also, I would have liked, for example, to be able to click on Wiki and get a list of the Wikis I have in my different projects. But with the panels you can only categorise under one panel title

As my Prototype got too messy I found myself using my my feedreader (NetNewsWire) as a sort of project organiser. I keep a folder for each project which contains the related feeds. But I also use the folders as a route into the different tool spaces. So if I want to check the BaseCamp list of ToDos in "Project CIARIS", then I go to NetNewsWire, click on the folder for Project CIARIS and click into BaseCamp through the link there.

But this system is a couple of clicks too many and doesn't work if a project has a site with no feeds. I need, for example, to keep consulting the CIARIS website, but it doesn't have a feed. So I then have to use my normal Firefox bookmarks, taking me out of that centralised headspace I need to manage so many different parts of my life.

The way my brain is wired I need is a way of organising my project bookmarks where I can get to places either through their project name or through the name of the tool. And sometimes through the name of a person.

So that's where Netvibes, another AJAX start page, has been my sanity-saver. In Netvibes I have a Bookmarks panel where I bookmark every tool or site related to my different projects. Each bookmark is tagged. So, for example in "Project CIARIS", that I'm doing with Nancy, I use esnips, Basecamp, CIARIS website and Moodle. Each of those tools is tagged with "CIARIS" and with "Nancy". So through this little panel on Netvibes I can click on, say, "Basecamp" and get a list of the projects I'm doing in Basecamp or click on "Nancy" and get a list of the projects I'm involved in with Nancy. Or I can click on CIARIS and get a list of the tools, sites or people involved in Project CIARIS.

It's very neat and keeps me sane. But, in talking to Nancy I discover that she doesn't find it nearly so instinctive. And it made me realise how individual these tools are. They are tools for a collaborative experience, but your experience of the tools is very individual. And I'm intrigued to know how other people manage their different projects and tools.

Tags: Netvibes, projectmanagement, Web2.0

Procreating bloggers

2006-05-26T23:17:00.000+01:00

Today I did an afternoon workshop with colleagues from across our five schools (*) to help them create a blog for their professional portfolio.

What did I re-feel in their experience as they started their own blog?

the delight in starting to construct an identity online;

the realisation that people are going to read it i.e. feeling accountable to something bigger than your department or School ...

a dawning realisation that if you write in Portuguese, then your audience - and therefore your identity - will be quite different than if you write in English;

a hint of the potency of new technologies and a sub-conscious realisation of the new relationships they could generate.

I've put the feeds for all the blogs into a Superglu account, so all the blog posts now appear on one Superglu page. Does that mean I'm suggesting that a Web2.0 technology is responsible for bringing people from across disciplines and across School all onto the same page?

(*) School of Business, Schools of Technology (2), School of Education, School of Health.

Tags: eportfolio, web2.0, educaçãosuperior

A great night!

2006-05-25T22:38:00.000+01:00

If you thought this was one of Setúbal's famous freshly grilled fish, you'd be wrong.

And if you thought it was a normal bar of soap, you'd also be wrong.

No, it's a bar of soap made from recyled cooking oil. Luis of Reciclamos brought it to the blogger + friends dinner last Saturday night.

It was a wonderful dinner - food from Cape Verde, great company. And 3 iPods and a computer!!

Without even asking someone took on the organisation of the next dinner. It will be in another special, not very well-known place in Alcube.

Criteria for being invited, if you're not a blogger? Something to say about Setúbal Now - or just simply cool!

Tags: SetubalNow, Setúbal

Using blogs in education

2006-05-18T22:55:00.000+01:00

Next Friday I'm giving a workshop - to my colleagues in the different schools in IPS - on the use of Wikis and blogs for creating a professional portfolio.

So my ears pricked up to see this interactive version of using blogs in education which is a remix of Scot Leslie's matrix of uses of blogs in education.

I think this remix could be helpful for getting people to think about the different ways of using blogs as a process - and not as a product.

My experience is that most people see online tools as a way of publishing or broadcasting their final product to an even greater number of people. Getting them to see that collaborative involvement in the process is where it's at is like speaking another language.

Tags: esceportfolios, education2.0

Bloggers change Setúbal now!

2006-05-18T11:59:00.000+01:00

Café Experimental, Setúbal is where it's at on Friday.

Seventeen cool people, mostly bloggers, from around Setúbal - including geeks, journalists, a photographer, an illustrator and colleagues from the local Business School have confirmed the African dinner, music and (if I have anything to do with it) dancing.

I needed a minimum of ten people to organise the dinner - but that quickly grew to 17 and there are at least eight people who couldn't come this time but want to come to the next one.

The Café is a new and unusual one for Setúbal although it's the same genre of those cafés in the early 80's in UK that sold alternative and Fair Trade goods - and a selection of worthy, herbal teas. For groups of 10+ they will do an African or an Indian meal (10 Euros a head).

Who knows ... maybe there IS a chance of stimulating local life in Setúbal. Maybe there's a chance that one of the most beautiful locations in Portugal won't fizzle out through apathy and mismanagement. We might even start getting people coming to Setúbal from Lisbon or Troia for a bit of a social life!

It's amazing what blogging can lead to. Sign up here for the next Setúbal party for bloggers and friends!

Tags: Setúbal, blogging

Tabblo

2006-05-17T06:41:00.000+01:00

See my Tabblo - "Urban ervas - Setúbal"

Oh no! Another fun photo thing from Tabblo. This is really neat - and I can easily upload photos from iPhoto, which I haven't found out how to do in Flickr. And you can easily integrate your photos from Flickr into Tabblo. Cool.

Zone 41 is responsible for my distraction this morning.

Tags: photos

SHiFT 2006

2006-05-17T01:25:00.000+01:00

Great initiative from folks in Lisbon, including some from Setúbal who I've written about before. It's a conference on "Social and Human ideas for Technology" in Lisbon in September.

Pedro Custódio of Centopeia describes it:

"We named the result of this ideas and intentions, SHiFT meaning Social and Human Ideas For Technology, and we hope it might create a central point for discussion of technology and it's role in society, whether the portuguese one or this new born global society we're talking about. SHiFT means essentially change, the idea that we're experiencing new developments every day as a society thru the use of technology. SHiFT for the principle that we don't have clear yet, what will this changes be, but we're assure that we're changing. A special desire for a SHiFT in the Portuguese society, that we want more and more technological. SHiFT for a more human approach to technology...

SHiFT aims to be simultaneous a celebration of technology and a gathering for people from different backgrounds with different experiences, working and living with this new emerging technologies. The main subjects for this year edition will be: People and Technology, Knowledge , New Forms of Economics, Blogs and Citizen Participation and last but not least, Liberty and Privacy on this new digital environments.

