Andy Boyd:

Isn’t it great how explaining yourself outloud to others, allows you to self reflect better then mulling it over in your own mind.

Me:

I always need a conversation for growing my ideas. This is the main reason I blog. Even if no one comments, blogging makes it a conversation: I come to the idea next day and I can discuss it with “yesterday’s Lilia” :) Of course, articulation helps growing ideas as well.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/17.html#a1432; comments are here.

• Open-Ended Manifesto on Research and Learning
• Research on how artefacts support thinking and knowledge creation
• Links on reflective skills

Just an example: how selecting units and color-coding for visualisation can amplify one perspective. Is the US really a nation polarised as much as it seems?

Compare US election results:

• Red/blue by state vs. purple scale by state
• Red/blue by county vs. purple scale by county

This is a good example of the case where black and white (red and blue ;) lenzes would do more harm than good.

It’s interesting why do we slip into binary thinking so easily?

I’m guilty of binary representations myself. It’s so strange: even given my beliefs in complexity, continuums and multi-dimentional nature of personal knowledge management I often slip into binary mode in my texts, making my own arguments vulnerable and stirring polarisation.

It seems that thinking in binary/linear/tree structures (context) is more natural for our brains than embracing complexity, so we need some conscious effort for getting beyond simplification and polarisation.

Lois Ann Scheidt on this in a context of research:

As human beings it is very common for us to look at new ideas, technology, etc. compare them to their older antecedents and then slot them into a linear continuum between two older examples of similar phenomena. By so doing we position the new idea, technology, etc. as somewhat less then the exemplars that anchor the continuum.

[...]

In my own research while I am forced to background some discussions with linear models so I echo the point of view found in published literature, I quickly try to move to more dimensional modeling that symbolizes the complexity of the ideas without making the ideas I am expressing overly complex and difficult for some of my audience to grasp.

See also:

• similar associations & more examples – Theresa Senft on maps and a follow-up by Helena Kvarnstrom
• even more maps

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/05.html#a1413; comments are here.

• NOAGGREGATE: what if I don’t want my digital bits to be connected at one place?
• Understanding real value of blogging: time, connectivity, need for reflection
• Out-of-the-box thinking

Lois Ann Scheidt:

At the The International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (IS_SoTL) conference I was present during a panel discussion where a conference attendee asked the presenter about the “role of a critical friend.” The term grabbed me and I knew I had to spend a bit of time finding out what it meant. After some web searching I found the following definition and citation.

A critical friend can be defined as a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critiques of a person’s work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward. The friend is an advocate for the success of that work

Costa, A. and Kallick, B. (1993) Through the Lens of a Critical Friend. Educational Leadership 51(2) 49-51

I have been blessed with a few wonderful critical friends who, through their prodding and reservoirs of insight, help me hone my arguments and craft my over all presentation to make the best use of my points, and often they simply keep my spirits up so I can continue working on whatever I am working on at the time. I value their input and hope that I come close to providing the same level of catalyst for their work as well.

I like the term “critical friend,” someone whose input is critical to the process and from whom one can expect friendly criticism. Both very necessary to an academic life.

I guess this is pretty much my definition of a friend :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/03.html#a1411; comments are here.

• Slow down time
• Learning: teams vs. communities
• Open-Ended Manifesto on Research and Learning

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.

• Change: patterns and leverage points
• My personal KM
• A personal view on knowledge work

I’m not lost, just busy finishing everything before leaving to another round of conferences next week (I’ll post on planning, check “meet me” section of my homepage if you are too curious to wait).

Although I do not blog, I read others. So this is something for you to think about: Ton on how Open Space makes you the one in charge.

Because it is clear up front that no-one is in charge, it is clear that if anything is to happen, you will have to take charge of your own role in the event. There is no way to delegate responsibilities.

It reminds me of the effect when someone needs help on the street: when you are alone you are likely to act, when there are others around we tend to wait to see who will take the lead, and then follow: usually meaning nothing happens. In Open Space it is clear up front that waiting for someone to take the lead will not be useful. The only thing to get the group going is to get going yourself.

“No way to delegate” :) Can we found a trigger for self-organised attitude here?

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/06/19.html#a1246; comments are here.

• Learning: communities vs. courses (4) – learners’ skills and motivation
• Links on reflective skills
• Preaching to the converted: PKM is not about methods and tools, but about attitude change

If you want some inspiration read My Life as a Knowledge Worker by Peter Drucker about experiences that taught him how to grow (found via Gurteen Knowledge-Letter).

