I realized how much I have come to love Chaos. I appreciated the side chats, the chance to bump into friends, to multitask, to let different senses be engaged.
When I design stuff for others, I have to really rein myself in because I appreciate that others don't feel the same way about these kinds of experiences. But I love 'em! Thanks
Nancy White
Posts made by Nancy White
Over the past week I've kept intending to jump in, but most everything I would have added has been eloquently brought up here by others.
Two of the themes I've been muddling about seem to be close to 2 our of 3 of your thoughts, Mark and George. I think I have slightly different labels for them based on some paralell work in communities of practice, rather than in education per se.
On #1 - which in another post, George, you referred to as a dualism, lines up with some work Etienne Wenger, John Smith and I are doing around technologies for communities of practice. We have slowly been having an extended (3 year!) conversation about this and one of the key things that has surfaced is that communities are always dealing with tensions, or polarities as we've come to call them. Often we think of these as things we must resolve. OUr conclusion is they are things to be aware of and make choices through practices and technologies to use them productively in our communities. I think this resonates with this idea of working with both some of the requirements for centralization and the possibilities of decentralization. It comes up again when we think of how we design for both the individual and the group. This idea what we go to where the learners are coming from, but construct just enough shared experience to benefit from the group as well as the individual, and to allow the individual to experience/see different perspectives and thus walk away with not just new external knowledge, but also increased self awareness/knowledge.
On the second item about collecting our personal learning, we have been grappling with the nuances of integration and interoperability from the perspective of enabling us to manage our multimembership in many communities. Technology has afforded us this heaven/hell scenarion: participation in a huge variety of groups, communities and networks. Most use differring technologies. Different norms and agreements/expectations. Managing more than a few is not realistic for many people who either don't have the ability to synthesize across all kinds of boundaries, don't have/aren't interested in geekery as a bridging aid, or are working themselves into an early grave by packing too much into a day.
Another polarity.
So it is really interesting to see similar patterns emerging in the conversation here. I think if I were to identify some of the key areas for learning in 2007 around this, it would be in these areas: multimembership and creatively working with polarities. (I suspect this has a lot to do with complexity and emergence!)
I hope that made sense. ;-)
Two of the themes I've been muddling about seem to be close to 2 our of 3 of your thoughts, Mark and George. I think I have slightly different labels for them based on some paralell work in communities of practice, rather than in education per se.
On #1 - which in another post, George, you referred to as a dualism, lines up with some work Etienne Wenger, John Smith and I are doing around technologies for communities of practice. We have slowly been having an extended (3 year!) conversation about this and one of the key things that has surfaced is that communities are always dealing with tensions, or polarities as we've come to call them. Often we think of these as things we must resolve. OUr conclusion is they are things to be aware of and make choices through practices and technologies to use them productively in our communities. I think this resonates with this idea of working with both some of the requirements for centralization and the possibilities of decentralization. It comes up again when we think of how we design for both the individual and the group. This idea what we go to where the learners are coming from, but construct just enough shared experience to benefit from the group as well as the individual, and to allow the individual to experience/see different perspectives and thus walk away with not just new external knowledge, but also increased self awareness/knowledge.
On the second item about collecting our personal learning, we have been grappling with the nuances of integration and interoperability from the perspective of enabling us to manage our multimembership in many communities. Technology has afforded us this heaven/hell scenarion: participation in a huge variety of groups, communities and networks. Most use differring technologies. Different norms and agreements/expectations. Managing more than a few is not realistic for many people who either don't have the ability to synthesize across all kinds of boundaries, don't have/aren't interested in geekery as a bridging aid, or are working themselves into an early grave by packing too much into a day.
Another polarity.
So it is really interesting to see similar patterns emerging in the conversation here. I think if I were to identify some of the key areas for learning in 2007 around this, it would be in these areas: multimembership and creatively working with polarities. (I suspect this has a lot to do with complexity and emergence!)
I hope that made sense. ;-)
I'll add it right now! But know that ANYONE can add to the wiki as well!
As I read this, the song "what's love got to do with it" ran through my head. In a very unscientific way, for me, love has a lot to do with this.