Reflection Point: Social media as a lens for social change

In the midst of coaching others to use social media to reach and connect with specific audiences to share research-based information,  I’ve probably re-tweeted and researched more about articles concerning social change, organizational management, innovation, and behavior change than any other topic.  Why? I asked myself.  What business do I have trying to tweet things about changing the organization and the habits of people I work with?

To answer this question, I copied and pasted my tweets that I have favorited into a spreadsheet (an activity I’m repeating/tweaking from my first reflection point blog post), then added a column to label each tweet with keywords that described why I had favorited those tweets.

I then took the spaces out of the words, and placed the list in Word it Out, which enabled me to see relationships between words based on their frequency of use.

What does the wordcloud tell me? What topics am I interested in and why? How does what I’m interested in tie to my understanding of my work and personal ambitions better?

1)Biggest sized words -Social change, environment, and sustainability.

I see technological shifts creating flux and the same time I see our natural environmental becoming stressed and less predicable.  Both of these trends disrupt stability and sustainability. Instead of thinking of stability and sustainability, I see we need to look at ways we can be more agile and resilient.

This will take new technical know-how, mindsets, and ways of working through social networks, more specifically by:

a) finding, knowing, and being connected to people (this 30 second ad on collaboration and social networking illustrates this point well).

b) strategically aligning or collaborating with people and partners around common needs and priorities. (I especially found the April 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review How to Thrive in a Warmer World insightful – especially the article of how UPS incorporated their sustainability efforts into their business and how they addressed priorities, and determined partnerships, etc..)

2)Medium sized words –blogging, social learning, behavior change, working outloud, PKM, planning, knowledge, social media, reflection, technology, planning, workplace learning, visual communication

In helping educational professionals change their habits to incorporate social media use into their daily work routines, I thought I should challenge myself to adopt new habits, also.

Since I’ve been using social media to keep up-to-date with new trends since 2008,  I didn’t anticipate how much I needed to slow down and spend more time reflecting upon or synthesizing what I am learning, how I’ve come to know it, and how to say and share (when and where) with others to provide value for me, or them.

This realization fully came to me through participation in Harold Jarche’s PKM Workshop, and is a real lens for personal, organizational, and social change.  I’m learning of few existing organizations that are setup to support or encourage this kind of networked learning and reflective practice, which may initially conflict (or appear to conflict) with getting current task-type work done.

3)Smaller words – I see a couple ways to make sense out of the smaller words: words that are “related to my work”, and “trends to watch of learn from”.

Related to Work:  community manager, digital technology, facilitation, situational awareness, diversity, educators, digital media, writing for the web, infrastructure, messiness, workflow, complexity, communication, social media tools, professional development, sharing, social media policies,  saticficing, social comfort.

My work is very much about making order out of change, and helping others (often many parties) navigate new tools and approaches for working and communicating together. Seeing how others work in similar contexts is helpful for validating or communicating ideas that might seem “out there” at first.

Trends to watch or learn from:  internet of things, diversity, serendipity, climate change, privacy, mindsets, nature, economy.

In helping others to use social media to  learn, collaborate, and share research-based information and solutions with others, I think it’s important to see and question both the possibilities and the limitations of how technological and other disruptive shifts are occurring and how they will affect people, communities, and business.

In summary, I see social media becomes a lens for change in these ways:

Social media and networking is a way to keep up-to-date and understand how social, technology, and environmental climates are shifting.

Social media provides possible tools, methods, and collaborative opportunities needed for trying to ride waves of disruption caused by shifting climates (social and environmental).

Without organizational support, I see shifting personal habits to spend more time reflecting, learning, and interacting via social media and networks within the context of professional work may be difficult for many.

Social media and our social networks can help those of us who work with hard-to-explain ideas, concepts, or ‘things for which we have no name” to validate, refine, and communicate our once fuzzy ideas into something more tangible or effective.

While teaching others to use social media often starts by helping others define their social media/communication strategies, I see the real value in helping people use social media is to develop (i.e. change or enhance) support networks and methods to help ride and detect future and existing waves of change.