Tags: SHIFT06

Online emergence

2006-05-15T10:40:00.000+01:00

Andrew McAfee writes about the mechanisms of online emergence. The reason why Google and the Web works is not because it's a databank full of links - its an emergent system because it's the dynamic creation of countless people around the world interacting with each other via links as they create new content.

That is at the heart of the paradigm shift related to new technologies and learning. I can see that until that mindset click happens, people still use sites, blogs or wikis as a way of "sharing knowledge" i.e. passing on more links and information - whereas Web2.0 is much more than that. In this mindset tools and technologies are:

"increasing the number of people who are contributing content (and the ease with which they can do it), and increasing the number of ways to let content creators (and consumers) interact with each other. These new interactions are the further mechanisms, beyond linking, for emergence -- for letting patterns and structure emerge from low-level behavior."

Like a number of other researchers who take a complexity view of the Web, McAfee compares the Web with an ant colony:

Ant colonies are also highly decentralized, but they appear tightly orchestrated. Colonies have complex social structures and use sophisticated strategies to forage, defend themselves, and make war. This happens because each ant is 'programmed' by its DNA to do certain things (carry an egg, fight an intruder, go to where food is) in response to local signals (usually chemical scents from other ants, eggs, intruders, food, etc.). As ants interact with each other and their environment they send and receive signals, and these low-level activities yield high-level structure.

Complexity science uses the term emergent to describe systems like this. Emergence is the appearance of global structure as the result of local interactions. It doesn't happen in most systems; what's necessary is a set of mechanisms to do critical things like connect the system's elements and provide feedback among them."

While McAfee is referring to the workforce I can reinforce what he says in other contexts about the energy needed to help people feel comfortable with Web2.0 tools:

Everything I've seen indiates that the 'activation energy' required to get the current workforce comfortable with Web 2.0 tools, and so to create Enterprise 2.0, is pretty high. My executive education students usually have a deer-in-the-headlights look when we start talking about the new tools.

The tools themselves are not at all difficult to use. More complicated is the mindshift as you start incoporating them in your practice.

He finishes with a question which is one that I share, and which I hadn't realised would be quite so difficult until I did a recent workshop about them:

What are the best ways to get a Web 1.0 workforce comfortable using Web 2.0 tools?

Tags: Web2.0, COP2.0, POLEN2.0

Facilitating in a second language

2006-05-13T10:00:00.000+01:00

I've been reflecting on my facilitation online in Portuguese, particularly on a workshop I recently finished. Online communication is almost entirely text-based so your literacies in another language are really brought into focus. This is what I observe about myself:

Time (I). It takes more than double the time to write anything. Full stop.

Time (II). Whereas in English I can reply quickly and without a second thought, in Portuguese I can't. Many messages (i.e. fine-tunings in the negotiation of meaning) go unsent because it takes too long to get round to writing even a brief message.

Non-happenings. What you write is what people see and what exists. What you don't write doesn't exist. Therefore a lot of things don't exist when you are doing something in a second language!

Tone. It is very difficult to get the tone right. The magic of facilitation comes in the subtle inflexions; how you say it is as important as what you say. It's very difficult to get the tone right in another language.

Social relations. Portuguese writing reflects the subtle and complex hierarchy of relationships between people and people's roles. I don't have a very good notion of my status in any language. While that doesn't matter when I'm operating in English (where the language is more equalising anyway), when I'm operating in Portuguese it adds another layer of newness for people already struggling with the strangeness of an online experience.

Risk-taking. The more fearful participants are about taking risks with the technology, the less confident I feel about taking risks or making mistakes with the language.

Identity. I'm still unclear about the ways this impacts on my identity, or my different identities in different languages, but I know it does.

Tags: multilingual, languages, reflections, identity

No Learning Patents

2006-05-12T10:38:00.000+01:00

Sign the petition:

"This petition aims to alert European authorities and policy-makers to the dangers of software patents, and particularly to the negative impact they will have on education. The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to support and enhance teaching and learning, including e-learning, is now recognised as a key element in providing education which meets the needs and abilities of students, and prepares Europe to participate creatively, technologically and economically on a global level."

Google knows ...

2006-05-12T09:10:00.000+01:00

My personalised Google Homepage couldn't have come up with a more personalised Quote of the Day. It's from Pablo Picasso:

I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

If you inserted "with other people", you would get also get the idea of learning in communities of practice.

Having a turn!

2006-05-11T16:19:00.000+01:00

My body may look like it's just sitting on the sofa. But in reality I'm rushing from room to room, person to person, task-to-task in a social universe located inside my computer.

Could that be the reason why me and my body keep getting out of synch? I can be talking to someone, brushing my teeth or giving a presentation when suddenly I feel like I've been dislocated from my physical self. It is very disconcerting. Today I found myself coming out of the lift on a different side of the lobby to my body!

Until I was around sixteen I used to think I was leaving my body at night. Sometimes when I got back to bed I lay in the opposite direction to where my body was - for fun. I had to be careful about falling asleep without getting me and my corpse back together otherwise I would wake up and crash into the wall as I swung out of bed. I thought, like masturbation, this night-time activity was something everyone did but no-one talked about.

Today I'm wondering if I'm showing symptoms of overdoing it ... or if my next post will be describing men in white coats!

The "C" word

2006-05-08T23:05:00.000+01:00

As I got out of bed this morning I heard in the news headlines that "peritos" (experts) in Brussels were predicting that Portugal would be the poorest country in Europe by the year 2050.

Wow - thought I - people all over the country will be feeling very content. Yet one more story to prove how poor Portugal is. One more piece of the jig-saw puzzle - Portugal is in dire straights and that there is nothing we can do about it.

I have a theory, based on nothing empirical, that lots of people in Portugal love a story that shows how wrong things are. At risk of being seen as not-a-serious-person I wonder if there really is anything wrong in Portugal - or if it's just a story that has become so vivid and widespread that people have started to live it. To be trapped by it. To make it part of their ... C-u-l-t-u-r-e.

Except in education, of course. That's never a story. That's true!

Tags: Portugal, culture

Design v. emergence

2006-05-07T14:15:00.000+01:00

Andrew McAfee writes about Enterprise IT v. Enterprise2.0, but where I am it applies to Education and also non-profits.

He writes about the tendency to assume that collaboration technologies need to be thoroughly "set up" in advance, rather than letting the structure emerge over time. One of his examples is that users get identities before they start using the technology which assigns them certain roles, privelages and access rights and excluding them from others. The role is usually their role in the existing organisational hierarchy. For example, in a recent course I was involved in people were assigned names like "Expert", "Debutante", "Tutor"...