Just two quotes. The first one is about perfection:

It was at about this same time, and also in Hamburg during my stay as a trainee, that I read a story that conveyed to me what perfection means. It is a story of the greatest sculptor of ancient Greece, Phidias. He was commissioned around 440 b.c. to make the statues that to this day stand on the roof of the Parthenon, in Athens. They are considered among the greatest sculptures of the Western tradition, but when Phidias submitted his bill, the city accountant of Athens refused to pay it. “These statues,” the accountant said, “stand on the roof of the temple, and on the highest hill in Athens. Nobody can see anything but their fronts. Yet you have charged us for sculpting them in the round–that is, for doing their back sides, which nobody can see.”

“You are wrong,” Phidias retorted. “The gods can see them.” I read this, as I remember, shortly after I had listened to Falstaff , and it hit me hard. I have not always lived up to it. I have done many things that I hope the gods will not notice, but I have always known that one has to strive for perfection even if only the gods notice.

The second is about conversation between Peter Drucker’s father and Joseph Schumpeter who were old friends:

By 1949 Schumpeter had become a very different person. In his last year of teaching at Harvard, he was at the peak of his fame. The two old men had a wonderful time together, reminiscing about the old days. Suddenly, my father asked with a chuckle, “Joseph, do you still talk about what you want to be remembered for?” Schumpeter broke out in loud laughter. For Schumpeter was notorious for having said, when he was 30 or so and had published the first two of his great economics books, that what he really wanted to be remembered for was having been “Europe’s greatest lover of beautiful women and Europe’s greatest horseman–and perhaps also the world’s greatest economist.” Schumpeter said, “Yes, this question is still important to me, but I now answer it differently. I want to be remembered as having been the teacher who converted half a dozen brilliant students into first-rate economists.”

He must have seen an amazed look on my father’s face, because he continued, “You know, Adolph, I have now reached the age where I know that being remembered for books and theories is not enough. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in the lives of people.”

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/05/12.html#a1202; comments are here.

• Developing reflexivity
• Slow down time
• Media literacy: from reading to writing and beyond

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.

• Learning: communities vs. courses (4) – learners’ skills and motivation
• Random observations from user studies
• Quality that emerges in action

Dorothy Leonard talked about “deep smarts” and how novices become experts (official keynote description, slides). As I understand “deep smarts” refer to a form of expertise – tacit, unrecognised, distinguishing experts from novices. I post some of my notes first and then a bit of comments.

“Ladder of expertise”: novice – apprentice – journeyman – master

Deep smarts (experts vs. novices)

• use pattern recognition
• draw on their tacit knowledge
• make swift decision based on knowledge about context
• extrapolate from what they see to what might be
• perceive small variations

Compared to novices experts have a lot of “receptors” and broad experiences, so they recognise patterns more easily. Novices have few or no receptors, without receptors information doesn’t become knowledge.

Ways of learning (with increasing independence)

• specific directions
• rules of thumb
• stories with a moral
• modelling
  
• Socratic dialogue
• joint problem-solving
• learning by doing (guided experience)
  • guided practice
  • guided observation
    • creating receptors (mind-stretching)
    • challenging assumptions and beliefs
    • checking role-models
  • guided experimentation
    • response to uncertainty
    • bounded search for feedback from environment
    • learning to think in hypotheses

For me the bottom-line of this talk was that coaching of novices by experts is may be the most effective way to acquire deep smarts. I would be interested to read more on studies Dorothy referred to and I’m getting convinced that I have to spend time studying research on apprenticeship models. If you have any pointers, please, let me know.

Gerald Prast asked Dorothy about dangers of coaching by experts and then we spent great part of lunch time discussing her answer. My summary of why coaching may not be good:

• not all experts can coach novices
• experts can be wrong, so with coaching “wrong expertise” will multiply
• when you learn from experts you are less likely to come up with new ideas

I believe that to overcome those dangers there is a need for more critical skills from novices (=not following gurus blindly, but finding their own path). Next to it an opportunity to learn from many different experts with controversial experiences and ways of coaching will help (but in this case there is a risk of getting lost with multiple role-models). Anyway, both require meta-learning skills which (we know :) are difficult to develop.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/15.html#a834; comments are here.