It’s helpful to reflect on the reasons I keep tweeting and reading about social change.  To me, making the most of of social media means learning new things all the time, which  requires behavior change at many levels (personal, organizational, network).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Experiment in writing a half-hour per day: What is writing time?

My experiment in writing a half hour per day is progressing. One month into my writing commitment,  I’ve been able to reflect on what really happens when committing some routine time to “write” about things I’m working towards.

I’m quoting the word “write” because I’ve discovered I spend a lot of time not writing, as sketched below:

Writing time for things I’m working toward is actually proving to involve several steps.

Along the way, I’ve learned that I prefer 60-90 minutes of time of “writing time” versus 30 minutes.

Thinking about Writing goals

I’m finding committing time to write regularly is really helping me to be goal focused. I’ve set some personal-professional learning goals for 2014, i.e. “What am I hoping to learn to improve my skills and how can I apply it to my work?” Thus, keeping a spreadsheet with a list of my goals, then generating a list of associated blog posts ideas, complete with a lists of blog post titles (and notes for each)  is one activity I’ve been working on during “writing time” over the past month.

Connecting Ideas with sketchnotes

I’ve also found that doodling/sketchnoting/visual note taking (one of my 2014 learning goals), is helping me jump start the writing process by providing myself with a visual map of what I should write about. It also helps me see the relationship behind the ideas I’m trying to make. One of the realizations I’ve (and many others, I’m sure) have had is that when I try and express my learning in one linear path, it completely chokes my ability to communicate. Drawing something non-linear, seems to be the first step to being able to write something linear, as funny as that may seem.

Writing!!!!

Next, I’ve been able to write and publish a few blog posts. This is gratifying, even though I’m shooting for 500 words or less and have missed every time!   However,  since my recent realization that making sketchnotes seems to be expediting and streamlining my thought process about what I should write, I think I may be able to achieve this goal for future posts, especially if I can further execute my ‘next steps plan’ (read on further).

Discerning with whom and when to share

I realize the last (and sometimes even the first) part of the equation to writing is discerning with whom and when to share (as Harold Jarche writes). For example, here are some of the questions I consider: Should I write in a paper journal, Evernote journal, this WordPress blog? What blogging tags should I use? Who should I share it with and when should I share it with them? Maybe I should write something and share this with my work team, an online community,  my Personal Learning Network?  What hashtag should I use if I share on Twitter or Google+?

What’s next to keep me “writing”?

As I think about all that is really involved with “writing time”, I’m finding I need more structure or a continuation plan. How will I write less per post, publish more frequently, and write things I and others will find most valuable?

Next steps plans (outlined in rectangles) for continuing to write on my blog

Here is my next steps plan:

• Find several tracks or series, where I can gain some momentum by writing blog posts in a series of smaller, but yet connected pieces. I plan to keep a spreadsheet where I can prioritize, schedule, then check off blog post titles and tracks as I complete them.
• Include writing time into daily priority list. If I’m short on time, discover which of my writing steps can be completed to move me forward to completing a blog post.
• As I see a list of unfinished blog posts grow, I will likely fold the review of my unfinished posts occasionally into my priority lists, so I can determine what to purge or keep and refine.

So there it is, one month later, I’m finding I’ve made progress in working on putting “writing time” into my daily workflow.  The last observation I’m making here, is that I didn’t originally give myself a commitment to blog, I made a commitment to write.

I’m finding the little bit of feedback and conversations I’ve generated through several blog posts has been so beneficial, that it’s driving me to stay focused and find better ways to write and share through this blog.  So, on that note, future progress reports may be focused on my experiment in blogging.

Perspectives from Multiple Participants – A lesson from family vacation

I’ve been looking at the role of participation and co-creation in science and education. A recent presentation provided a glimpse of how John Porter, Steve Hadcock, and I are seeing the expectations and potential of social media and new technologies really changing the way we see educational professionals interact and participate with the interested public and partners.