McAfee's point is: "How much of this structure is necessary? How much is valuable? Well, the clear success stories of Web 2.0 demonstrate that for at least some types of community and collaboration, none of it is."

His context is enterprise but it's what I see in my world of education too. Existing hierarchies are trying to use IT to maintain, reinforce and control work processes in the status quo and to broadcast their message to more people, not to indicate any mindshift about the nature of learning.

McAfee doesn't think the situation will last long because "freeform IT-based collaborations are yielding great results".

But I'm back to my ongoing question - can freefrom collaboration and learning work if people aren't ready for it? Do you have to structure learning environments so that people learn to be unstructured? Striking that balance between a structured design and emergence is a fundamental design parameter that's different for different people and for different groups. It's also a threatening one ... and a difficult one to get right.

Tags: designforlearning

Identity Crisis

2006-05-07T13:31:00.000+01:00

identitycrisis
Originally uploaded by Madge Webb.

A fab. drawing from Madge Webb of her different identities.

Today I think I'm more like Monkey girl but with aspirations to be glam.

The blogosphere: multilingual and deeply international

2006-05-02T21:57:00.000+01:00

David Sifry writes part 2 about the state of the Blogosphere "On Language and Tagging". Technorati have started tracking the primary language of each blog that they track and getting some idea where the wordwide growth of blogging is happening and what were the trends. Here's his summary of what they found.

* The blogosphere is multilingual, and deeply international.
* English, while being the language of the majority of early bloggers, has fallen to less than a third of all blog posts in April 2006.
* Japanese and Chinese language blogging has grown significantly.
* Chinese language blogging, while continuing to grow on an absolute basis, has begun to decline as an overall percentage of the posts that Technorati tracks over the last 6 months
* Japanese, Chinese, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and German are the languages with the greatest number of posts tracked by Technorati.
* The Korean language is underrepresented in this analysis
* Language breakdown does not necessarily imply a particular country or regional breakdown.
* Technorati now tracks more than 100 Million author-created tags and categories on blog posts.
* The rel-tag microformat has been adopted by a number of the large tool makers, making it easy for people to tag their posts. About 47% of all blog posts have non-default tags or categories associated with them.

Tags: blogging

Dialog - memories and forgetting in Communities of Practice

2006-05-02T18:49:00.000+01:00

Wonderful! Some of us in CPsquare have now booked the Veb Guest House in Florence for our Dialogue on Communities of Practice - memories and forgetting. It is a beautiful antique building just 10 minutes from the Duomo and has one of the highest terrace rooftops overlooking the city. I think we'll have a wonderful few days reflecting on our work and pursuing specific lines of questions - using each other as sources of inspiration. Master and apprentices welcome if you are interested in joining us (max. 20 people). The Dialog will run between the 5th and 8th October.

The questions we'll be starting with are:

Domain:
* What are our practices for keeping track of memory and learning in communities of practice? What do we forget?
* When do our practices fail us?
* Similarly for claiming a role in the world, do we claim our contribution properly? Do we disguise it? Forget it?

Practice:
* Through what relationships do we discover new skills and share what we know? How do we reinvent our view of the world for each other? How do we coach each other (before, on the spot and afterwards, at a distance)?
* What traces are we leaving for our work on communities of practice? What technologies and practices are there for supporting these traces? How do we get people to sponsor us in our practice?
* What is the nature of rigor in our relationships of sense making about our practice? How do we formalise the reputation that comes with our expertise? How do we live and engage with the ambiguities in our practice?

Community:
* Who is here? Who is not here? Why?
* What does that say about how we’ve spoken about our learning in previous interactions? What relationships have we sustained and what relationships have fallen away? Is there tolerance of the ambiguity of being a peripheral participant?

Part of our own history and memory is the Lisbon Dialog (which took place in Setúbal, not Lisbon). At the end of that Dialog we did a one day presentation in the place where I work. After this Dialog in Florence we'll be presenting a short workshop with our reflections at the Community Informatics Conference at Monash University in Prato.

Tags: pratodialog CIRNPrato2006

Influence of bloggers

2006-04-30T17:07:00.000+01:00

Antoine points to this article in Guardian Unlimited reporting on research that shows that bloggers have a disproportionate influence on public opinion and on business:

Its study suggests that although "active" web users make up only a small proportion of Europe's online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.

It suggests that grassroots campaigns can become so visible that decisions are being shaped by a small number of activists.

Mr Reynolds admits the idea of small groups being able to pressurise wider decisions is nothing new, but those who ignore online buzz do so at their peril: "You can bury your head in the sand, but very quickly you'll look like a very old-fashioned company."

Tags: blogs

Deep breath: I will never keep up

2006-04-30T12:45:00.000+01:00

I have to-do reminders on my i-cal, I have to-do post-its all over my desk-top, I have paper post-its stuck all round my work-space. I have a project management space in Basecamp. I even have a flip-chart next to my sofa with the very most urgent things I have to do this week.

And that's not counting the growing pile of books and papers which is starting to block the sun from the window.

I read Kathy Sierra on Creating Passionate Users gives some tips for combating Information Anxiety. It's called the myth of "keeping up".

The most helpful advice is at the end:

... take a deep breath and repeat after me, "I will never keep up. Keeping up is a myth." And if it makes you feel any better, add, "John isn't keeping up either."

So there it is. My Zen moment of the day: I will never keep up. And yes, I do feel better knowing that John isn't either!

Life!

2006-04-28T13:58:00.000+01:00

Where are the stories of scholarly success?

2006-04-27T09:42:00.000+01:00

I won't do it! I won't contribute to the story of insucesso escolar in Portugal. I will not talk about the shocking level of scholarly failure. And yes, I do know that could undermine my credibility as a docente (lecturer). I am aware that if you want to be taken seriously as a docente in Higher Education, then you must shake your head and tut and mutter the words at least several times a day.

In fact I have just received pages of numbers in Excel tables that prove to me the failure of our students. Each row tells me the disciplines they are failing and each of the many columns tells me how many fail at every moment of evaluation. I check the failure rate of my own disipline - it will be like a badge: the higher the failure rate in my own discipline, the more I will belong to the growing band of teachers concerned about students' lack of culture, education and study skills.

Looking back to the turn of the 1900's, let's just imagine for a moment that John Dewey had won (*) and not Edward L. Thorndike. Whereas Thorndike's plotline was embedded in a reverance for numbers and faith in empirical data, Dewey's plotline for social science research was one that was concerned with humans, their relations with themselves and with their environment. Studying experience was his starting point and the key term for social science inquiry.