• Learning from Jill’s PhD journey
• KM Europe: other weblogs
• Critical friend

Course Development Wars: A Content Expert’s Cry for Help by Susan Smith Nash [via Alex Halavais]

This is a story about a teacher (in a SME role) being pushed to fit instructional design categories

Why did education departments brainwash students in this way? Or, more to the point, why do such people think that they are the only ones who possess the right to comment on (more like “make pronouncements on”) learning? I know I’m only seeing a tip of the iceberg, and that there are real and compelling reasons for accepting the results of carefully conducted, IRB-blessed research. Nevertheless, aren’t we sealing our own fate if we allow ourselves to present information and to mediate learning their way only. Heaven help those who deviate from the norm!

This makes me feeling happy that I studied instructional design after several years of learnt-by-doing training design. I remember my reaction for the ID course assignment: ok, I do it this way once and I’ll play my own rules after. I’ve learnt the language, some useful models, techniques and tricks, but I still do it “wrong way”.

A couple of years back I was designing a teacher training program for PhD students. I had to think how to teach them instructional design and avoid the risk of making them thinking that ID models boundaries are those to respect.

The program was implemented, first results were promising, but I left the job, so I can’t evaluate it properly. Still my recipe for teaching instructional design is the same:

spending more time not on studying ID, but on being exposed to different learning designs and facilitation styles (values, models, methods, technology support) + reflection on what, why and how works and on “what I would do differently?”

This is not a very efficient or easy to reuse method. It also depends highly on learners reflective skills or instructors’ ability to facilitate their development (I don’t have a good recipe for it :) It worked for me and for some others and I didn’t find a better way.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/03.html#a823; comments are here.

• Out-of-the-box thinking
• Developing reflexivity
• Learning: community vs. individual perspective

Another turn on Learning: communities vs. courses – 1, 2, 3: George Siemens summarises the discussion in Learning Ecology, Communities, and Networks. It’s a great overview (and it’s very good to have someone rethinking and summarising bits of distributed ideas), but I’m thinking on implementation challenges.

I wouldn’t come back to my concerns that some educational goals may not work with community dynamics, this time it’s about learners themselves, as “The simple fact of membership in one or seventeen networks specifies little about content of knowledge and nothing about degree of mastery” (Spike Hall). This point links the discussion about learning in a community with another stream on learning with weblogs.

Spike Hall notes that introducing weblogs as a learning tool is not about the technology, but about “passing over the deuterolearning (aka meta-learning and learning-to-learn) torch” and lack of meta-learning skills of students. He also adds that we are likely to overlook it:

I thought I might mention this because those already deep into a) weblogging / journaling, or b)research and development, as two examples, are already deep into self-directed growth and may take their own skill for granted. This taking-for-granted sets up a certain blindness to the total set of attitudes and skills that go into high levels of active and self-directed learning. And this blindness, in turn, can render the teacher/developer incapable of isolating and teaching the subskills and attitudes that are involved.

Sebastian Fiedler continues:

Though I certainly see the potential of personal Webpublishing to be turned into “a major self-uplift machine” (actually a good part of my paper for BlogTalk 2003 was trying to examine the possibility to conceptualize personal Webpublshing as a powerful tool for self-organized learning), I keep bumping into missing “subskills and attitudes” of adult learners whenever I try to integrate personal Webpublishing practices into formal course settings.

Sebastian points that it’s difficult to change existing learning habits and attitudes of adults and that there is a variety of ethical questions around it. At the end his asks:

What can we really do to promote more self-teaching and self-organized learning?

Can personal Webpublishing practices support a development into this direction?

Or do we need to treat some “attitudes and sub-skills” as explicit pre-requisites for turning personal Webpublishing into a tool for personally meaningul learning?

I would add: Can we decide being a self-organised learner is a good thing for someone who is comfortable learning in other ways? It’s quite a paradox: we want learners to be self-directed and this is one small thing we will decide for them… I believe that reflection and meta-learning skills are increasingly important in our days. My questions is: how do we facilitate others going there without forcing them?

Coming back to learning in communities: given the lack of structure and guidance in communities it’s personal meta-learning and communication skills that make learning possible. And, as Spike Hall notes, those who have these skills tend to take them for granted and expect that everyone will learn given the opportunity to do so. I don’t think so and I don’t have ready an efficient and ethical roadmap of developing these skills.

Related: earlier post on Developing reflexivity.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/17.html#a805; comments are here.

• Learning vs. doing: implicit learning and reflection
• Blogs as a learning tool with group projects
• Books on-line