In this presentation, I shared two resources I continue to look to when thinking about how we may involve people in research, education or perhaps better put – how we can involve ourselves in learning and working with the public or non educational professionals to accomplish community goals and outcomes (local or global):

• New Report: Engaging Citizens in Co-Creation of Public Services, and
• Open Innovation Handbook

Lessons taken from capturing views of our family vacation

A recent family vacation to the Grand Canyon was great a reminder about the value of engaging people to contribute to gain multiple perspectives, and also how I see the younger generation expecting to contribute, interact and move from more of a mindset of passive learning to active learning.

Capturing the ‘big picture’ views at the Grand Canyon

Returning from our family trip,  I uploaded photos from several devices (family camera, ipod, iPad, Mom’s smartphone, Dad’s smartphone).

I realized that for the first time ever, all of us could participate to capturing the family memories.

Everyone captured photos on the family trip

During the trip, I discounted the potential of just about everyone else’s photo contributions (but mine). Mostly because I had “a plan” in mind.  I figured their shots would be blurry or too close up, or not tell much of a story.   I was wrong.

While I had been busy making sure not to miss the chronological details of the trip, and major sites, my kids captured the details, the little things that probably will evoke the most memories.  I first noticed this when I uploaded my youngest son’s pictures.

Pottery from Hopi House

I opened the iPad he was using, fully intending to delete or edit a lot of what he captured (largely because I saw him take such quick shots and random pictures), but instead what I saw a rich set of photos.  He captured his experiences, where, I, the self-appointed person in charge of the family camera concentrated on getting the picturesque scenes.

He captured photos of the art from gift shops, the rugs and loom exhibit at the Hopi House, and even how we saw things through his toy compass-magnifying glass-thermometer 3-in-1 kit.

This compass-magnifying glass-thermometer 3-in-1 kit was part of the Grand Canyon adventure

These things are all details that I would have forgotten over time, but they meant something to him, and now we’ll have these pictures to reinforce these memories.

Applying lessons from family vacation back to work

As I bring this back to my work world, it was a great reminder of …

a)how far technology has come to enable someone in grade school to capture a great shot

b)due to an abundance of digital storage space (Terrabytes+) and the low cost of taking a lot of digital pictures, we often have a new opportunity to capture more of the little details than we did, say, 15 years ago when developing photos was the only option.

c)both big picture and little details help us put together the pieces we need to capture value. (Had I had let my youngest take all the pictures, we would not have gotten a sense of the big picture overview of the trip.  Had he not captured details,  we would not have had a sense of the fullness and richness of the trip.)

d)digital participation can help us understand what questions to ask. (Seeing details from my son’s perspective made it possible to follow up and ask him more detailed questions. I found that what he saw, learned, and observed is really quite fascinating and that he internalized the experience more deeply than I had understood originally.)

Questions and ideas for gathering participation in science and education in new(er) ways

As I translate this experience back to my work, and the articles I mentioned above, it prompts me to ask these questions:

• How are people seeing, wanting, and able to participate in the world in a way that was not possible 5, 10, 15 or years ago?
• How might seeing what other people are seeing or valuing through social media help scientists and educators gain new insights or do their jobs better?
• As mentioned in New Report: Engaging Citizens in Co-Creation of Public Services, what new role(s) (e.g. explorer, ideator, designer, influencer) might people like to play in a project, opportunity, community, or collective effort that might not have been possible before social or digital media existed?

Last but not least, on a practical level, I’d like to point to a recent presentation done by my colleague Amy Hays:  Instagram for Instaprogramming (see also part of her presentation on YouTube). Amy is great at demonstrating how visual social media tools like Instagram can involve both new and existing audiences, while simultaneously expanding or deepening our (the researcher’s or educator’s) understanding of what may be learned or achieved through digital and collective participation.

Sunset captured by our youngest picture taker during an evening walk at the Grand Canyon – South Rim.

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An experiment in writing a half-hour per day

For the last twenty-one days or so, I’ve been working at writing a half-hour per day about my personal-professional development. (Full disclosure: I traveled last week and didn’t write at all since I was with colleagues during the day and evening).

I’ve been struggling to work in writing and reflection time as a routine practice into my daily workflow. From past work-related experiences, I have estimated that one blog post usually takes about 4 or more hours of time. During most weeks, finding one solid four-hour time block to write is pretty rare for me.