But Dewey lost for a while and the story scripted by Thorndike became pervasive and a metanarrative for education. And judging by the pages of statistics that tell the story of the scholarly failure of Portuguese students, it's still the grand narrative round here.

But hey! Dewey's back folks... And Lyotard has given metanarrative a serious knock on the head. Education, experience and life are inextricably intertwined. Our students are much more than their nota. Their lives are filled with complexities, hopes, dreams, wishes and intentions. And they live the stories that we tell about them. Our stories are their education.

I want to hear the good stories. Where are the stories of scholarly success? I want to hear them so that our students can live them, reaffirm them, modify them and create new ones. And I don't hear those stories in rows and columns of numbers that prove their failure.

(*)"John Dewey's Defeat: Studying Education in the Research University 1890-1990" by E.C. Lagemann (book in progress)

Tags: ensinosuperior, highereducation, narrativeinquiry

Economist survey - audio interviews

2006-04-27T08:20:00.000+01:00

Here are the collection of audio interviews from the Economist that they used for their survey of new media:

Blogs as leading indicators
A discussion with David Sifry, Founder and CEO, Technorati

The demand for everything
A discussion with Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired

Wide world of wikis
A discussion with Jerry Michalski, founder and president of Sociate

From Gutenberg to Mcluhan to What's Next
A discussion with Paul Saffo, Director, Institute for the Future

Author interview
A discussion with Andreas Kluth, Technology Correspondent of The Economist

Tags: web2.0

Technology - the solution (II)

2006-04-27T00:58:00.000+01:00

After three hours on Skype and at least as many searching and playing Nancy and I are still searching for the right technology for a particular learning community. And that was just today! Our search began a few days ago, with Nancy's post here.

We want to find a multi-user blog system that integrates multiple users. And we want it to be very very simple for the users and replicable for future communities in this network. Multi-user wordpress doesn't do the trick and there isn't enough time to set up Drupal. Any ideas?

So - just in case there is anyone reading this who thinks I'm being deliberately evasive when I hum and hah about the technology solution for their community of practice, then I hope I'm convincing you that if you multiply the number of technologies by the number of contextual considerations - it adds up to a lot of thinking!

To get a feel for some of our fun, see Nancy's review about Group.s for what looks like a very interesting social groupware and her review of Vaestro for some cool audio forum software.

Tags: CoP2.0, communitiesofpractice, virtualcommunities

Request from Qumana

2006-04-26T09:13:00.000+01:00

One comment in my last post was from Jon of Qumana asking if I know anyone who would translate the commands of Qumana to Portuguese. I wish all tools were tranlsated into Portuguese and I will put it on my to-do list, but my list is so long that it could take a couple of years before I get to it. In case someone else can do it, here's the message:

Hi .. Jon from Qumana here. We hope you like using it, and will welcome any constructive feedback as to how to make it better for you.

And ... I have a question. I notice that you are in Portugal. The design of Qumana is such that it is quite easy to make a different-language version of it, by translatiung the commands and a relatively short list of text strings.

I am wondering if you, as a blogger, might know of someone (and maybe even yourself) who might be willing to volunteer to undertake the two or three hours of translation work required so that a Portuguese version of Qumana mightbe available?

About making a great tool better, Jon - here are my two niggles in WYSIWYG. One is that the paragraph spacing seems too wide and the other is not having blockquote (if you indent one paragraph, the whole thing indents).

Talk about being fallible!

2006-04-25T12:24:00.000+01:00

I use a desk-top blog editor, Qumana, to write posts to my different blogs. It's a great tool but you have to remember to send each post to the right blog.

After a semester of hardly saying anything on the blog for students, can I believe that I just accidentally sent the last post with that title to my students' blog! That really has to count as a big mash-up of worlds and identities.

They will be hungry for news about moments of evaluation and "works", so deciphering why I should have sent a post like that will require a whole heap of sense-making skills!

I deleted it faster than jack-rabbit, but I think most people subscribed to the blog through email.

Ho hum ...

An opportunity to talk sex

2006-04-25T12:23:00.000+01:00

Unless there is a chance of some interesting conversations, I rarely go out. But last Saturday night I gave my sofa a rest and went to a bar in Lisbon. I had a great conversation with a young couple who run the Portuguese fetich and BDSM online forum and organize the community related events. We had so much in common!

We were talking about running online forums and although they saw their problems as specific to Portugal and to the BDSM world, their stories would resonate with moderators and facilitators from most places in all communities. To paraphrase what they said:

1. Time. It is very-time-consuming moderating discussions and keeping alive a sense of community. Unless you've done it, no-one can imagine how much time it takes. The paradox of things looking visible because it's online when most of the work you do is invisible.

2. Most people go to an online group to see what they can get and not what they can give. The idea of shaping the community, the events and its learning is not a familiar one and people wait to be given rather than looking for ways to give.

3. When you do something people are quick to jump in and complain and to tell you what you are doing wrong. Like she said - you give one of your arms and there will be at least someone saying - why didn't you give both?

4. How you keep going even without positive feedback from members, keep experimenting and keep getting it wrong in order to make it better i.e you keep learning. And you have to keep your eye on the ball and remember the bigger reasons why you are doing it.

5. It's not easy for people to handle the ambiguity of diversity, rather than trying to explain or reject or control it.

6. In short, helping to build a community is an unrecognized act of love and has to be fitted in with competing work and other demands. Contributing to a community is a gift that you rarely get thanked for.

Hearing how they had risen to these challenges, about their persistence and imagination at dealing with people and problems, and seeing their sensitivity and sense of humour through it all and I realised that I could be talking to two of the most experienced and knowledgeable facilitators in Portugal. Their hands-on knowledge of social processes, learning and identity was really fine-tuned - and I was thinking that they would make excellent mentors for other community builders. It would also be great for them if they could join a wider community of facilitators who shared similar challenges and joys.

Now that would be a big leap from content to social processes! I wonder how many people could make it.

And yes, my kids despair of me. "Why, even at a bar in Lisbon, do you always have to bring the conversation back to learning and online communities!" I didn't dare tell them that I considered the evening a success because I think I managed to sell the idea of RSS feeds for their community site. I'm just a sad case of one-tunnel vision!

Tags: communitiesofpractice

Being uncertain and fallible

2006-04-25T10:07:00.000+01:00

In the Action Research discussion I'm following, but with no time to participate the subject of uncertainty has come up. Someone asks if it's possible to establish "uncertain" beginnings without losing the confidence of clients and colleagues and stakeholders.

