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Mathemagenic ...giving birth to learning... |
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Mathemagenic
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 End of the year thinking
This time of the year it's always about looking back and looking forward - thinking on things done and those to come. It's also about cleaning your house and your thoughts - to be prepared for the new to come. Somehow I really need those moments, and the symbolism of the year going away and another coming in works just fine. Even my Tablet gets in this mood - a bit of fiddling with admin options, restart - and I can't login anymore. Funny enough, I'm not dissappointed a bit, even given that not everything is backed up. May be it's a sign that I don't need it during my days in Moscow? May be it needs time and will get fixed once I'm back in 2006? Or may be it also wants to start a year prepared for the new things to come? May be it needs clean reinstall? I don't know, but the whole thing reminds me of the interview with Pico Iyer telling about his feelings after his house burnt down taking away all personal posessions, family archives and work in progress: I probably told myself that I fel liberation - in reality the only thing I missed was all my notes and the many books that were in progress or that were close to completion that were reduced to ash. And yet at the same time I probably did quickly see that as a possible liberation. I think one of the good things about being a travelleer is that you come to see every circumstance as a possibility. When any of us are travelling, especially in one of the difficult parts of the world, we know that in some ways the more things go wrong, the better the stories that we will bring back from it. [A sense of place, 179-180; more] Anyway, it's funny how year plans turn to be true even if you don't think about them that way. It's almost a year since I wrote:
It worked that way. Not sure I found the balance, but I'm definitely learning to let things go. So, the highlights of 2005:
It was a good year. Let's see what the next one will bring. Don't know how end of the year predictions work, but I can give it a try - I think for me 2006 will be the year of getting things done... And for you all - lots of love, time to think, finding who you really are and becoming better in that, enough strength to change the world and dreams worth chasing... More on: life no work-life balance
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Friday, December 23, 2005|
Holidays between cultures
Things used to be simple, but not anymore. I'm spending Christmas with one family - European way, New Year with another family - Russian way. But there will be some work in between: since Russian Orthodox Christmas is two weeks later Russian holidays are starting only 31 December. A bit confusing :) Anyway, happy holidays regardless of when/if you stop working! More on: cross-cultural life
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Tuesday, December 20, 2005|
Topics and terms (categorisations and text analysis) for weblog conversations
Anjo, in What is a topic? The most mysterious term that I encountered a lot recently is topic. I have no idea how to define it and, neither seem the weblog research proposals that suggest finding the topic of a post is something worth doing. Being on holiday currently, and given it was raining and snowing outside, I tried to apply the notion of "topic finding'' to weblog conversations (see also: here, and here). Anjo goes on, providing an example of "unique" terms extracted from three weblog conversations (more details in the post). Although those provide a good picture of what conversations are about, they do not really answer the question of what is a topic of each of them. Which makes me thinking of my own experiences around the issue... One of the things we planned to do this year, but didn't get to do, was looking at personal categorisations. To be more specific the idea was to compare categories (~tags, ~topics) that a blogger assigns to her posts and the results of the text analysis of those posts to see if there is any correlation between the language used and conceptual categories. [I still think it's an experiment worth doing, but not sure I personally can devote serious time to it. Anyone interested?] Thinking of my own weblog I can imagine that for some topics (I call them topics ;) that I use for my own weblog the correlation should be present (e.g. posts related to events are likely to be labelled with it and mention it in the text). However there are others, those where I assign topic to organise my ideas on ill-structured themes (=I feel that those posts belong together, but I don't know why yet, or I don't have a good label for it). The examples of the second type are posts on life, knowledge mapping or transparency. Which brings me to the reason I started to write this post. I think that topics are conceptual categories used to characterise a group of connected pieces (conversations with others, conversations with self, or something in between) and to give it a nametag. The common name makes sense - it makes it easier to remember those pieces belong together, to retrive, to communicate about. The problem is that conceptual categories are subjective. They depend on a person, group or even groupthink (as with pressure to use certain tags to appear at right places in Technorati and not because they make more sense than others). So I suspect that once we define a topic of a conversation there will be someone who would say that it's about something else (referring to Anjo's examples - it could be "not about Skype, but about presence"). That's said I still think that defining a topic of a conversation makes sense. Personally, I'd prefer to have a Sigmund picture (~frequent terms and relations between them) for a conversation, as some kind of ontological fingerprint of what the conversation is about. Or there is a number of ways to select one of the terms from the "unique term list" for a conversation:
Or we just have to find a way of matching personal caterogisations. Given there the tools are going this shouldn't be that far... |
Monday, December 19, 2005|
Communities of practice in Russian business settings
A bit more comments on the statement of my previous post:
I had to talk on this issue several times while being in Russia, so I thought of sharing it here as well.
