Tag Archives: nugget

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Confessions of a Computer-Mediated Communications Addict

Yes, I’ve been going through the closets lately. Here’s something I caught that might be of interest: a closing keynote address I presented at the 2002 Mary Washington College Faculty Academy on Instructional Technology.

It was an interesting in-between time. Our Assistant VP for Instructional Technology, David Ayersman, had left MWC in 2001. Our first CIO, Chip German, would arrive and begin his work in the fall of 2002. I had led the Instructional Technology Advisory Committee for several years but had not yet become an administrator. That step occurred in the summer of 2003, at Chip’s instigation, and would change all that followed in my career.

And I had not yet read Doug Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, or Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think, or any of those writings. I had never even heard of those people. I had no clue whatsoever about the “resonant frequency” of this stream of thought. No blogging, no podcasting, no Bluehost Experiment, no domain of my own, nothing. As you’ll see from the talk, it was all listservs (surprisingly sturdy and useful then) and what turned out to be ugly, slow, and ultimately disappointing Blackboard discussion forums. (I don’t think I’d discovered the Steve Hoffman Music Forums at that point, either–a new moment in my experience of discussion forums that would eventually turn me away from Blackboard and its ilk for good.)

So this paper tumbles out of my closet, and I caught it. In this talk I see that nearly a decade of working with computer-mediated communication had brought me into the thought world of dreamers who’d imagined and helped to build my future–ironically, unmet dreamers whom I had yet to discover. I see that my discovery of those dreamers ended up radicalizing me, in a way, as what I would read just two years later awakened me to the scope of those dreams and their liberatory potential for teaching and learning. Those dreams, and those dreamers, seemed to me a secret history of shared yearning, flawed and stained as all human endeavors are, but one that asked the central questions about the most salient concerns. It was an intellectual rebirth for me, but also the beginning of a trial-by-fire in some respects.

I see how ready I was for my next teachers to appear. I see a discontinuous moment ahead that I could not have anticipated. (I see that I am already using the word “bootstrapping.”)

I am trying to draw some lessons from this moment that comes into a new focus, fourteen years later.

I also like the muddle-mull-meal idea, which I’ve never used since in any talk I’ve given or any paper I’ve written. Maybe you’ll like it too.

Confessions of a Computer Mediated Communications Addict_final-2

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Selfies & avatars as a form of reflection

Recently, I’ve spent much time and energy  discussing the pedagogical merits of blogging: a practice that supports skills such as social networking; providing and receiving feedback; developing a sense of audience; and creating a searchable, filterable, organizable record of thinking and growth over time. Alan Levine talks about this last benefit all the time – he can trace his learning for decades through his blog.  That’s wicked cool.

I’ve been blogging for about 5 years. It’s really interesting to look at how my practice has changed over time.  I had some better stories back then, but I’m better at telling them now. More balanced. I’m growing into my blogging and it shows.

However, a couple of nights ago I was searching through old folders on my PC. I was looking for an image that I needed to edit and submit for an upcoming publication. While I was searching (and cursing my lack of organization in the last days of my dissertation phase) I happened across a folder of old avatar pics, some of them as many as five or six years old.  My doctoral program was full of opportunities to establish a digital presence. Blogging, tweeting, and Google Plus were required in one class or another, LinkedIn was often encouraged by the faculty, Skype came in handy, and Instagram wasn’t much of a stretch. Furthermore, I presented at plenty of professional conferences and was interviewed for articles.. all of these required pictures or avatars.

Oh, the avatars. The selfies.

Selfies are somewhat controversial among the general population.  Some people have embraced them as opportunities to document, empower, or entertain.  Others see them as an alarming trend towards collective narcissism and self-involvement.  Since I tend to be the photographer of the family, I see them as the only real visual record of my existence in this world (seriously – and I’m not the only one with this problem).

When I look through the avatar folder, I see my graduate school story unfold as clearly as it does in this blog.  In fact, flipping through selfies might be a more visceral experience than clicking through blog posts, because the pictures were taken in a moment rather than composed over hours, days, or weeks.  When I look at these pictures, I see more than age changes (although there are plenty of those). I see a growing understanding of social media (that first picture on LinkedIn? really? I was a hot mess). I see signs belonging within academic communities (the Howard Rheingold impression). I see confidence in a professional role (never been more in my element than in that picture with my glasses on the top of my head). I see landmark occasions (graduation). I see my kids. I see some pretty significant depression this summer (the third and second to last pictures… I wince a little when I see them and recovery (what a difference a couple months can make).  I see me. The avatars help me lay it all out. They aren’t about self-absorption as much as sharing and recording, just like blogging.

