Connected Futures Workshop nearing end of Week 1
May 2, 2008
For some of us this has been a baptisim of fire for all of us. There has been a lot to get ready and lots to do in this one week and the time leading up to it. With 32 of us learning together (faculty and participants) this opening week has proven that we need always be mindful of those new to community and Web2.0 tools and to not let the dialog escalate to a level that only the experienced can engage in. Even though this workshop is about strategies and tools we cannot let the technology be the driver.
As we near the end of week 1 people are still registering in the core tools and finding their way to the technologies we’re using. The hands-on activities are vitally important as this workshop is about learning by doing - so we can’t talk about tools without using them and hopefully giving participants a rich set of experiences of how these tools can support community.
This week’s culminating activity involves writing a blog post (or commenting on someone else’s blog) with early reflections on the significance of orientation and the technology steward in communities of practice. So watch out for those reflections! We have now also provided a Reflection discussion space on our private Home Base area for people to draft a reflection message if they’re not ready for the public blogosphere quite yet. I think we under-estimated the tool uptake time and over-estimated preparedness to take risks so early in the game. Oh well lots to learn 
.
I hear people asking for a map of the technologies we are using, to enable them to visualize their purpose and relationship. Seems a very reasonable request. I was tempted to say let’s go build one together in MindMeister but will one more tool tip people over the edge? I think so, maybe I or the faculty group should draft it form our perspective as designers of the experience and let our participants edit and refine it over the course of our time together.
Since the first week is not the normal course environment people might have experienced in the past and while people seem to be catching up on all fronts, we have decided to reinstate the Monday call for Week 2 and bring everyone back together to clarify where we are and where we are going. That will offer great feedback for us on how this first pilot offering is shaping up and how much we were on or off target.
Hard fun as Papert would say 
Bron
Entry Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: learning together, Web2.0 tools, workshop design, workshop reflections.
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1.
Nancy White | May 5, 2008 at 3:38 pm
I’m having very limited connectivity in Ethiopia. Hped to post this on my blog, but no luck so far and I can’t find my log in here, so I’m adding mine as a comment as a very fast short cut. (When I can get online, it has to be fAST!)
Week 1 Workshop Blog Post
I’m lending a hand for the CPSquare’s (http://www.cpsquare.org) “Connected Future” workshop which started the last week in April. As part of our collective “end of the week activity,” we are all to blog a reflection either on the workshop discussion board, or on our own blogs. Since I am currently offline while I write this, my timing will be off, but I decided to share it on my public blog as a “peek in” to an ongoing experiment.
(Why am I offline? I’m currently at ILRI in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where I’m co-facilitating a face to face element of an ongoing distributed workshop on knowledge sharing in international agricultural research. The network is down. Who knows for how long…???)
The workshop is devoted to looking at the role and impact of new technologies on communities of practice, and how we steward those technologies (or technology stewardship. If I were online, I’d be linking all these things to previous posts and definitions, but that will have to wait until later!)
This is not a workshop for the fainthearted. In the first week we are asked to register and acclimate to a fistful of online tools, from wikis to blog readers. While we have a “home base” on a discussion board, our activities will range across tools and modalities so we have some real experience to reflect upon and learn from. But all this jumping around right off the bat, before we’ve all gotten to know each other, feels pretty challenging. The brave post that they are feeling confused and I suspect others are quietly nodding in agreement in front of their computer screens.
What facilitates coherence? Especially in a complex world? What enables some of us to feel comfortable with incoherence, ambiguity and incompleteness while others take it as natural? Furthermore, how do we reconcile these differences when we are intending to act “in community?”
For me, these questions are always on my mind when I am in the technology steward’s seat. (Or on that keyboard!)
2.
twsolutions | May 5, 2008 at 5:33 pm
There is a large risk that introducing yet another tool like MindMeister will send many of us over the edge. However, there is a key difference in this technology in relation to the technologies we have been trying. Namely, it is a visualization tool that is useful precisely because it attacks the problem of orientation to the various tools from another perspective. Visualizing the interaction of the tools from the hyperlinking structure is one way of understanding this. But that is causing difficulty. A visual tool might help us understand the connections in a different way.
3.
jose sanchez | May 6, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Since I have not been able to login either I am posting my thoughts as a comment. No, this workshop is not for the fainthearted, that´s for sure. I am glad that this is the case since there are too many offers that leaves you wondering…if you were wasting your time an money. For me the discussion on our first call as well as the readings have been extremely useful. Since I am in the middle of facilitating five communities made up by librarians I have been able to see the relevance of the readings, particularly Chapter 7 which is very relevant to my work.
By developing a better understanding of coomunity orientations I might be able to be more useful and a more effctive facilitator. The autonomous nature of these communities and the struggle to differentiate their dynamics with those of traditional committees have demanded time , patience and to tap more knowledgeable people (a reason for my presence in this workshop).
I must admit I had a vague idea of what a technology steward was but it is definitely what I was looking for to satisfy a need I see in the develoopment of these communities. The timing has been great and i will keep struggling and I will continue to seek ways to participate and collaborate as best I can.