That is why I recently decided to try giving writing a half hour per day a try.  A “half-hour” is an approximate amount of time for me, as some days I have been writing as much as an hour, whereas other days it may be twenty minutes. As of now,  I am not forcing myself to have a published product (or blog posts) in that same half-hour, for now it’s about writing (here in WordPress, Evernote, or on paper) so I develop a habit of working out loud or narrating my work.

At two weeks into this process, I’ve mostly worked on one blog post, which remains unpublished, but I’ve also had the following reflections:

1)Even though I haven’t published the original blog posts I’ve been working, I have done more thinking and research on the topic then I intended (that is a good thing). I also ended up sharing these ideas with co-workers more easily since they were already put together in a (unpublished) blog post.

2)It’s been very helpful for clearing my mind. Writing a half-hour per day has helped me feel like I can become aware of other new ideas, either by tabling them,  incorporating them into what I am writing at the time,  or helping me to deflect new ideas that may be interesting,  but less relevant to things I’m working on at the moment.

3)Other people find this act of writing for a half an hour, helpful or interesting too.  After tweeting about my 4th day of writing for a half-hour, a former #xplrpln cMooc member Tanya Lau mentioned she’d like to join me, and several other people retweeted or favorited my tweet. This is great, because I could always use social accountability to continue the momentum.

4)There are some days I need to take a break. I think I’m going to allow taking two – three days most weeks for this kind of non-committal activity. Why? I also need my early morning time to write the grocery list, set health goals and stay on top of the family calendar.

5)Other days I need to write with the intention not to share with others.  The reason for this is there are some ideas that I’m working on but not ready to share yet. When I find myself working on these ideas, I plan to journal in Evernote or in a paper notebook.

So far, I’m pretty satisfied with taking the time to write for a half-hour per day.  I think taking the time to write a half-hour a day is working from the stand point that I look forward to sitting down to write a half-hour every morning, and I’m putting this into my daily routine consistently. However, I am interested in getting to the point of publishing more frequently. As Tanya Lau mentioned,  I think it may be helpful to start to develop an outline and plan of things I’d like to write to publish here once I get the ideas flowing from a couple a weeks of just writing a half-hour per day.

 

 

 

 

 

Reflection Point – April 29, 2014

This is my first reflection point blog post, a collection of conversations and resources I’ve liked, shared, or added as favorites from across the web in the past few weeks.  I’ve been sitting on this idea for quite sometime, but I have finally put it into action as a result of my current enrollment in Harold Jarche’s PKM workshop.  I hope I keep this up, because I was pleasantly surprised to see three patterns emerge around my current areas of work or interest: community and social engagement, communicating and relating, and natural sciences.

Community and Social Engagement

Since jumping into the content development role in 2007 (and later community management roles), conversations have surely changed from a) how to use social media tools to engage people to b) actually changing our social approaches.  Here are some quotes and resources I kept coming back to the past few weeks:

@JackRicchiuto  “It is incredibly naïve to expect that anyone would support something they did not help create.” #engagement

Quitting the social business (blog posts about making the case for helping people shift from pitching social platforms and software to working socially and collaboratively).

State of Community Management 2014 Report (this report in Slideshare deserves it’s own write up about how communities (internal and external to the organization) and community management can help improve organizational performance. In several regards, it also reinforces work we’ve done in eXtension and my own experiences in a community management role)

@Alexnetlit “Dialogue, the engine that drives Knowledge Sharing> uncovering the “unknown knowns” #netlit”

@DaveGray – YouTube Interview with Mitchell Sipus. (This was an 88 minute interview that ended too soon. Through many fascinating stories of Sipus’s international work, great insights emerged about how to embrace messiness in complex situations and how to find intersections to solve problems.)

Communicating and Relating

Communicating and relating, especially through visual means, is on the top of my 2014 skills to improve. I especially appreciate learning through others learning and working to communicating science.

