I know that I’m not going to catch up with all interesting posts from Internet-cafe, but I’m still trying :)

John Moore (and long chain of others) point to a quote from Art & fear:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pound of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

John adds a connection with the book Changing Conversations in Organisations by Patricia Shaw.

This is such a fantastic book I can’t do it justice here, but essentially Shaw discusses

(moving from a) thought-before-action, design-before-implementation, systematic, instrumental logic of organizing, towards a paradoxical kind of logic in which we see ourselves as participatingin the self-organizing emergence of meaningful activity from within our disorderly open-ended responsiveness to one another

Shaw is talking about how we talk to each other, the story is about making pots; they’re both about recognising that it is misleading to think we can entirely separate thinking from doing – an insight that may trouble a great many management thinkers.

At the same time Martin Dugage writes about smart people driving out action linking to Why Can’t We Get Anything Done?

All those provoke many ideas for my thinking on learning vs. doing and would provide an interesting angle to look at the actionable sense story, but I guess I’m not writing on it now :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/05.html#a893; comments are here.

• Learning: communities vs. courses (4) – learners’ skills and motivation
• Why people do not ask questions? (2)
• Uses of TACIT LEARNING

Chris Lawer on plenitude

Now my unfortunate problem is that I am suffering real bad from a plenitude of plenitude, i.e a curse of consuming plenitude itself, i.e. a deep desire to consume all the books, articles, comments, papers, journals, magazines etc etc. that discuss issues of plenitude in modern consumer society. And its driving me nuts, to the point that sometimes I feel that I just want to give up – a real case of “Amazon Overload”!!

While reading it I thought of the old post by Ton

With all the enthousiasm that comes with entering new uncharted territories at first everything is interesting. All special interest groups on KnowledgeBoard are worth contributing to, all interesting blogposts, and boy there are many out there, are worth commenting on or reflecting on in your own blog. You reach addiction levels when you start being afraid to miss something interesting.

But that eagerness takes its toll. There is no real time to filter all that passes before your eyes, as you’re already sprinting to the next interesting post as soon as you’ve linked to the last one. And finally there is the time when all that discovering and exploring, and playing with ideas for fascinating projects, becomes too much.

I’m learning to deal with this thirst for new insights, to let it go, to make sure I have time for a reflection, for working on a bigger canvas and for the “simple act of human contacts” as John Moore puts it commenting on the post of Chris.

There is so much real pleasure and satisfaction to be had in the simple act of human contact without the need for an orgy of consumption.

And I keep coming back to my own mantra: let’s put relationships before ideas. Blogging at its worst becomes a diet of too many ideas and not enough real contact. We tend to think of innovation as inherently good, but an awful lot of grief is caused by the championing of an abstract idea in a way that trashes relationships. It’s a mistake I catch myself making, or about-to-make, quite often.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/12/17.html#a870; comments are here.

• Misleading visualisations, binary thinking and research
• You just don’t know what you’ll want to know down the road
• Synchronicity

The voices below speak well for themselves, so I don’t need to comment much. In response to The power of visible loose ends.

Ton Zijlstra, Making Actionable Sense

The problem I think is that for both those steps, digesting the results of exploration, and making actionable sense of them, we should bring our co-discoverers, i.e. the bloggers, along for the ride, but by and large still fail to do so.

We together came up with the idea, so why should we not together turn it into action? Current reality is that we try to feed the ideas into our regular workflow, and try to bring our colleagues into it. Most of our organisations however will not yet be layed out for the types of things we come up with here.

Dina Mehta, Blogs – turning ideas into actions:

I had the very same feeling this evening – amazing synchronicity ! I’ve only just returned from a meeting with a company that is more ‘open’ than many others to the idea of using social software tools like blogs, both in their intranet and externally. And as i was driving back – i was thinking that how wonderful it would be to be able to brainstorm with other bloggers interested in this area on some of the barriers or stumbling blocks – and work out possible solutions or directions forward.

John Moore, Blogging and collaboration:

I know that via the net I can now tap into some pretty remarkable talents in different parts of the world. This is both exciting and frustrating. Exciting cos I really like these people and love the idea of working with them, frustrating because I’ve yet to discover how best to do it. I’ve seen a lot of putative collaborations fail because they don’t get to some kind of critical mass or level of commitment.

Gary Lawrence Murphy, Pinging the Actionable Senses:

Back to actionable sense and the outcome of the blog-dumps, this, I believe, is an inevitable outcome of all blog-reading. Knowledge is only additive, you cannot remove knowledge, you can only add to it. We read each other’s stories and make an implicit actionable sense in that we are confrontied with a need to assimmilate what they’ve said, or to accommodate it into our world model (which may mean to dismiss it), but we’re still taking a mental action that changes the way we’ve previously thought about the issue.

[...] The loose ends offer me a sense of the possible, a landscape that can go anywhere, a sense of adventure that keeps coaxing me back to explore a little more. I wouldn’t want it tidied up in a tight focused and deadlined bundle because I know, philosophically, to do so would require closing off many of these possibilities, discarding the undiscovered territories. It’s an ongoing story, a story of ideas, a story of what’s needed, what’s possible, a story of senses where there’s no way to end the plotline, no way to limit the cast and no way to cut it off in time for the capping colophon. Unhemmed as it is uneven.

