It’s hard starting after a break – there are way too many stories to tell and way too many thoughts that came in between. So I start somewhere.

I had a burnout – going on and off after my PhD defense and not very obvious behind the usual “not feeling normal” during my pregnancy. But eventually it came to the surface and things are slowly getting better. Between other things that means less time online (and mainly lurking :) and much more time making things with my hands (rather then typing and talking :).

And, of course, we had Anna. With her all the background thinking and feeling about “work, us and our kids” surfaced again. Only this time I didn’t have an excuse of having a PhD to finish, so I had to deal with it, making choices that I had to make to stay true to myself (like extending my maternity leave to the maximum possible).

And, with Alexander approaching school age, it was also a time to rethink all thoughts I had about learning and education from a very personal perspective. It’s much easier to think and write about learning as what it could be or learning as “this is how I want to learn”, but practicing what you preach when it comes to your own kids is far more difficult. Especially since you easily bump into lots of real constraints of the society you belong to.

The process is still on the way, but a few things are clear so far:

- I’m leaving work. I’m pretty sure I want to be active professionally, but I have to figure out a different way to do it. (Some say that a burnout is a signal that something is out of balance pretty badly :)

- Time to reinvent life to fit our kids there. Not as inconvinience or as a a well-fenced part, but as an integral part of how things work. In a short term that means being a mother more than everything else and focusing on the local physical world more than paying attention to the global network.

- Unschooling as a shortcut name for educational trajectory we find important for our kids and figuring out what does it mean in practice. May be a bit cryptic right now, but there is lots in the pipeline and I just have to figure out how to put it into words. Funny to think that I started this blog from an “edublogging” angle, then moved to all other topics, but now it feels that I’ll be back where I started very soon.

• Invisible work
• Leadership is pretty much like respectful parenting
• The first dress

Paper tea box that’ve been at Alexander’s play kitchen for ages went into recycling. A few days after he founds a lid of it and then realises that the box is not there anymore and can’t be brought back. The tears of loss come and then I embrace him in my arms to tell a story.

A story of a paper tea box that went into an exciting journey.

First to sit on a curb with other papers we put there. He knows – we do that every month.

Then to travel in a paper garbage machine, the one that Alexander finds so fascinating to look at, when it comes with blinking lights and a crew of guys who pick up piles and boxes from the curb and throw them inside the machine’s belly.

Then to a recycling factory – to soak in the water, to mix with pieces of other papers, to whirl, to be sifted, pressed and dried on a screen. He knows that too – we made paper together.

And then it became a box, like those that the postman brings, that hide new gadgets or books or “something for papa” that is actually a present not to be seen before the due date.

And then a tiny piece of the tea box that became part of the parcel that comes to our house smiles from recognising the place where it had a good time playing in the kitchen.

And then Alexander starts smiling and I know that the cycle is complete…

• Unwritten posts
• Parenting: traditional wisdom and modern life
• Blogging as jazz (2)

While lots of people tend to focus on the positive side of finishing a PhD (which is, of course, a great achievement :) I feel more like the one who is just released from a prison. Finally you are free to make choices, but, after spending for so long in a solitary confinement you don’t really know who you are, what you can do, what is out there to choose from and where to start with.

It seems to play at two levels: identity and routines.

Identity

Working on the dissertation forced convergence and focus, but as a result I find it difficult to find a new professional identity. Who am I (next to being an ex-prisoner someone who just completed a PhD)? Where do I belong (next to academia, where I don’t really belong even if I am a researcher)? What are the issues that I want to work on? I didn’t want to believe others when they said that I wouldn’t want to do anything with the topic of my dissertation. Not that I don’t want to talk about blogging anymore, but I definitely don’t want to talk primarily about blogging and especially being known as “the one who knows something about blogging”. [Mark, you were right, I'm working on finding a new story to tell :)]

What I’m trying to do to deal with with one:

• Do things I left for “after the PhD life”, diving into topics and communities that provide complimentary, but fresh perspective on my professional worldview. Ideally as a more or less structured learning experience (I’m starting from Cognitive Edge accreditation course, CPsquare foundations workshop and KM4Dev workshop).
• Find what makes me happy by doing interesting things with interesting people. On a small scale, without worrying too much how would they fit in a bigger professional picture.
• Ask people I trust where they see my experiences and expertise fit.
• All that trying to make sure that I don’t get into too many commitments of what could fit next to regular things at work and in life.