‏@treubold “81,561 people agree – It’s time to ditch the boring slides and design kick-ass presentations! http://www.slideshare.net/treubold/fight-the-powerpoint”

@FromtheLabBench “Totally just finished a 40-page paper in 3 days: Best Communication practices from Environmental Psychologists! pic.twitter.com/n29fvovu0d”

@DeniseRuttan Helpful share MT @copykatrecipes How to Find Your Social Media Marketing Voice and Tone: http://buff.ly/1m9zfG9 pic.twitter.com/KphqABNzlq

I picked up the book Sketchnotes by @rodesign – hoping to use this as a tool to help me improve my notetaking and drawing abilities.

Things I learn from the natural world science

Besides having pure awe and wonder at the natural world, or the desire to keep my formal education in natural sciences alive, I find helpful hints about relationships, connectedness, human wellness, and the value of diversity in networks through science and nature conversations. These hints are often helpful in me understanding or communicating social flows, ways to organize in networks,  or feeding my curiosities in other ways I have yet to understand.

@kdewey1unl One of my favorite sensations is the smell when it starts to rain on a hot summer day. Here is the science behind it. pic.twitter.com/QJnPH6D7yc

@NatureSacred: Can Growing Cities Have Both Dense Urban Development & Green Space? http://bit.ly/1mIsICS

@AmericanForests: A Call For Backyard Biodiversity – http://www.americanforests.org/magazine/article/backyard-biodiversity/#.U1sbsYren50.twitter

@realscientists bridges like this are also vital for carnivores that have big home ranges but live at low densities pic.twitter.com/PqouBIKn5F

— Michael Hunter (@mikeh0611) April 26, 2014

Narrating Work in the Present – Taking a Leap of Faith

One of the assignments I’ve been undertaking in Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop (#PKM14) is about narrating your work.  I’ve been working towards making an effort to increase my reflective practice as part of PKM for quite some time (mostly I’ve been writing in paper notebooks, reading and sharing in social networks, and most recently I started this blog).

The hardest part of sharing openly has been to share the present, I finally admitted this (see the red outline in the photo below) as I recently sketched out:

Narrating work, past, present, future – what am I sharing on a day to day basis?

What I realized is that I usually share things in the past, and things I’m looking to find out about for the future, which means I can share someone else’s link or ideas with others.  This is all great…it really is.  However, rarely, do I ever share many of my present experiences or narrate my work through an open network like Twitter (unless I’m at a conference). Why have I been struggling with narrating my work in the present for quite some time?

Narrating My Work – a Test

Well,  does anyone really want to hear what I’m doing?  Here’s a test:

• Today I tried to figure out whether or not to merge two work team related Google Doc spreadsheets to maximize use and participation. I think I figured it out: I need two because both spreadsheets need their own tabs of related information that would be confusing if together in the same spreadsheet.  I also discovered some nice new Google interface updates in the process.

When did this nice little wrap text icon come to Google spreadsheet? pic.twitter.com/UhICYJpE4t

— Karen Jeannette (@kjeannette) April 17, 2014

 

•  I helped someone merge 3 PowerPoint files into 1 without losing the formatting of the original files, a struggle several team members and I have experienced.  Then, the file got so large I had to upload it through a special enterprise sharing site to get the 25 MB file to an ‘external’ partner (instead of the usual vehicle – email). And once that person received it we discovered we might have to rethink how to take it apart again to run the webinar! Oh well! 🙂

How to merge PowerPoints files and not mess up the original formatting

• I started sharing and thinking about how to share more openly with our teams using Basecamp (something we’ve been wanting to do). This also enabled me to share the screenshot of how to merge 3 PPT files into 1 without messing up the formatting) without cluttering up email inboxes.

• I sent an email/Doodle poll to pull together our 2nd meeting for putting together social media ‘training’ modules to make nationally available to over 50 EMG programs later in 2014/early 2015.

• I coordinated the logistics on a few webinars (e.g. phone or VOIP? Can we broadcast a Prezi without crashing things?)

• I worked with someone to promote one of our partners resources and thought about where to put a new partnership document that our teams could all access.

• I felt guilty for taking the time to write this blog post about what I did, since it didn’t feel like work (yet it’s actually been very helpful).

Getting over the vulnerable feeling of open sharing – will it ever end?

