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Having two blogs is like haveing two lovers. Fun at first but after a bit it just gets too confusing.

I’m blogging at jamiebillingham.com

“The Diffusion Simulation Game was created in the Department of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University Bloomington. This Web version was led by Dr. Ted Frick with designers Barbara Ludwig, K. J. Kim and Rui Huang. The DSG is based on a board game originally developed by Dr. Michael Molenda and Patricia Young, and is based on research on diffusion and adoptions of innovations.”

Wikipedia has more info on the Law of Diffusion in Innovation, really cool, might even interest the “cautious adopters” out there (I didn’t like the label originally used for that group).

I’m an early adopter in most areas. I like.. no, love change, the new, different, innovative. This sometimes has it’s drawbacks. I have, with no doubt, stressed out more than one co-worker with my need to find “better” ways to do things that were actually working ok just the way they were.

This week I have to decide on a research project for my Interdisciplinary Master. A topic that incorporates Leadership, Learning and Technology and that I can insinuate into my professional life and most importantly one that can hold my crow like attention for a year.. Wait.. what’s that shiny new idea over there?

I think there may be a link here to a project that will fit well and meet the criteria I am looking for. More later. Heading to Saskatoon to teach Violence Prevention program for the week.

A long time ago, far, far, away… Ok, a couple of years ago and just down the road, I facilitated the Breaking Barriers program along with two other programs, 5 days a week at three jails for three years. This is one of the “resources” we actually used in Breaking Barriers which was designed by a “consumer of correctional services” aka Gordy Graham. We used a video series produced by Gordy but the story in this clip of Hyrum Smith was part of that series.

I like this style of humour, where the “learning object” in embedded and explicit in the story and the humour is sprinkled throughout to season the narrative making it much more palatable and memorable. Research has shown that our brain tends to remember ideas associated with stories and with humour.

Humor has the ability to capture the attention of the brain. “Emotion drives attention and attention drives learning.” (Sylwester, 1995) Learners need to pay attention in order to learn and humour is one way to capture attention while maintaining the relaxed alert state that is optimal for learning (Caine, et al, 2009).

There was another story, in the Breaking Barriers series, about where beliefs come from told via story about a young married couple and the cooking of a ham that I was trying to find. No luck but if I get a chance today I might try to record it myself.

This week I’m co-facilitating a seminar in my MA program. The topic is “Facilitating Teams in a Collaborative Online Environment”. So, ya, we’re facilitating how to facilitate online, in an online course. Recursion and irony follow me. Its recursions turn apparently.

Our instructors suggested that we think outside the box and advised us to “get creative” thus opening Pandora’s Box. Ok, maybe not quite so dramatic as Pandora’s Box. We did decide to colour outside the lines and rather that doing an Appreciative Inquiry process or a Community as Curriculum we decided to use the week as an opportunity to nudge some of our cohort outside of our safe,comfortable and cloistered team environment and into the world of blogs and networked learning.

Clint LaLonde and Pam Joyce, my partners in this endeavor, found three blog posts that related to the reading that had been assigned for this seminar. The first post “Lurking and Loafing” by Steve Wheeler of the University of Plymouth relates to an article by Lam, Chua, Williams and Lee titled “Virtual Teams: Surviving or Thriving?”. In the article Lam (et al) uses the terms “free-riders” “easy-riders” and “social loafers” to describe team member phenomenon similar to Wheeler’s discourse on lurkers and loafers.

Ben Grey’s blog was chosen due to his ideas about the differences between collaboration and cooperation. I have to admit I had not thought quite so deeply about the difference until I read his post.

Lastly Tony Karrer posted to his blog after seeing Patrick Lencioni present on Dysfunctional Teams. I am a huge Lencioni fan and appreciated the post although I’m not sure it was enough information for anyone unfamiliar with Lencioni’s Field Guide to Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of Teams. Perhaps that’s best though as it might wet ones appetite for more.

So, our cohort, or at least the western division of our cohort will hopefully post comments to one or more of these blogs between now and Friday. Already a few have and feedback has been mostly around comment moderation. Hopefully the blog authors will have their “ears” on and approve the comments quickly so that we can “facilitate” a team learning experience in a wider network. (We need the marks guys, so please, be home, be listening and be nice).