Ton, Making Actionable Sense II

Yes, I too love what Gary calls the landscape of possibilities. In fact I think I’m very much addicted to it. To the feeling of that sudden spark in my head where I feel thoughts and ideas are connected but still just out of reach to be able to put it into words well, but I already sense that it is there.

[...]Nevertheless I do have a feeling that I’m not responsive enough in picking up the thoughts we dream up here in the blogosphere and turn them into action. The blogs reveal emerging patterns, and we can nurture the memes we think important, and block or criticise the ones we think are not.
But I seem to be less succesfull at moving stuff from the complex and un-ordered realm (to adopt some of Dave Snowdens vocabulary) where my addiction is fed, to the more ordered realm of the knowable and practice.

One of the barriers in doing that and that might be turned into an attractor, is the people with whom I try to bring that transition about, from the complex un-ordered to the more ordered knowable. Why would I try to do that with people who never been to the complexity realm, when at the same time I know lots of people who have and are in part neatly listed in my blogroll?

I said to a couple of people on my first Skype round that I wish to be able to get many of us to work together at the same place, but I guess it’s not feasible :) And even if it would be I don’t think it would work well: the power of our joint discoveries comes from “weak-tied” nature of our connections, different backgrounds, different countries and different lives. Still, sometimes I wish to know easy ways to turn weak ties into strong ones, at least for the time needed to develop ideas that worth it.

I don’t think it’s a matter of technology, although finding an easy way to communicate and to work on joint products is important. I guess it’s more of a mindset, thinking that the line between weak and strong ties can not be blurred, that collaboration is for colleagues and blogging is for bloggers, as well as not knowing there to start.

I believe that one thing needed to start is writing about future plans next to past experiences and current thoughts and inviting others to join. The learning webs paper we wrote with Sebastian Fiedler had been triggered by an e-mail inviting for an adventure of writing a paper in a week before the deadline, leveraging the connection and shared context we had through the year of blogging.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/30.html#a855; comments are here.

• Levels of communication, relation building and weblogs
• Weblog by Inna Kouper and finding people writing about you
• Wish I was there: Weblogs and Cross-Disciplinary Communication panel

Bill Seitz reacts on communities don’t practice with a suggestion to focus on teams and not communities, because their focus on outcomes “creates a shared ConText which makes learning much stronger”.

This triggered my response, which I’m reposting here.

Agree that distinguishing between team and community is important. Not sure if learning in teams is stronger:

• People in teams have a natural drive to learn – they learn in order to get things done. But after “things are done” (e.g. a project is over) the motivation to learn from past experiences is much lower, because “new things” call for “new learning”.

• Shared understanding (ConText) is stronger in teams, but it may also lead to “group think”, while a community provides more diversity (and I believe that learning comes from recognising differences).

• “Doing” focus of teams creates another problem for learning – lack of time to stop, look back and reflect (more).

Summarising I would say that teams create better conditions for “learning while doing” (implicit learning) and learning directly related to the task, but they don’t provide enough time and motivation for reflection and “learning beyond task focus” (e.g. learning more about a field to prepare for a future job).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/29.html#a772; comments are here.

• Misleading visualisations, binary thinking and research
• Understanding real value of blogging: time, connectivity, need for reflection
• Quality that emerges in action

Do Yourself a Favor and Stop Learning made a few circles in my news aggregator before I found time to write. In this post Deane writes about drive to learn new technologies:

It’s true — we learn far more than we are ever able to use. We learn just for the sake of learning. [...]

This may seem harmless, but does it, in fact, hinder our ability to produce? Does all this learning and all the attention span we spend on new technologies detract from what we should be doing in the here and now?[...]

Is learning a defense mechanism? Do we keep learning so we don’t have to write code? Is learning just an easy way to avoid having to actually put ideas into practice? Is this a case of, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t just read a few more blogs and test new theories.”?

I agree with the main idea of “application-oriented learning” instead of “learning for the sake of learning”, but this leads me thinking about something else: learning vs. doing dilemma.

I wrote a bit about it earlier, referring to the time to learn vs. time to do things discussion at I-KNOW 03 conference. Now I have better explanations.

I’m reading papers on implicit learning (drafted notes). Implicit learning could be defined as

the process through which we become sensitive to certain regularities in the environment (1) in the absence of intention to learn about those regularities (2) in the absence of awareness that one is learning, and (3) in such a way that the resulting knowledge is difficult to express (Cleermans, in press)

In other words, implicit learning is the one that happen while doing (so there is no learning vs. doing dilemma here :). The funny thing is that most people are not aware of it or don’t consider it to be “learning”.

But there is something that takes time from doing – it’s reflection we use to articulate what was learnt implicitly (see reporting vs. reflecting in conference blogging for an example and notes on informal learning for articulation techniques). Note, that explicit (e.g. self-directed or other-directed learning) is likely to take time from doing too.

So how do we find a good doing-learning balance? I don’t know yet, but I’m going to do some doing on Saturday afternoon instead of reflecting :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/20.html#a758; comments are here.

• NALL resources on informal learning
• Research on learning effects of (web)browsing?
• Searching for knowledge as constructing personal learning experience