If someone asked me what the value of social networking I would say it’s to share these kind of things, but it feels different when you are the one that is sharing.  I’ve known in my head (see Hagel: The Big Shift of Influence and Jarche: trust emerges from effective networks)  that this kind of present, vulnerable sharing can bring forth real fruit, answer, innovation, and new ways of working .

In fact, for the past few months, I’ve learned some of these best examples from Sacha Chua, because she has been diligent about journaling her work for quite some time.  What I’ve learned from her is that her willingness to share so openly is extremely valuable for me.  I’ve learned her process of getting better at visually drawing and conceptualizing ideas (a current goal of mine),  her technique for journaling her work, and how she’s been able to take on new challenges – like delegating tasks I’d never thought to delegate.

Taking the leap of faith to let my network filter me

So, what’s my dilemma? I just haven’t narrated or shared my work in the present much. It seems unworthy to take up space on the web, yet, I’ve just learned 750+ words later that this blog post has been an amazing process in self reflection.  I really didn’t think my day to day activities like merging a PowerPoint really needed reflection, but having done this now, I can now see that a seemingly trivial activity was more attached to a community and future improvement than I would have normally have given it credit for.  That in itself is exciting to recognize.

Harold Jarche said it took him several years to refine his blogging,  and I need to remind myself that this is a process. I’m seeing that other people have said it’s really about letting your network filter you. So with that thought, I’m going to take the leap of faith, reminding myself this is a process, something I can do for me, and perhaps from time to time what I say will resonate with someone else that might lead to future conversations and new ideas.

 

Takeaways from National eXtension Conference 2014

There were an enormous amount of takeaways for me from the National eXtension Conference 2014, so I anticipate this is the first of a few posts reflecting on conference takeaways, but here are a few things I didn’t want to forget:

Audience with no internet access? Can you help them get it?

During Dave Gray’s keynote (recording here), the following Q and A occurred:

Q: How do we reach those that can’t connect via tech A: How can we do things to help people get them access to be more connected? #NeXConf

— Karen Jeannette (@kjeannette) March 25, 2014

In the past years, this has been the rub for many serving multiple audiences -some having and some not having Internet access. Gray’s answer helped me rethink that the way to provide access may actually be to help them get online access as they’ve done in this San Antonio Public library.  Extension could be a key advocate in helping this happen by working with local city and governments.

Purpose, Personal Branding, Personalization

Gray talked about “Purpose, Pods, and Platforms” and that purpose can be used to help drive autonomy to help people self-organize and work together.  Jane Hart and Harold Jarche discussed (recording here) that personal learning and personal branding will go hand in hand now and in the future as people are learning to be more self-organized, self-directed knowledge workers.

Thanks for finding link Jerri RT @jl_hammonds: #quote #nexconf pic.twitter.com/3pmcUN0ijy #NeXConf

— Karen Jeannette (@kjeannette) March 27, 2014

I think this raises the point that purpose is more important than ever to be intentional about communicating on behalf of your brand, and organization, as it matters how the organization and individuals can communicate and pull together to get work done.

Infusion of network and social learning literacies into learning opportunities.

Listening to Jane Hart, it became even clearer to me we need to infuse educational curriculum and learning opportunities by integrating network literacy , PKM, and the Seek-Sense-Share concepts framework, as we teach others to find and use resources.

My daily PKM routine (practices and toolset) http://t.co/FzFVy1gk0L #nexconf

— Jane Hart (C4LPT) (@C4LPT) March 27, 2014

Seek sense share and some of the tools @hjarche uses #nexconf pic.twitter.com/pnewX0n0On

— Nick Leffler (@technkl) March 27, 2014

During the conference @soapboxmommy provided an example of how this is being done in her Fostering Social Media Self-Efficacy in Future Family Science Professionals presentation, including a slide where she identified 15 social media competencies.

Yes! “Students need social competence to prepare them for the new world of work.” #NeXConf

— Karen Jeannette (@kjeannette) March 27, 2014

Driving project performance with friendly competition

During a post-conference meeting, we discussed placing our overall project’s discussions in a central place like Basecamp. The ideas would be to unite several teams in overall project discussions where teams could keep track of decisions, ask and answer each others questions, and provide more opportunities for cross-collaboration between teams.