I had an experience the other day that clearly demonstrated my ability to no only climb but to bound up what is referred to by Chris Argris and Peter Senge as the Ladder of Inference.

Click on graphics for larger image.

Although the ladder is often represented visually in a linear and upwardly scaled fashion in reality it is followed in a circle or spiral.

This is an invitation to dialogue about Harm Reduction. Before I lay out the groundwork for this dialogue I’d like to provide a short introduction to the container, Voice Thread.

If you’ve never used Voice Thread please be assured that it is very easy to use. The big triangle shaped arrows located at the bottom right and left of the screen move you through the slides. There are seven slides in this Voice Thread.

Each of the slides contains some content in the form of questions. Although Voice Thread is typically seen as a visual format, often used in art education, I have purposefully not included visuals. I did this because I did not want to prime or influence the viewer. I am trying really hard not to advocate for any one perspective rather I am hoping that each visitor will share their own unique views relatively removed from my own personal agenda in this area.

The slide topics are:

1. An Invitation to Dialogue – Title Slide
2. What is your understanding of the term Harm Reduction?
3. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – Questions about the pro’s and con’s, in your view.
4. How do you use Harm Reduction
5. Morality and Ethics
6. What else? – Add “other” stuff here.
7. Stories – An invitation to share stories about Harm Reduction

In the centre bottom of the Voice Thread screen is a button that says “comment”. When you click on this you will see options to comment by phone, voice recording, video, type or upload a prerecorded comment. I will try to include exemplars of video, audio and text and hopefully others will provide more as the thread evolves.

Please do not feel obliged to comment on all the slides or for that matter on any of them. Listening without commenting is also a form of participation. Do feel free to embed or link to this Voice Thread on your own blog or website. This application is built for sharing.

A couple of things to know about the recording options, first they start recording automatically after a few seconds, so be ready to speak. Second, you can delete and do over.

A few thoughts about Dialogue

Dialogue is a Greek term that means “flow of meaning”. It is essentially “an enquiry that surfaces ideas, perceptions and understanding that people do not have already” Issacs, 1999, p. 2). In this Voice Thread, the invitation is to dialogue and to take part in a process of enquiry.

There are four important processes and abilities that dialogue perpetuates. The first is to evoke people’s genuine voices. This means both speaking your own voice and encouraging others to do the same. This invitation is to add your genuine and authentic voice.

The second is to listen deeply. Really listening is hard work, most of us don’t listen really well. Instead we hear and while hearing think about what we want to say in response.

The third equally difficult ability is to genuinely respect others. This, for some, involves adopting the belief that there is coherence to all views. My friend Jane Katz uses the phrase “That makes perfect sense based on what you have experienced” in a program she teaches on managing emotions. Respect is about privileging all voices, not just the ones that sound like our own.

The fourth involves suspending that which we are certain of. If we want to expand our own perspective, to make it larger, more able to encompass the whole, we may have to un-attach ourselves from our truth for a period of time. To achieve dialogue requires integrating these four practices.

In my mind the practice of dialogue is similar to the activity of Rhizomatic Education or Community as Curriculum as put forth by Dave Cormier (n.d.).

A rhizome is type of root defined as being a “horizontal, usually underground stem that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes” (Rhizome, n.d.)). I have adapted Dave’s suggested Rhizomatic premises below as a possible foundation of understanding for this process.

1. Experts do not create knowledge; it is co-created by individuals through dialogue and reflection. (Reflection being an internal dialogue)
2. Those facilitating the process suggest the context and create any needed scaffolding to contain the issue, which I have attempted with the questions on the slides.
3. We all have our own resources and our own unique experiences to draw on.
4. Collaborative, community led processes allows us to be more creative with our combined knowledge.

These ideas are not yet fully formed in my own mind so any feedback on them would be welcome. Right now I am seeing the questions on the slides as being like the nodes on a rhizome. I can easily shift to seeing each person being a node however.

So, again, welcome and let the dialogue begin…

References

Cormier, D, (n.d.) Dave’s Educational Blog. Community as Curriculum – A Research Project. Retrieved February 20, 2010, from http://davecormier.com/edblog/category/rhizomes/

Issacs, W (1999). Dialogic Leadership [Electronic version]. The Systems Thinker, 10(1)
http://www.dialogos.com/resources/files/systhink.pdf

Rhizome – definition from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/rhizome accessed February 20, 2010

I’ve had a broadly productive couple of days. I keep chasing down one idea only to be led to another linked but independently fascinating concept. This scattering of attention started a few days ago when I revisited Dave Cormier’s treatise on rhyzomatic education or community as curriculum.