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LinkedIn – 2012.
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Twitter – 2012.
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LinkedIn – 2013.
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WordPress – 2013
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Academia.edu – 2014
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Twitter -2014/15
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Conferences, Articles – 2015
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Instagram – 2015
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Twitter – 2015
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Twitter – 2015
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Google, Presentations – 2016
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Twitter – 2016 (Graduation)
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Twitter – 2016
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Twitter – 2016
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Instagram – 2016
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Twitter – Today (Literally).

 

Open Participants, Syndicated

Hace doce horas en un pasillo del hotel oscuro – Openness with Brian Lamb

Much as he may disavow my assertion (ask him about the one in Flagstaff a few years ago), Brian Lamb and I getting together for presenting is always a peak experience, usually peaking soon before it happens.

For the UdG Agora face to face sessions last month in Guadalajara, Tannis Morgan asked us to do “something” as a main session on Openness, as this was one of the pillars of the project. We knew the one we did in Victoria in March for BC Campus was not quite the right thing (especially w/o our twitter performance which went a bit off the rails).

We’ve done much individually and together on the topic or a while, so I was not worried that we had nary a plan before we went to Mexico.

There was also no plan by Thursday of the first week, and we were slated to do it the next day. We had talked/speculate at we might not want to start with the assumptions on attitudes and awareness of open sharing, re-use that we know from our usual North American audiences.

It was on the ride back from the CUAAD campus in a car with Nancy White, that her typical magical force happened:

Nancy Libre
flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license

Of course what she said seems to have faded, but it really gelled the idea- that rather we try to explain the ideas of openness, that it becomes more of a questioning our our own assumptions; and that we look to use small examples if things that the participants had done that week that demonstrate its spirit in action (I may have actually been dozing on the ride home, but Brian got the spark).

He banged out an outline that night as we sat on the veranda at Villa Ganz.

And that was the setting for a bit of drama inn our session;; we literal play acted for the audience “twelve hours ago in a dark hotel lobby”. We acted like we were trying to organize the very presentation we were doing. I would do a bit of overview of my usual stuff (True Stories of Open Sharing) and Brian talks some about one of his favorite examples, the Jon Beasley Murray Murder Mayhem Madness Wikipedia writing story.

We in fact talk about these as if we were conversing. Then we stop and say to each other “I don’t think this will work for this audience”.

Brian hams it up fine with his quizzical look!

The Quizzical Brian Lamb
flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license

And then we break into a series of vignettes of examples we saw that weak, things openly created and shared by participants, informal connectivity, how the open internet participated in the activities that week. Plus some serious addressing of the concerns people described for us, unclear local support, how to integrate technology not readily available, and the looming issue of being evaluated.

Then we flash back to our own stories of how we first connected in 2003, of finding support from remote colleagues, even flashing the old photo of us with D’Arcy Norman in Vancouver at 2004 (oh they loved the old photo!)

And we return to images of what we saw that week, how every time we looked at our participants, the way the were nearly always working collaboratively, laughing, showing their work. The question we want them to leave with is how can we sustain or develop this same sense of being together we had face to face when we move to the online sessions.

I don’t want to gloat much, but the energy in the room was strong when we moved to a conversational mode, even with us doing this in English. Does the spirit of openness come across even when not all the words do? I’d like to think so.

It was a joy to put this together- Brian and I both co-assembled the images as a Google Docs presentation thing, and in the morning, I downloaded it as Powerpoint (in case of internet hiccups) to project. Both of them are embedded below (we used media and stories from each week of the activities, to showcase people who were in the room).

I have an audio recording of the second version:

It’s hard to top working with Brian, it’s sheer excitement every time we plot something off kilter. My favorite mode of presenting has a bit of theatrics to it, and Brian is always willing to play (or provide the foil hats)

You Can Trust Someone in a Foil Hat
flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license

Our audience provided their own photos as well

Also, Brian storified a bunch of twitter responses to his question about the Value of Openness

Top / featured image credit: Twitter photo by @javierzepeda

The post “Hace doce horas en un pasillo del hotel oscuro – Openness with Brian Lamb” was originally emerged from the primordial ooze and first walked on land at CogDogBlog (http://cogdogblog.com/2015/08/hace-doce-horas/) on August 2, 2015.