This post-modern metaphor of journeying communities exploring mysteries together is all very well - but most of us are still working in modern contexts where being uncertain, fallible and non-holders of the truth is to lose credibility, not win it.

Dancing my way through post-modern and modern mindsets is a tough one - and I find myself hungry for stories that help me find meaning in both worlds. My uncertainty doesn't come from either belonging to post-modern or modern communities or mindsets. My very rocky uncertainty crises come from looking for meaning from both.

Tags: identity

Lectures as conversations

2006-04-25T08:57:00.000+01:00

A great 3 part series in the Economist about New Media, where it talks about a new mindset ... open-ended, horizontal conversations that can fail - and not just top-down broadcasting of "truth". Part one partially relates, to my previous post about presentations and also to what I said about learning as sense-making in the post before that.

In the words of David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a search engine for blogs, one-to-many “lectures” (ie, from media companies to their audiences) are transformed into “conversations” among “the people formerly known as the audience”. This changes the tone of public discussions. The mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Centre, “don't get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations”. That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility.

I see people still using New Media, including blogs, as a way of transmitting information to a greater audience ... rather than as conversations ... but that's to waste their potential.

Tags: presentations, learning, conversations

Jazz and the art of connecting

2006-04-25T08:49:00.000+01:00

A wonderful analogy from Presentation Zen between jazz and the art of presentation - and which can be applied to almost anything - especially teaching and learning. He uses inspiring quotes by jazz greats - see his post for the whole thing.

(1) “The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.” (Duke-Ellington)
The best communicators in the world are almost always the best listeners.

(2) “Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.”(Paul-Desmond)
I'm not sure I've ever been taught anything about making presentations, but I have learned a ton from observing great presenters...

(3) “Don’t bullshit… just play.” (Wynton-Marsalis)
Audiences today are busier than ever and have developed built-in "crap detectors" to filter out anything remotely insincere or shallow.

(4) “If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit!” (Louis-Armstrong)
... Practice, rehearse and make it great. But keep it real. Keep it human. And remember that it is about them (the audience), not us.

(5) “Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.” (Charlie-Parker)
Studying design and presentation, communication, etc. is crucial. But when we present, all that matters is that moment and that audience...

(6) “It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.” (Dizzy-Gillespie)
...Knowing what to leave out takes work...

(7) “You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.” (John-Coltrane)
... A poor presentation is not any better simply because expensive equipment is used to project images. Sincerity and respect for the audience matter far more.

(8) "When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them."(Don Cherry)
... Conventional wisdom is often the unwisest choice of all. "Conventional wisdom" about presentations is at best a prescription for mediocrity.

(9) “Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.” (Charles Mingus)
Many presenters -- very smart people -- either take something essentially simple and confuse an audience or simply fail to make their more complicated material meaningful to their audience. Simplicity ain't easy. In fact it's hard.

(10)“I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain’t music..." (Billie-Holiday)
Even if you have the same set of slides or the same key points from one night to the next, every presentation is different because every audience is different...

(11) “A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.”(Herbie-Hancock)
My best teachers as a child and my favorite presenters of today have this in common: they inspire, stimulate, motivate, provoke, and lead...but they do not dictate.

Tags: presentations

Technologies - the solution.

2006-04-23T11:57:00.000+01:00

If I was paid a euro for every time someone asked me - "but what's the best technology to use" for our community of practice I would be a rich lady! But, being someone with integrity, I'm rather poor. Instead I hum and ha and say, well ... you know .. it depends ... and .. um... really I need to know more about the context.

Let's be straight about it. There is no right answer. And anyone who tells you that they have "the solution" is either new to the game or has something to sell.

I'm working on a technology proposal with Nancy White - who is one of the most experienced people there is for working with communities and technology - and between us we have spent a good many hours in the last few days building up a picture and a context for the group we are designing for.

We've started with some questions that Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith suggest in their report on Technology for communities:

* What are the community activities that need to be supported?
* What is the technological context (access to Internet/ broadband, skills, budget)?
* What is the range of media to use (synchronous, asynchronous audio etc.)

We are also looking at people's different needs and expectations, especially those of:

* the project funders;
* the participants in the group;
* mine and Nancy's.

Also, the participants come from four different countries - what are the specific needs and expectations of people from different countries that we need to be considering?

We are opting for Web2.0 technologies (rather than a plataforma) because of the opportunities they offer for intersecting and networking and we've started thinking of everything from the simple, like mailings lists and discussion groups, to wikis, blogs and something more integrated like CollectiveX. Every technology and every combination of technologies has its advantages and disadvantages. And no one combination will be perfect for a diverse group with different levels of technology and community knowledge and skills.

In the meantime a base line criteria is that any technology we use must have RSS feeds. Not so much for the members of the community (most people still have difficulty with feeds) but we need to be able to integrate the feeds into the system we eventually choose.

Nancy and I, different timezones (Seattle, Setúbal) are planning and doing things in Basecamp with its shared "to do" lists, scheduling and whiteboards and in eSnips for shared documents. Except that it doesn't have an RSS feed eSnips is great fun ... you can even design your own little folder icon. It's those simple pleasures!

Tags: techreport, technologyforcommunities, cop2.0

Learning as sense-making

2006-04-22T14:57:00.000+01:00

I'm helping my daughter as she writes up her final dissertation at the end of her first degree in Theatre Studies in Manchester, UK. A significant part of her course was working with different Theatre companies and, because she majored in Prison Theatre, she did a number of workshops in high security juvenile prisons.

I am fascinated as she searches for and devours books and theories that help her make sense of her emerging practice. American anthropologists, Brazilian writers about theatre, subultarn theories, Bakhtin on heterglossia, carnival and parody and Foucault on sexuality - these are just some of the writers who talk to her about what she's doing.

From the beginning of the course she was encouraged to keep a log and a reflective diary, which is as much a part of her repertoire as reading books and writing essays. In it she takes notes of conversations and observations of ...anything ... She has learned that they are an integral part of sense-making, an important resource for helping her understand the world she's learning about and helping to create.

The other day a friend of mine said that her daughter was doing a course of Theatre Studies in Portugal but was fed up because they did very little practical stuff. That conversation reminded me of a fundamental mind-set difference in education in Portugal. Ingrained is the idea that you have to be taught something first, before you can go away and apply it. The entire school and Higher Education system is based on the paradigm of knowledge as object to be transmitted from one person to another and which then can be applied. Your aula prática is where you do exercícios. Practice means being a student who does excercises - it's not related to doing and being a professional.

