Mathemagenic

Two different streams of ideas from around Online Information:

• First one, covered in the panel The Facebook generation and touched by other speakers is about digital natives, those who grow up online, and their differences from the rest of us.
• The second one, outside of the conference, over food and walking with Matt is about cultural stereotypes so deeply engrained that we don’t even know they are there until we experience something that triggers reflection.

Well, those two connected to today’s talk with Robert about our fist computing experiences. For me it personal computing started with AGATs and black-and-green screen Robotrons. We had a Robotron at home for a while and I helped my mom with her NGO work by doing some database programming. I also remember my dismay when my university freshman programming course was scheduled in a class full of Robotrons and not in those with newer and fancier PCs (of course I wanted newer and fancier machines to play with ;). The teacher then said that “if you can program on Robotrons, anything else will be peanuts”.

Now, looking back at my personal computing history I’m thinking that he was probably right. Not that I can program anything now (I’ve learnt that being good at programming doesn’t mean loving it :), but I’m happy having all those “old computing” experiences - text only black and green screens, points-and-nodes BBS culture, disconnected emails, fascination with those magic WWW letters… Those are not just romanticised memories - I’m happy to have those experiences as they help me to understand what new technologies bring (and what do they take away). It helps to make conscious choices about the aspects of digital cultures I want in my life, rather than growing with them and may be never discovering that some cultural stereotypes don’t serve me well.

Ewan McIntosh said he didn’t like the whole digital immigrants/digital natives terminology. I like it, exactly for the power of the metaphor. A piece from Watching the English (discussed in another context) on the Englishness of natives and immigrants:

For those of us without the benefit of early, first-hand influence of another culture, some aspects of Englishness can be so deeply ingrained that we find it almost impossible to shake them off, even when it is clearly in our interested to do so [ ]. Immigrants have the advantage of being able to pick and choose more freely, often adopting the more desirable English quirks and habits while carefully steering clear of the more ludicrous ones. [p.18]

The metaphor also brings other concerns - those of inclusion and exclusion, integration and cultural diversity. I hope that at least I can teach my own little digital native some of non-digital cultures :)

Technorati: OnlineInfo2007

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/08.html#a1964; comments are here.

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While trying to find things related to my previous post I came across a few posts I forgot I wrote. While reading this one I became mesmerized by “madly letting go” in the quote from Donella Meadows:

I don’t think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage has less to do with pushing levers than it does with disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.

I’m getting more and more convinced that letting go is one of the key skills in whatever 2.0 - web, business, science, life…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/29.html#a1959; comments are here.

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It feels that everyone around is experimenting in Second Life. I’m listening to the stories with lots of interest, but I don’t have any inclination to go and play myself. Feels really strange (as I’m old and outdated :). One more lesson learnt about myself - it seems that I’m very selective early adopter ;)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/12/20.html#a1872; comments are here.

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Back home. Some SHiFT impressions that will stay:

Very convincing optimism of Euan Semple regarding the power of bottom-up processes in business settings that eventually will change organisations as we know them. Although I feel like being on the same ship thinking about long-term effects, I can’t avoid thinking of practicalities on the way there – this is something that came back over conversations with many others around SHiFT.

• Lack of compatibility with current cultural norms –>
  • “old” culture that shapes participants, difficulties with risk- and responsibility-taking behaviours at personal level (see also: Mediated)
  • management resistance (especially middle-management)
• Need to change organisational structures and processes. Euan said that “quiet revolution” will eventually happen when current bottom-up processes reach tipping point - wonder if we will deal with “revolution” or “evolution” scenarios.
• Technology upscaling problem - you may start experimenting with wikis and blogs at “do it yourself” server without a budget and formal support, but if the whole thing works it would have to “professionalise” to scale up (probably meaning relying on paid software, involving IT department, getting helpdesk, etc.). My experiences are that once you go beyond early adopters to majority you can’t rely on “do it yourself” technology any more (happy to hear any specific arguments if you believe that I’m wrong :).
• Creating a space for “globally distributed near instant person to person communication” doesn’t always means totally thought-free self-organisation. What seems to hide behind the success stories is the role and specific approaches of people who initiate and support the change (position and reputation in an organisation, insider knowledge of organisational culture that allows choosing ways that are likely to work, experience in facilitating change and self-organisation, specific tricks to make things work, etc…).