Routines

This is actually the one that’s more challenging: I’m stuck in unproductive routines, being stressed by the amount artefacts, digital and otherwise, that have accumulated in wrong spaces while I tried to focus on the core activities of getting the PhD done and making sure my family survives in the process. There are backlogs everywhere and reading that “high stress environments can cause the brain to rewire itself in ways that reinforce and contribute to ongoing stress” makes it look like vicious circle.

I don’t have a recipe here, but the things that work for me are much closer to FlyLady approach than to GTD, taking baby steps instead of sorting through everything before establishing new strategies and routines:

Your home did not get dirty in one day and it will not get clean in a day either. You have been living in clutter and CHAOS for many years, you are not going to get your home clean in a day. I do not want you to crash and burn. This is why I teach you to take baby steps. If you try to do this all at once, you are going to be mad at me, because this will be like every other “get-organized” method you have tried. I want you to take your time. As you establish one habit, you will very easily be able to add another one to your routines. – FlyLady

While FlyLady approach is aimed primarily at SHEs (Side Tracked Home Executives :), I am looking how the ideas behind it might work where most of my problems are – in a digital / professional sphere. Let’s see…

• #KM4Dev – blogging session
• Accelerated leadership trajectories in communities of practice
• Some thoughts on #KM4Dev

It is amazing how much observing Alexander exploring rain tells about human nature: the need for a safe place to start, playing on a boundary alternating between a few more steps to explore and coming back for reassurance, gradually venturing into more and more scary territory, getting confident, having fun while getting wet and cold…

I treasure moments like this – when he grabs my hand and invites me to join the fun, so I can shed the skin of things learned about getting wet and cold in the rain, and instead just be a kid who enjoys the simple fun of being in the rain.

• On the role of theory
• As a trojan…
• Women @ work: the role of role models

Interesting things from today:

• video diaries on student learning habits
• blogs as portfolios – time, tools and common format for digesting
• “presumption of competence”
• formative vs. summative – not only assessment of competencies, but also assessment of research
• taking responsibility for choosing learning options vs. can you judge learning options about things you don’t know
• role of intermediaries (people and tools) to help navigating learning landscape

Those pages are likely to move, but I keep links here for a while:

• ProgrammeLifelongLearning
• GroupWorkArea
• Resources

Relevant pieces from earlier blog posts:

• On responsibilities/competencies for being self-directed (including learning)
  • Preaching to the converted: PKM is not about methods and tools, but about attitude change
  • Personal knowledge management in KM Magazine
  • Learning: communities vs. courses (4) – learners’ skills and motivation
• On formal/informal learning and supporting both

• Converging knowledge management, training and e-learning: scenarios to make it work (more here)
• Early version of my PhD proposal – for an overview of interplays of formal/informal learning and necessary support
• Supporting informal learning

• BlogTalk: who owns narrated experiences?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/07.html#a1758; comments are here.

• Cooperative learning links
• Where would I start learning?
• PhD proposal: notes

Another piece “around” now almost-finished-paper.

In the study we describe in the paper we carried out exploratory interviews (we did more :) using critical incidents technique (see Intel white paper for similar approach), asking people to recall several situations when they needed in-house knowledge and discussed why and what they were looking for, how they found it and what problems were encountered.

During the interviews we found out that in many cases when people talk about “searching for knowledge” they look for

• information about knowledge (e.g. “what do we know about topic X in our organisation?”)
• knowledge representations (e.g. reports on certain subject)
• knowledgeable people

This findings support the argument that knowledge doesn’t exist “out there” (e.g. in documents) and that people need information cues and engagement of others to (re)construct it. A similar observation is made by Cross et. al. (2001: 102) who make a distinction between being informed about what another person knows and “the willingness of the person sought out to engage in problem solving rather than dump information”.

From this perspective “searching for knowledge” is in fact searching for information and people within an organisation in order to obtain knowledge. Or, “searching for knowledge” is a process of constructing personal learning experience, selecting learning resources and engaging others as facilitators.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/26.html#a1186; comments are here.

• Formal/informal interplay (2)
• Links
• Ontological fingeprinting: documents or people

Denham commenting to my community vs. individual perspective for learning post:

To change entreched mental mosels you need the energy supplied in deep dialog, the explication and defense of alternative points of view, you really need ‘community’ help to discover, surface, articulate & examine your personal assumptions. To get to those burried models you have to have external support – they just cannot be reached via personal introspection.