And then> Anne Adrian mentioned it could also increase our overall  performance through a little friendly competition between teams. I often think about using tools to help us work together, but rarely think about spurring friendly competition to drive the performance of the whole project. It was a great point I will remember in the future!

Does knowledge die in email or is email the death of knowledge?

E-mail is where knowledge goes to die! #NeXConf expert panel.

— Jamie Seger (@techie_jamie) March 27, 2014

During the same post-conference meeting I just reference, we started by sharing what we learned at the conference. Here I share a humorous exchange that took place as a result of the Master Panel discussion (recording here):

Team member 1 said:

What stuck with me is Dave Gray saying, “Email is the death of knowledge.”

Team member two said:

I don’t think he said that exactly, he said: “Email is where knowledge goes to die.”

Team member 1 said, curtly, with a hand wave:

“Well, I thought I’d be more direct and just get to the point. I think it’s the death of knowledge”

The room burst out in laughter – probably because everybody feels the pain that email can cause to a group or organization in restricting team participation or developing situation awareness among members. It was a good moment for many of us to think through using social tools to share our work more openly, rather then to lose it in the blackhole of email.

Key Personal Takeaway Action – Get going on PKM for real this time.

Last but not least, this conference helped me re-emphasize just how important it is that I really need to work on my commitment to consistently working in PKM to my everyday workflow and routine.

My largest area of need is to continue blogging, as I understand this will be helpful for me for a number of reasons (see: Finally finding motivations for starting to blog).  Afterall, it’s one thing to think you should do something, and another thing to do it.  In the next 2 months,  I plan on putting this into practice, developing my routine, and finding a few colleagues that will hold me accountable.

Finding ways to visually explain personal learning in networks

As part of a recent assignment (note: I started this posts months before I finally published it) for the Exploring Personal Learning Networks MOOC, I’ve been thinking about how to better explain how technology enabled networks have expanded our personal learning networks.

Thus, I wanted to compile some of the resources that are helping me learn to visually communicate what this network expansion might look like for an individual person, or perhaps more specifically a community educator. Here are three that I found particularly useful:

1)The Connected Educator and Social Media –  While this Prezi might not have shown the exact connections between people or nodes in a network, it connected the ideas of how an educator could connect with others in different online social spaces (or circles) in Facebook or Twitter,  or how they could use Pinterest to gather and share resources in those spaces.

I marveled at this Prezi, because the author connected a sense of space and purpose without necessarily making each connection a person to person connection.  IMHO, this was a great use of Prezi, and would more difficult hard to convey with a linearly sequenced PowerPoint.

2)Dave Gray’s Connected Company Flickr slideset has some great visualizations which I frequently review. I find “Customers are connecting.  Are you?” could be a helpful and powerful illustration of how we used to predominately learn in physical spaces. Now technology enables us to connect quite continuously across geographical and time boundaries.

While I find people already know this is happening in our networked world, when they see a visual explanation like this, it begs people to ask: “How might I make better use of these continuous connections.”

Image: Dave Gray, CC BY-ND 2.0, http://www.flickr.com/photos/davegray/6338447273

3) Nancy Duarte’s The Importance of Visual Storytelling video (or slides 15 and 16) offers a simple way to draw the expansion of a network from a core circle of people.  Since I’m often speaking to education professionals about how we can use social media to expand our networks in new ways, this seemed like a good way to express this expansion from a core group or circle.

4)Making Sense of Emergent Patterns in Networks  – This blog post was a little more of an analytical resource than I was originally seeking to find on my quest for networked visualizations.  Yet, I found stumbling across this series of network visualizations led me to think more about how people are grouped together in clusters or by community and what that might mean. I thought figure 8, was particularly interesting since it showed the position of a liaison between clusters. Aa-ha, I thought, a new way to think about drawing groups and connections – not every one has to be placed in a connected circle!

So what do I plan to learn from compiling this networked visuals list?

1)I think I will spend more time investing in trying to draw with my digital pen, as Duarte’s and Gray’s posts are giving me some good ideas.