Discussions with Beverly Trayner and Stephanie Booth about helping unprepared participants to get involved with a community technology

• Attitudes: not being used to decentralised, participant-driven ways of communication - need for someone in the beginning to “start filling the page”, not expecting everyone “jumping into it” immediately, but designing strategies of involvement
• Fear of making mistakes (especially strong in some cultures, e.g. in Portugal according to Beverly) as a barrier - making own mistakes to give an example (although the culture could be too strong that you as a facilitator may start fear to make mistakes yourself)
• Lack of technology skills - slow introduction, preferably with private sync support (ideally f2f, otherwise IM/Skype/phone)

Communicating concepts through comics by Kevin Cheng (slides and related reading) – thinking of all those little drawings in my presentations that people seem to like to much :)

Extended thinking on design:

• Peter Merholz (stop designing products)
• Luke Wroblewski (story and slides)

• design as an added value once things start to work (find that diagram of Donald Norman)
• abductive thinking
• growing co-dependencies between technology, people and business
• “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” by Hans Hofmann (here)

Blogging SWOT by Monica Andre and Margarida Cardoso - will be back on that soon.

Talking with Suw on choices and ethics of handling digital information (following her talk about ORG).

The image of earthquake coming from David Galipeau.

Talking about balance with Martin.

Side observations - feeling of discrimination by the Mac majority (can’t they just accept that there are people who pray other gods?), talks about consulting rates and too much sweet pastries I couldn’t resist :)

Overall:

• SHiFT guys did a great job putting it all together - for me that was a good mix of familiar topics and stretching beyond current boundaries
• SHiFT notes by Luke Wroblewski and by Suw (between other things)
• I should be back to Lisbon to walk around - hardly had any time

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/09/30.html#a1837; comments are here.

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A few weeks back, at Headshift office I saw them for the first time - funny plastic bunnies. It quickly turned into a discussion about peripheral awareness, ambient knowledge and simple devices to help in doing that. I also learned that Robert has been looking at those bunnies for some time and I couldn’t find out a better present for his birthday ;)

So, we’ve got one in the house. It’s actually a wifi bunny that can speak (pre-programmed messages or those that you send to it) and give all kinds of signals with lights on his belly and moving ears. It’s cute, funny and a really nice creature to have in a leaving room.

I should be back with more in-depth post on why bunny could be important and useful, but now just a funny fact: next day after unpacking the bunny Robert took it to work. He didn’t worked that day and two other colleagues have ordered theirs.

I guess technology adoption is driven by fun :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/16.html#a1816; comments are here.

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Last few weeks I had quite a few experiences with setting up technology (mainly Skype and Flickr) for my family members and helping them to learn how to use it.

Helping your “hardly computer-literate” relatives is a great source of insights: about problems that non-geeks have with tools, about mental models they construct, about good strategies to help learning or ways to solve problems that you mom could have when you are not around.

Which brings me to two thoughts:

First, it would be a great case of teaching about all things “user-related”. What if anyone who design or develop tools, especially those intended for a different target group then themselves, should be asked to make sure that their parents use one of their own everyday communication tools. This would require:

• finding which tools would be useful and for that purpose - e.g. now my mom wants to use Flickr to “talk in pictures” with my in-laws since this would solve the problem of talking in different languages
• find a way to install and configure those tools according to the user needs - e.g. I was very surprised while configuring Flickr for my mom and my mother-in-law that both of them were so worried about someone stealing their photos that I had to set it up as “no prints” and “no downloads” for anyone outside of the family.
• find a way to explain how to use the system and to make sure those instructions stick long enough for the system to be used - I’m actually thinking of making a set of screenshots explaning Flirkrc functionalities in Dutch and Russian and sticking those somewhere easy to find.
• find a way to troubleshoot when things go wrong - e.g. I was happy that I registered my own email as an alternative and kept earlier admin emails when my mom lost her Flickr password. Another example includes my brother who was so tired of visiting my parents and sister for admin work that he configured remote access to their desktops.

Those who manage to succeed (measured as consistent use of the tool by parents within half a year), would get “Basic user studies expert” title, lots of insights, fun of seeing their family “geekyfied” and have an extra reason to come visiting if troubleshooting on distance doesn’t work or their parents want to learn how to use one more feature.