From another perspective, communities of practices could be a (knowledge) management instrument. In this case it's about an explicit effort of supporting and strengthening communities within a company or across several companies with some kind of business benefit in mind. I tried to illustrate the difference in the picture. It's a bit straightforward, so necessary caveats:
Coming back to the situation in Russia: many companies are only in the beginning of the process of recognising the business value of communities and developing an infrastructure to support them. Communities of practice are there, but they still have to become an explicit part of management practice. More on: communities KM RUSMECO
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Friday, December 16, 2005|
Note to myself: think in terms of innovation acceptance stages for every new project
It could be amasing how easily you can get drawn into mistakes you made before while having necessary knowledge to avoid them... Let me first tell you about one of the things I has been doing while not blogging :) I'm coordinating a European project focused on supporting collaboration of innovative small and medium enterprises (iSMEs) in Russia (official title is RUSMECO - Enhancing Russian SME collaboration and business development through COmmunities of practice). It's two year project with business/academic partners in four EU countries and three Russian regions. The first phase of the project is focused on understanding specific problems Russian innovative SMEs have and then figuring out which of them could be addressed in via "communities" (which is a way to address solutions on information sharing/ learning/ networking/ collaboration spectrum). The original plan was pretty straightforward – start from the literature and doing in-depth interviews with selected iSMEs, use insights to develop and run survey to reach a bigger group and then invite participants for the workshops that provide feedback on the results and discussion on solutions that could work (and then work on developing them). It didn't work that way – we found out that it was very difficult to motivate iSME representatives to spend their time on interviews and questionnaires. Not only because they are busy anyway, manoeuvring in transitioning economy and changing regulations, but because it was very difficult to explain to them what the project is about because the whole idea of communities was new to them.
While dealing with the problem I realised there is something we overlooked during the planning stage: the relation between the degree of understanding the value of communities in business settings and project planning we had laid out. At that moment I thought of a similar mistake I did 6 years ago while planning for e-learning introduction in a university. Similar to 6 years ago I thought of an instrument that could help to prevent it - stages of innovation acceptance by Diane Dormant. The framework is simple and it's one of the most useful leadership instruments for me (I blogged it three years ago ;). It suggests that in their acceptance of an innovation people move through several stages and that if you want to promote new practices you need a strategy that corresponds to the stage where people are (check the original post for more details on stages and strategies):
In our project most of the planned efforts were focused on demonstrating-training-supporting communities for innovative SMEs while people in our target group were hardly aware of what a community could be for them. After bumping into a number of problems we had to adjust our strategies to advertising and informing, but it would be much smarter to think about it in advance. So, given that it's a repeated mistake I should make a note to myself to think in terms of innovation acceptance stages for every new project I start. Hopefully it will become a routine while working on planning... More on: awareness change communities innovation RUSMECO
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Wednesday, December 14, 2005|
Away from blogging
It has been almost two months since I'm away from blogging. Being overstressed with all things going in life and at work I just decided to take things easy, letting myself not to be worried about not blogging, hardly reading weblogs. missing all interesting things around... What is more important I also took a break from my PhD research, focusing on a project laying further from blogging than many things I did over last couple of years. I guess it's time to come back. It similar to a feeling of coming back from a vacation that wasn't too short - feeling a need to go back to things rather than pushing youself with sad "I have to...". Don't know how about blogging, but I definitely feel happy taking a break from my PhD research. I've got some distance, an opportunity to look from a bit outside at things that were so encompassing before. I guess it's time to come back - I actually feel like working on it :) And, of course, some interesting things happened over time - will be blogging about them slowly... More on: life no work-life balance PhD
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BlogTalk reloaded: 2-3 October 2006, Vienna
Why reloading BlogTalk! Call for papers is online, submissions are due to 1 April 2006. More on: BlogTalk
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Tuesday, December 13, 2005|
CHI 2006 Workshop on Mobile Social Software, 22-27 April 2007, Montreal
Workshop on Mobile Social Software at CHI2006, Montreal, Canada, April 22-27, 2006 (organised by people I know well :) Social software has seen a tremendous jump in usage over the past few years and looks to take another significant leap forward as it becomes integrated into mobile devices we carry at all times. As designers of social software systems, we can now design for typical users who want to “do”social computing while they are in their social environments.Yes! We need more research on these things :) 3 pages position papers are due before 6 January 2006, more at chi2006mososo.telin.nl More on: learning event
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Tuesday, December 06, 2005|
Life offline (.ru)
Some observations:
It feels that I'm a caterpillar turning into something else... |
© Copyright 2002-2006 Lilia Efimova 
This weblog is my learning diary. Sometimes I write about things related to my work, but the views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
Last update: 1/19/2006; 9:35:57 PM.