I was first introduced to this concept via Wiaoc09 – Fun & Games in Professional Development Online Conference when I took part in Dave’s facilitated a session called You Can’t Collaborate Alone (UStream recording of the presentation is here.) That highly collaborative experience made sense to me; it felt right, despite my inability at that time to clearly articulate the concept to others. (I’m still working on that.)

Shortly after this I attended a residency at Royal Roads as part of the MA in Leadership program. Two related concepts were presented while I was there. The first, democracy, threaded through the entire residency. I’m still struggling to understand and define democracy but at least I’m in good company there.

In my view, the primary challenge with democracy as we know it, is that is assumes all voices are equal. This is not the case, again, at least from my experience. I think we can do better than democracy in its current form. I think we ought to be aiming for a system, in education, government, and work that looks and feels more like Helgeson’s Web of Inclusion.

The second related idea, Open Space Technology (OST), was introduced during the residency as a way to use a democratic process to facilitate learning. Harrison Owen is credited with inventing OST however even he suggests that it is a method of self-organizing that has been around since human began gathering in groups to get things done. There are four guiding principles and one law in OST.

Principle 1 – Whoever comes is the right people. You don’t need hundreds or thousands showing up, nor do you need the “leaders”. What you do need is that the people showing are invested and willing take action.

Principle 2 – Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Keep focused on the here and now.

Principle 3 – Whenever it starts is the right time. No clock watching, inspiration and creativity are impossible to schedule.

Principle 4 – When it’s over it’s over. Don’t waste time. Just do it and once done move on.

The Law is the Law of Two Feet. If at any time you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing – use you two feet and move to some place. Unhappy people are unlikely to be productive people.

Every time I read these I am reminded of Angeles Arrien’s Four Fold Way. Show up, be present, tell the truth and be open but not attached to outcomes. This of course brings me back to the idea of rhyzomatic learning and education.

VoiceThread: Effective Design Strategies and Student Perspectives is a blog and an invitation to use Voice Thread.

Michelle Pacansky-Brock posted this Voice Thread to “showcase some practical instructional design strategies for integrating VoiceThread into an online class, as well as powerful student comments and survey results”.

Join the Voice Thread below to be part of this discussion.

Yesterday, Clint LaLonde, a member of my Royal Roads University (RRU) cohort posted a link to an Elluminate session called “Pimp Your Post“. Well, with a title like that I had to check it out.

The session, facilitated by Gina Bennett from College of the Rockies and Tracy Roberts from Royal Roads University, focused on ways to use icebreakers and community building applications in an online environment.

Gina and Tracy did an excellent job of modelling online facilitation and provided some really cool links to applications that could be used in an online course or community forum to help break the ice and to create more comfortable connections between users. One of the best ideas presented, in my opinion, was Voice Thread.

I have since played around with Voice Thread and found it to be very easy to use, with an intuitive interface that includes visual and text based prompts. The idea is to post a visual or graphic and then add comments. To experiment I chose to post a visual metaphor representing online facilitation and learning. This was our first assignment in LRNT505, the course I am currently enrolled in at RRU, so it seemed appropriate to play with that idea.

I posted a visual of a Neural Network and then recorded a short video in which I articulate whyI chose that particular graphic. It took me about 4 minutes to post the graphic and record the video. Had I wanted to I could have posted text, audio only or uploaded a file instead of posting video. How cool is that?

One note on the video posting, after allowing Voice Thread access to your camera the video begins recording automatically after about 3 seconds. No worries, you can “do over” as many times as you like.

After recording the video and deciding that my Sunday afternoon “look” was good enough, I clicked on the “share” button and was presented with multiple ways to distribute my creation including inviting people via email or, the option I chose, create a link that can be posted to blogs, Twitter, emailed, whatever you like. When others visit my Voice Thread they can post their own ideas and responses to what I have recorded or better yet how they would interpret the visual.

I can imagine all kinds of ways to use this in education, community building and even in knowledge management and sharing.

Here’s an article from Penn Sate University (with link to whitepaper) about the many virtues of Voice Thread and it’s use in education.

keep looking »

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