The second thought is a bit more scientific. I wonder if there is any research on this aspect of relationships between geeks and their family/friends - strategies of supporting someone else’s encounters with technologies and lessons learnt from it. Didn’t do any proper search, only saw some hints to that as a very side issue in The long term fate of our personal digital belongings (.pdf). This would be such a great source of insights with lots of technology design/technology introduction implications (itching to do some of that myself, but probably should try not to get distracted :)

And a funny side-not observation - I always thought I was much into workplace uses of technologies research, but it seems that my personal experiences get me more into home and family stuff. Interesting…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/28.html#a1810; comments are here.

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A few weeks ago we had a very special incident. My mom thought that I was around home computer with Skype logged in as Robert and started a chat. In Russian.

Of course, it wasn’t me next to it, but Robert himself. He went to an online translator, figured out what my mom was saying, got his reply translated and posted back. First my mom thought I was making fun of her typing strange Russian, but then she had to believe that she was chatting with Robert. Both of them were very happy and very proud that they found a mode for direct communication despite of speaking different languages.

Thinking of opportunities that this discovery could bring (=not having to translate back and forth between family members :) I thought that it would be great to find an automatic translator for Skype chat. I found one - ULRTMT - Universal Language Real-Time Message Translator, which is in difficult to install beta. Haven’t tried it yet, but already happy since these times things develop fast.

On a side note - it took ages to get my mom on Skype and she is still learning ins and outs, but I’m so much happier now. Between other small victories is having my grandma talking to me (wearing “I look like those guys from Spaceship control center” headset) and giving her a video tour of our house in real time.

Now, there are a few more things before my familyskyping project brings real fruits: get other family members on Skype, make sure my mom finds their webcam and my brother installs it, configure properly for my new Bluetooth headset so I don’t have to change the settings manually…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/25.html#a1807; comments are here.

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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.

Necessary detour. Many KM concepts and practices still have not reached Russian business world (and academia as well) – apart from a few exceptions most of the KM talk there is still about why it could be useful to invest in something like that, rather then deciding what and how to do. Communities of practice, while there as a reality, is not part of conceptual thinking about management and not a format that organisations would deliberately support with some business gains in mind. [more on this]

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…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/12/16.html#a1714; comments are here.

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Just finished presenting still a bit raw results of my study of weblogs at Microsoft. It’s recorded, but available only to Microsoft employees - link to the video and slides on Microsoft intranet. Eventually it will be published, but I guess I’ll find a way to blog bits and pieces of it before that…

The most interesting things for me are:

• general patterns of weblog adoption - factors, forces and speed
• certain patterns of blogging overepresented in internal “media” + big number of people who blog on personal and not work-related stuff

• –> so similar to what’s happening in the bigger blogosphere :)
• –> glocalization challenges at play inside the company or just adoption cycle?
• –> many people are not new to blogging, but do not choose to use blogs for professional purposes - all kinds of why and what if questions there…

And - just one day left and lots of things to sort out…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/09/09.html#a1661; comments are here.

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This is the topic that surfaces again and again: heated discussions about ‘pushing’ people into self-organised learning with Sebastian Fiedler, recurring “personal KM is about taking responsibility” with Ton Zijlstra, one more “parallel thinking” line discovered with David Gurteen last week… And finally this line from an article on adult learning pointed by Cindy Hoong:

Efforts to lure people to new educational technologies and to promote a culture of life-long learning resemble a case of preaching to the converted, according to a new UK study.

Familiar?

Why there is such a high degree of autodidacts or self-employed people between bloggers I know?

Do we put put the cart before the horse providing people with great methods and tools when they don’t have a need for them? Not surprising that methods and tools stick only with those already converted.

I don’t know how to put these things together in a coherent text, but I can make a bulleted list:

• There is no “sponsor” for my research on PKM as there is no “sponsor” for life-long learning. Organisations want agility from their people, but they care more about today’s and tomorrow’s profits than about employability of their employees in 20 years.
• The change is up to an individual.
• Change starts from a need more often than from an opportunity (= unless you are an early adopter having good tools is not enough to change way of doing things).
• Change is painful and unless there are visible threats not many people would go out of their comfort zone.
• If you want people to take responsibility for their own lives you have to respect their choices. Including the one about not taking responsibility :)

Coming down to personal KM:

• Taking responsibility for one’s own life (or work :) is a main challenge for personal KM: it’s both rewarding and risky (more).
• It’s not about methods and tools, but about attitude change. Attitude change is difficult and there are many ethical issues around (more).

Fun of playing with forces of middlespace :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/01.html#a1407; comments are here.

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