Stephen Downes commenting on Important Learning Must Occur in Groups by Spike Hall (check 17 September 2003 as there is a problem with direct linking):

That fact that there are some irreducibly social elements to learning does not mean that the whole thing is social. You can learn some things, in some ways, on your own, without a social network. Specifically, you need a social network in order to teach others or to learn from others. But that is not the whole of learning.

I agree with both. “Community” or social context is very important for learning. At least, this is true for myself: I always need a conversation for growing my ideas.

I believe that learning comes from recognising differences. This could be done in several ways: confronting your today’s ideas with yesterday’s, confronting mental models with practices or confronting your views with the views of others. The last way is probably most natural for us as it is part of our social life anyway.

But there is a simple question that makes me looking at the individual differences: why not everyone learns from being a part of social interactions even if “creative abrasion” is there?

I think about very simple example. I studied for my Master’s degree in the Netherlands (here). I was part of an international study group, had international social life and many opportunities to observe people from different cultures. When I look back I say that learning about different cultures and their interplay and learning about my own myths and perceptions about other countries probably gave me more than learning for my studies. But I also observed another extreme of this “cultural” learning: getting closed, staying in one’s “own country” club only and almost visible resistance to look what could be learnt from differences.

So, why same conditions provoke learning and change in some people and resistance in others? I can think of many explanations, like personal need to learn about specific things or personal need to belong to your “tried and tested” communities without being open for new experiences, but all of them have to do with something “personal”.

Summarising I would say: social context is vital for learning, but not enough. I wonder what else do we need and I suspect that this “something else” is hidden at individual level (or, better, in interplay between social and individual).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/21.html#a759; comments are here.

• Challenges of studying knowledge work
• A long due update
• New KM blog: Dubbings and Diversions by Jeremy Aarons

I wrote earlier that I didn’t have much time for learning and networking during this summer school. I was wrong.

I didn’t have enough time to do usual networking, so I missed some interesting people, but working together with others to organise this event allowed building deeper connections with some people instead of scratching the surface of “who does what”.

Learning was different as well. I didn’t learn much of the program (which is not surprising as I was involved in organising something during 3 days out of 5), but I’ve learnt a lot about organising a learning event like this one.

So, these are my lessons learnt. They are based on participants’ feedback, organisers’ debriefing and many one-to-one informal talks. Important conditions to take into account if you think about reusing them:

• This is a summer school, not a conference or a training course. We tried to balance some elements of both.
• It was organised mainly for young KM researchers (although we had enough experienced researchers and practitioners), so you can’t rely on participants being active and confident all the time.

Team and process

We worked as a distributed flexible team; most of the program committee members were volunteers and we didn’t have any “formal” leader. Most of us met during last year KM Summer School without knowing we will organise this one. After forming the program committee somewhere in beginning of 2003 we didn’t have any single face-to-face meeting with all of us, but few people met each other on other occasions. We had to rely on e-mail (somehow threaded discussion didn’t work), bi-weekly phone conferences and occasional phone calls. No conference management system, no document-sharing repository, no centralisation…

As some others I’m quite impressed with what we were able to achieve given these settings. But if someone asks me if I would do it this way again, I would say no.

It takes too much energy to achieve results in such a distributed network with no formal commitments (as a volunteer you can always have valuable excuses), no process/communication facilitation and no shared understanding/experiences of organising a learning event like KM Summer School 2003. Too many uncertainties altogether.

So I would work in a distributed network if there is a clear process and responsibilities or if there is shared understanding of how things work. The last one is probably most important: shared values, shared approaches, being on the “same wave” makes sure that you can work on achieving results and not on achieving shared understanding first.

Then there are some practical sides: using conference management system (e.g. free one like ConfMan or ConfMaster), structuring and capturing communication (ideally forum/wiki + file exchange server), a bit more centralisation and face-to-face contact.

Program, sessions, networking

Presentations

• No presentations after lunch
• Be careful with several presentations in a raw; better think of something interactive in between
• Prepare inexperienced presenters (ask them not to read their paper, focus on few most interesting issues, provoke discussion)
• Ideally make parallel sessions with inexperienced presenters (the risk of getting the whole audience bored is too high :)
• Questions

• Make more time for questions
• Do background negotiations with “talking too much” people, so they give more space to others to comment
• May be writing down questions on paper can work to give space for more people to ask questions

Interactive sessions

• Make sure results of small group work are presented
• Do not leave group work for self-organisation, structure the process (and leave more time at the end to continue with self-organised discussion)
• Provide group process facilitators if possible
• Find ways to involve everyone and not only “leaders” talking (e.g. asking everyone to brainstorm on paper first and then discuss results in a group)
• Give reading materials in advance and then don’t rely too much on people reading them

Socialising and networking

• Make sure there is a bar/restaurant in the hotel (“common space” in the evening)
• Make sure there is a group of people initiating “having dinner together”, so people without established network can easily join
• Longer breaks (at least 30 min)
• Write countries on badges
• Support finding each other by interests
• Scaffold active position (this is a separate topic which I hope to address one day)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/14.html#a743; comments are here.