That you should learn by doing and being and making sense of that process is an anethema to the whole system where so much power is invested in hierarchies, in downward transmission of content, and in people trying to control learning rather than valuing the learning that happens. It's what I see at every level of the system, not just the classroom. And I think that the high level of insuccesso escola is just the first manifestation of what is to be tested in a more global social and economic system. Until the whole systemic problem of top-down vision, thinking and control is challenged, I don't think there is any hope for creating real change.

Tags: Tag: ensinosuperior, learning

Rich relationships

2006-04-22T13:36:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I met João Vasconcelos Costa of Reformar a Educação Superior, my tranlsation partner, online pal whose blog is one of my principle ways of keeping up with conversations related to Ensino Superior in Portugal.

It reinforced for me that way that knowing someone online changes your relationship with them when you meet them f2f and the way that changes your relationship with them online... The two modes make for a different type of understanding and reading of a person than you get if you know someone only in one mode.

In fact, knowing someone only f2f seems so one-dimensional that you wonder why people do it! Only communicating with someone same-time same-place is like always talking to them through a glass door.

Tags: sametimesameplace

The power of conversations

2006-04-22T13:23:00.000+01:00

I am flattered that my blog post about the power of conversations in "Making things, like gay marriage, happen" was translated into Portuguese and put in Zona Livre, a magazine by Clube Safo.

Through memories on my blog, conversations that I had twenty years ago with members of the ANC from South Africa - when I was campaigning in UK for aid, trade and human rights - have crossed time, technologies, cultures, languages and communities to arrive in a magazine for the rights of lesbians in Portugal.

Just don't tell me there isn't something magic about blogs and conversations!

Tags: conversations

Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky

2006-04-22T11:13:00.000+01:00

Ali G is just such a phenomena. I cringe as I watch him, fall about laughing, and am amazed at his audacity as he paradies the most holy of the holies and as he turns political correctness on its head.

This time he caught Noam Chomsky in an interview. He must get permission from people afterwards to show the interviews - I guess he pays a really good PR person to do it.

Thanks to no good schooling

2006-04-20T00:53:00.000+01:00

I'm glad that my schooling was so bad. Between the age of 9 and 15 I was at a new school in Limuru, Kenya. There were only 12 of us when I first started. We got there by taking the overnight train from Mombasa to Nairobi and were picked up in the combi and taken up to Limuru. We slept with the windows closed to keep out the mosquitos, robbers and lions.

At school the Head's eldest son taught us. The middle son looked after us and the youngest son was kept out of the way as he dabbled in drugs and stuff. Every now and then we got teachers coming from England who earnestly tried to teach us. On Sundays the missionaries came ... they had some good songs.

The Head's husband was madness himself. He lined us up in the morning and asked each one of us individually: "Are you tickety boo?" And in turn we would answer "Yes, Major. I'm tickety boo." Sometimes he gave us cod liver oil.

We had very few lessons. The woosie-wet teachers who came out from England didn't last long. Only those who taught us how to play games - like Mr. Sykes who taught us badminton. An exception was Mr. Nichols who taught Geography. I don't know why we listened to him...

The rest of the time we were outside, unsupervised, creating our universe. We built an entire village in the bush on the periphery of the school bounds (beyond that was the wild). Bundu-bashing through the undergrowth we built ourselves houses. We created an entire economy based on buying and selling cakes (made from the Limuru-red soil and pretty flowers) and crockery made from carved out custard-apples. Our banking and currency system was the custard apple seeds.

We played British bulldogs, marbles and skipping. There was no TV, radio, indoor toilets - and often no water. We tried to dig a swimming pool.

David, the Head's eldest son, set up a wonderful rope swing which you could daringly swing on over the pigsties. We created an annual three-day safari rally with dinky cars. We weren't allowed out when Jeremy-The-Bull was out of his field - legend had it that he had killed two people. Even so, we did go through a phase of playing "risk" by running through his field to the loquart tree (nesperas) while he was there.

At 15 my parents whisked me off to a strict boarding school in England which counts as two of the most miserable years of my life. It was there I had a cold, sharp shock about different realities, different worlds and different values. I quite easily managed to pick up lots of O'levels despite having no preparation.

I feel immensely privelaged that for most of my schooling we had time to play, to make things happen, and to create a shared, glorious imagination. I am sure it was the best preparation for being able to participate, to create and to give. I think it prepared me to find things out for myself and to think outside the box.

Above all, I think it prepared me to learn...

Reasons for living!

2006-04-16T12:13:00.000+01:00

It sounds crazy but one of the reasons I love Portugal is the variety of grasses. Just on my dog walking route around the block ... after a couple of days rain ... a square metre of pathway has such a rich ecology of plants and insects. And grass.

It's the grasses that bring me so much pleasure ... each one so detailed and so esquisite, with each species so different in shape, colour and texture. All growing bunched up together. I find the sensation of looking at them quite overwhelming. In a different life I would be drawing and recording each one.

How do you value slow and fast innovation?

2006-04-14T23:48:00.000+01:00

The only keynote speaker I managed to hear something from at the Webist conference said something that set me thinking and has led me to a small epiphany. He said:

And nowadays you have Wikis and blogs. They are so easy to use that even the most digitally illiterate can use them.

That is just clearly not true, I cried out in my mind! Many people don't know how to use them. And they don't know how to use them for social and cultural reasons, which are at least as important as technical ones. Some reasons I see why people don't find it easy:

* you are afraid to use them in case you make a mistake. If you make a mistake you might "break" something. So you don't try.

* you learned duing your life that making mistakes is wrong.

* if you make a mistake and you don't know how to fix it, then your mistake will be public and everyone will know you've made one.

* you learned to follow rules and guidelines and in the absence of those you feel like you don't have permission to try.

* you don't know where to go for help - especially if you haven't ever used user forums or FAQs or a tutorial embedded in the system.

* you leaned during your life that asking for help was a sign of weakness.

And if in all that you don't really have a context or see the objective for using the tools, they why would you bother to prioritise any time trying them out?

That lead me to my next thought which is that I've been asking some wrong question recently about distributed or virtual communities. It's not - what can we do to help people use the tools? The question isn't even: what practices should we be cultivating to help people make sense of the tools? I've got to get back to asking: how can we improve the full range of our social practices so that we are harnessing the knowledge, experience and networking capabilities of people who are and people who are not using the tools? Which, as it happens, is also what our paper was about ...

Serependitiously, I read Jane at creativity machine who says:

We have a lot to learn from the practices of late adopters, as well as those of the thoughtful, the sceptical, and the reluctant. We should watch them. We should listen.