2)I’d like to spend more time thinking of connected or networked analogies that may help me convey how network connections can make things happen. For example, how could I illustrate if someone shared something in one place, how that might make an impact somewhere else in the network?

3)I need to figure out a few key tools besides PowerPoint that will help me communicate network expansion better.  Prezi seems to be a good fit because of it’s map-like navigation.  I have also been using Sketchbook pro,  Snote, Bamboo notes in conjunction with a digital pen,  but I still find myself limited in one way or another with these tools. I think partially this is because I need more practice both in what to draw and how to use the technology to draw and share, and partially because I’m still learning which tools transfer across my computer, tablet(s), and smartphone so I can pick up where I left off or share from any device.

Finally finding motivations for starting to blog

For years I’ve been wanting to take on blogging to catch the most important ideas and thoughts that seem to speed by me in the fast-paced, increasingly collaborative and communicative world around me. Yet, until now, I haven’t been able to comitt to starting a blog.

I’ve adapted my gathering of information through many media flows or side streams, such as Twitter, Feedly (Google Reader) Google+, Facebook, and various other sources. These flows of information have even been instrumental in helping me switch gears professionally from the ‘hard science’ classes I took in undergrad and graduate school as a horticulture major (i.e. soils, mycology, biochem, landscape restoration) to understanding more of the ‘soft science” or how people learn, interact, collaborate,  communicate, and change behavior.

While I’m learning things from amazing people who share in social networks all the time, understanding how that information fits into my own goals and direction, and then being able to retrieve or pool that information through a blog, where I can organize, manage, control most of the settings, and then to choose to share with others when needed is more valuable to me than ever. I now realize blogging as a routine practice is more a necessity than ever to “pool” what I am learning so I can make sense of new information and experiences and how they connect to my existing experiences and knowledge.

Reasons motivating me to commit to blogging (this time)

So, at this point, sort of like exercising, I need to commit to myself to incorporate blogging into a routine reflection and workflow process.  In doing so, I’ve realized the following list include reasons that seem valuable enough for me to shift my work habits to include blogging on a regular basis:

• Understanding the “Why” behind my like  – I’d love to meaningfully curate or reflect on my “favorite” resources to understand why I chose them. It’s one thing to click the favorite, or like button, but another to know why I like it or how it could be useful.
• Keeping on top of understanding and communicating complex ideas – I need to think, write, and discuss complex topics more frequently. Thanks to @hjarche and @indalogensis for this recent interaction on complex knowledge on Twitter that made me realize this was yet another reason to blog.
• Reducing ‘crunch time’  – I need to be able to pull the information together for presentations and discussions more readily. By blogging about great examples, resources, ideas, insights,  I hope to spend less time finding great examples when it comes to presentation ‘crunch time’.
• Getting better at writing to connect and learn– I want to get better at writing to connect with people, not just to write. I’ve already experienced blogging (for other blogs) has helped me write more direct, shorter sentences, and to be more focused or concise.  I find most long articles, with many ideas and options, make connecting and relating to people more difficult. If I want to write to connect and learn with others, having practice to be more concise seems like the way to go.
• Stop (unintentionally) hoarding knowledge. The goal in using social media  is to learn by exchange, thus it’s hard to exchange if there is no action on my part to share in the first place. Through blogging,  I’m going to do my best to share the kinds of examples and ideas I find valuable, hoping that someone else may have that idea or experience, too, and perhaps maybe even lend additional insights.
• Leave a comment not a dissertation – In certain cases, I would like to be able to leave a comment with a link to my blog posts on other people’s blogs rather than consume several paragraphs of real-estate in their comments sections. Because these exchanges are often very meaningful, I’d also like to retrieve them on my blog for future reference.

So there it is, some of the main motivations that have pushed me over the edge to go from thinking about blogging to starting a blog.  When I first thought about blogging about 5 years ago, I was thinking of blogging as more of a way to promote or distribute information.  Now, I find it motivating to think of it as a tool and process that will help me focus and gather information in a way that is useful to me, rather than creating just one more thing to do.