• Blended Learning Models
• KMSS02: Day 1
• Accelerated leadership trajectories in communities of practice

Jim McGee makes my day. The morning started with his pointer to Career Calculus by Eric Sink. I loved this piece. It’s about simple formula behind someone’s career:

Cluefulness = Gifting + Learning*Time

And as Eric notes, “your career success is determined by three variables, only one of which you can control”. It’s not about how smart you are, it’s about the speed of learning. The first derivative.

Two small pieces:

…We want learning to be a process, not an event. Making your first derivative constantly positive is not just about formal training. It is a posture which you bring to your job each day. It is a posture of teachability, a constant willingness to learn.

…The best learning occurs when we choose to process a mistake with a mentor or peer. Unfortunately, this goes against our natural tendency. When we foul something up, the last thing we want to do is shine a light on it so everyone can see what a bonehead we are. What we really want to do is cover it up and hope nobody notices. But in doing so we miss a huge opportunity to increase our cluefulness.

That was a good start. Then I scrolled a bit and found From managing knowledge to coaching knowledge workers:

The fatal flaw in thinking in terms of knowledge management is in adopting the perspective of the organization as the relevant beneficiary. Discussions of knowledge management start from the premise that the organization is not realizing full value from the knowledge of its employees. While likely true, this fails to address the much more important question from a knowledge worker’s perspective of What’s in it for me?. It attempts to squeeze the knowledge management problem into an industrial framework eliminating that which makes the deliverables of knowledge work most valuable–their uniqueness, their variability. This industrial, standardizing, perspective provokes suspicion and both overt and covert resistance. It also starts a cycle of controls, incentives, rewards, and punishments to elicit what once were natural behaviors.

[...]Our goal is to make it easier for a knowledge worker to create and share unique results. Instead of specifying a standard output to be created and the standardized steps to create that output, we need to start with more modest goals. I’ve written about this before (see Is knowledge work improvable?, Sharing knowledge with yourself, and Knowledge work as craft). In general terms, I advocate attacking friction, noise, and other barriers to doing good knowledge work.

This approach also leads you to a strategy of coaching knowledge workers toward improving their ability to perform, instead of training them to a set standard of performance.

These two posts got me out my “I’m lost in my PhD” mood. I’m still lost, but now I see the light :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/08/20.html#a724; comments are here.

• When I’m done
• Knowledge networker needs
• Draft chapter for a review: Blogging PhD ideas

Sebastian Fiedler comments on Blogging as jazz

What a coincidence. I have just read through a German paper (pdf) about a change project in learning culture in which the authors make heavy use of the Jazz Band metaphor. Burow and Hinz suggest a “Jazz Band Model of leadership” for the intended change of learning culture in an educational institution. These are the characteristics they are focusing on:

• people are getting together who are experts on a particular instrument
• they choose a common theme (in a meaningful context)
• they offer each other an ‘open space’
• to create something together they need to listen to each other (dialogue and participation)
• if one takes the lead the others step back and support her/him
• not everybody has to be able to do everything, but individual skills need to be integrated into the composition
• everybody has to be open for new creations
• participation can also mean that one remains silent, takes a break, and leaves room for a solo
• the band does not need instructions or a conductor
• instead it needs a set of shared, internalized rules
• bands often emerge around a “point of crystallization”; a person who is able to articulate a shared vision and to support its realization

Burow and Hinz go one step further and extract “basic principles for self-organized team learning” from this description:

• bands emerge through self-organization
• bands need a manageable size
• bands emerge through a time-consuming process of self-selection
• bands create a “community spirit”
• bands are based on division of labour and shared rewards
• bands function through mutual challenge and stimulation
• bands are based on win-win-games: everybody profits

The more I think about it the clearer become the parallels to what I see happening in niches of the personal Webpublishing and Weblogging community. It’s not a bad methaphor, is it?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/04/10.html#a531; comments are here.

• Learning and knowledge sharing (2)
• Learning in the rain
• The fun of others blogging for you :)