Somwhere in there lies a key. I've got to keep chewing on it.

Tags: mindset, distributedcommunities

Education2.0

2006-04-14T22:15:00.000+01:00

After giving my paper at Webist I had a great conversation with Antonio Fumero from the Universidade Politécnica de Madrid. I'm sorry I missed his paper where he presented the European project iCamp. As it says on the webpage:

"The project aims at creating an infrastructure for collaboration and networking across systems, countries, and disciplines in Higher Education. Pedagogically based on constructivist learning theories that puts more emphasis on self-organised learning, social networking, and the changing roles of educators."

He also showed me inside a space designed by Permalink. It was an Education2.0 dream space where you could tag every post (or attachment), make your post a little Wiki space (or not) and where your entrance into the space was like an Ajax entrance with widgits for different applications. Plus a whole lot more.

What really tweaked my ears is that the aim is for you to be able to design your own space which you then use to participate in different communities. That is one hell of a conceptual jump away from registering in a platform or a discussion group or a community space in order to do a course or a workshop or belong to a community.

It is the beginning of managing an identity of participation across multiple communities .... and that is very, very interesting.

Tags: education2.0 learning2.0 cop2.0

Webist - 2006

2006-04-14T21:45:00.000+01:00

I presented a paper at Webist yesterday - "Participation in international online communities" (which I've stored here in esnips). It was quite out of place as its history is so much on technology whereas our paper is on the social practices around technology. And I didn't feel like I gave enough context to be sufficiently coherent.

It was a weird sensation to be an international conference that was using our Institution as its location. I didn't feel free to go to any of the sessions because my office was upstairs with a thousand things to do and meetings and classes and ... Also I didn't have to pay for the conference because it was being hosted by my place - but that meant that I wasn't entitled to the lunches and coffees etc. which also made me feel a bit out of it. The boring bits of a conference are usually the papers and sessions and the interesting conversations that happen at lunch!

Tags: Webist2006

A social networking mindset

2006-04-14T10:21:00.000+01:00

Also from Anecdote - from the newlsetter you can subscribe to - a tidy description of the behaviour of people who manage to develop networks across and beyond their organisation:
* Listening—based on a genuine spirit of inquiry, and including listening for emotional meaning as well as information (a useful question: ‘So what are you working on?’).
* Being prepared to take a stand and being interesting—so that others know what they stand for and want to talk with you.
* Cultivating people and, importantly, building reciprocal and collaborative relationships (and a reputation for integrity).
* Having a reputation for making useful introductions, and being authentically helpful without a tit-for-tat mentality.

Tags: mindset

Three big problems

2006-04-14T10:13:00.000+01:00

Andrew of Anecdote identifies 3 big problems for social network analysis. It's also relevant for anyone interested in social learning and communities of practice. The three big problems to overcome are: engendering trust, the illusion of accuracy and taming the expert mindset.

That feels like an enormous challenge to me in an ambient that thrives on mesquinhas and whose raison d'être is a hierarchical top-down flow of knowledge and expertise.

Tags: comunidadesdepractica mindset

No finalising, explanatory word

2006-04-11T22:49:00.000+01:00

I would like to know how other people have done it before me. How do you hold true to Bakhtin's "plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polphony of fully valid voices" when you could improve your professsional status, identity and mental well-being by "giving the right answer"?

My most important role model has been Etienne Wenger. But I am truly tested in a context where your professional and academic identity is based on "knowing" the correct anwer!

(A thought stimulated by Purse Lip Square Jaw).

Tags: identity doctorate bakhtin

Running to keep up

2006-04-06T12:03:00.000+01:00

I haven't written for a while because I am just so busy. I mean really busy. And what's more, my business and non-writing of my thesis is getting me into deep thoughts about who I am and where I'm going. It also brings me out in a sweat. It would be so cool to find a job where my research and what I have to offer in terms of distributed communities of practice had a place. Machinations going on ....

Tags: PhD, identity

Don't go here (more Web2.0)

2006-03-30T07:48:00.000+01:00

Web2.0 awards from Seomoz with over 300 web2.0 sites in 38 categories! I don't dare go and look ...

You can start by just looking at the winners and pretending to yourself that it won't take long.

Tags: web2.0

Powered by Qumana

Second Carnival of Blog Translation

2006-03-29T18:11:00.000+01:00

Following the First Carnival of Blog Translation, this is what happened in the second:

King Alfred of "The Bitter Scroll" translated A Linguistic Manifesto from Swedish into English. Johan Jönsson, talking from the Swedish context, talks about the degree to which linguistics is a science, what exactly a language is, and incorporating the inevitability of change into our own approach to language.

Johan's post Ett ideologiskt manifest is from his blog Månskensdans

In an interesting turn Susanne of Daipers and Music translates inner children and inner parents from her other blog written in German. She talks about waking up her inner parent to make some rules for herself. She refers to every journal entry she's made over the last week that begins "I'm so tired" and tells her inner child to go to bed on time.

The original post comes from innere Kinder und innere Eltern on her blog Windeln und Music.

João Vasconcelos Costa of Reformar a Educação Superior translated my post Limited by face-to-face where I quote a blog post of Leigh Blackall reflecting on how one-dimensional it seems to rely only on face-to-face connections between people. And I translated a post that João wrote about My mother who was also a teacher, which was in memory of his mother who recently passed away. A woman years ahead of her time.

The original post is Uma professora que também era minha mãe.

Although there weren't many of us at the party, we had a great time! I had intended to make a button for the carnival which we could put on our sidebars, but didn't have enough minutes in the day. The languages represented were Swedish, English, German and Portuguese. King Alfred will be hosting the next carnival - in his castle, I guess - on the 28th April. I'll be there for sure with JVC - we're hooked on this game!

Tags: blogtranslationcarnival

A teacher who was also my mother

2006-03-28T16:16:00.000+01:00

I have translated João Vasconcelos Costa's post: Uma professora que também era minha mãe or "A teacher who was also my mother" for the second carnival of blog translations. JVC has translated my post "Limited by face-to-face" on his blog with the title "Limitados pelo face-a-face."

I always feel like translating is quite an intimate practice and that was certainly true in this post. I felt a lot of emotions as I inhabited the meaning of the words of this special lady, with whom I could identify, but who I’ve never met. So here is my translation from Portuguese to English of JVC's post:

A teacher who was also my mother
The day before yesterday, at the age of 89, my mother completed her life cycle and left peacefully, after a full life; overflowing with affection, rigour and sense of duty, an insatiable intellectual curiosity, a strong sense of ethics but with an understanding of her own and others’ weaknesses, and all with a great sense of humour and passion for life. I think you can see all of that in the photograph.

She was also a great teacher. If I have any pedagogic instinct, I certainly inherited it from her. Two years ago, I asked her for a text for the then Professorices. At 87 she wrote her “pedagogic memory” with great lucidity and freshness, which I’m now going to publish again. At this time when there is so much questioning of the “fashion” for an education of play, see how my mother was already doing it, just by intuition, without a text-book. N.B. and this was in 1940!

Memories of a teacher
In 1934 I finished the seventh year of school. It was always my dream to go to university to study classics, a course which still fascinates me today. However, my dreams never came about. All those long years ago, full of prejudices, a good girl, the only child, who wouldn’t go too far by herself without the protection of her family. I went to an island, to the house of almost family in S. Miguel and I attended the Magistrate’s School. But I always said that I would never be a teacher “with glasses on the end of her nose and a pointer in her hand”. And I wasn’t, ending up loving, and loving a lot, my professional life.

Remembering my early years at infant and first school I’m going to try and describe how I followed the methods and processes I worked out for myself. I didn’t care for the ones that I was taught. Lots of memory before intelligence, when the first should be an important support to the second. I start with discipline, which I always maintained, but without being strict. My students didn’t see school as if it were a prison, but rather as a cosy nest where my little birds – the classes had the names of birds – felt the affection of their parents’ house. A child would call me by my name, but with “come here, come there” they respectfully did as they were told and a feeling that there was an affective bond between us.

My methods and processes were based, from infant school to school admission exams, games and play, that, even though they seem like they don’t give a perfect schooling, had positive results, as I can confirm with my experience over the years. Students didn’t parrot lessons, on the contrary they got a good all-round education for their ages. The beginning of a lesson and of calculus was done with stories drawn on the blackboard with colourful chalk, starting with a story, a new one at every lesson and in which the students participated. Sometimes I got them talking with their mothers, drawing in their garden or on the window of the house. For example, in reading, the little boy T, with the letter on his child’s pinafore, would go and get little boy I and they would talk to know what and who to go and get, with the hand out, to say then, “TIA” (aunt). For them it was a game and also a way of quite easily learning, whether they were clever or not.

History, for example, was started with me drawing cartoons on the blackboard while I told the story in an appealing way and the students copied it in their books, drawn for better or for worse. Afterwards there was lots of lively conversation. It was many years later that I saw a history textbook with cartoons. I cried when I saw them, remembering how I introduced into my teaching something different to what was done at that time. All humans have gifts and teaching was one of mine, and without being vain, I think it is a special charisma.

Even dictation was completely against the rules then. Reading a well-chosen text, with lots of pauses and - essential! – guaranteeing the understanding of it, because writing a dictation is to write something that makes sense, not just words. Later, each student received the text and it was them who, with attention, compared it to the dictation and wrote down the wrong words in a little book. With this personal effort it was rare that they would come back and repeat those mistakes.

I thought these were good processes, not only did I create them but I also made them my personal pedagogy method. All my life I’ve been critical and always judged my work with its pros and cons, looking for ways to correct them. With this process you only get positive results. In a seemingly light way you create a true sense of civicism in the lesson, a deep feeling of sincerity connected to the truth and to the notion that learning is to fulfill a duty, with the basic principle that the child’s esteem, since a baby, should get for itself and for its perfection, how to improve what was meant for this purpose. As a principle I also had the idea that we shouldn’t only work with the intellectual part of children but also with their moral part and with the beginning of their character, which should be carefully molded.

Working this way is tiring for someone who teaches, but I felt fulfilled. I got tired early because this is extremely hard work, but giving all my made me very happy in my professional life. I could give many more examples of the good results that I saw, but as this text is already too long, for which I apologise, I’ll finish here.

Reboot8.0

2006-03-28T15:36:00.000+01:00

All my own personal buzzwords in one event in Copenhagen in June. How can I not go to Reboot8.0? And what a cool wiki/way of organising the event.

So reboot8 is like reboot7 a journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas. Applied towards us as individuals, citizens, teachers, culture workers, entrepreneurs, creators and change makers.

and

Reboot is the European meet-up for the practical visionaries who are building tomorrow one little step at a time, using new models for creation and organization in a world where the only entry barrier is passion. reboot is two days in June filled with inspiration, perspective, good conversations and interesting people.

I like the way you can see the list of participants. On the list I can see my neighbour in Setúbal, Pedro Custódio, who I've met online but not face-to-face. Perhaps this way I'll end up having a coffee with him in Denmark!

Tags: reboot8.0 web2.0

Sally ... are you there?

2006-03-28T00:35:00.000+01:00

I know you will appreciate this, Sally Ann. Eight years ago we were hopping around at UAL (Universidade Autonoma de Lisboa) ... writing proposals and reports ... it didn't seem credible that no-one wouldn't get it. The whole ECTS challenge and the direction in which Higher Education was going. I still have the report that I wrote then. It looks like it could have been written in 2005. So convinced were we that people would be able to catch sight of the road ahead, if only we could put it in the right way!

Up until a few days before your 51st birthday (three years ago today and the day you died) we never wasted those days or nights when I was there to help with the practical things, like turning you over every couple of hours. Even while we went through those motions, adusting the tubes along the way, we didn't stop talking about how much there was to do in our lives, in the world, and in Higher Education in Portugal.

We - and you especially - were right. The discourse now - the Bolonha discourse - is all about new paradigms and new pedagogies. Who knows if those new paradigms are the new ones from 10, 5 or 2 years ago? Or the new ones today...or even tomorrow? These days I just get on with my own thing ... I've grown (almost) wiser and (almost) manage to keep my mouth closed. Especially as the last minute rush is on to change the curriculums.

But, hey girl! If you were here, we would appreciate one big irony together: everyone is waiting to be taught the new paradigms so they can go away and apply them!!

Thinking of you ...

Tags: sallymavor, ensinosuperior

Playing in Web2.0

2006-03-26T08:51:00.000+01:00

I have a million things to do. More in fact. So I've been wasting time in All Things Web2- THE List. It's not even 9 o'clock on a Sunday morning and I've send audio e-mails to all my family. And I've put a recording on my blog. I feel a bit self-conscious with my voice so I don't know how long it will last.

I've also found a Gizmo plug-in for Adium (on Macs) which works great. I haven't used Gizmo VOIP much but I will do as you can easily record calls, which you can't do with Skype. And I've started uploading my files to Openonomy, an online filing system. The idea of being able to share my papers there, all tagged and easy to find seems too good to be true.

Tags: Web2.0