Hanging Out uses “genres of participation” with new media as a way of describing everyday learning and media engagement. The primary distinction that the authors make is between “friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation, which correspond to different genres of youth culture, social network structure, and modes of learning.” (p. 15)  “Participation” is an alternative to an internalization or consumption perspective.  It has the advantage in not assuming that kids are passive, mere audiences to media or educational content. “Hanging out” refers to friendships and social interactions that are oriented to local networks. “Messing around” refers to exploring, playing, cruising around, “finding stuff” – intermediate between the other two categories. “Geeking out” is participation that’s more oriented toward expertise, delving in a particular topic or technology.  “Transitioning between hanging out, messing around, and geeking out represents certain trajectories of participation that young people can navigate, where their modes of learning and their social networks and focus begin to shift.” (p. 17)

Megan Finn was the lead author in the section that discusses the “techne-mentor” in depth (on pp. 59-60).  A couple long quotes describes the techne-mentor concept:

“In conceptualizing the media and information ecologies in the lives of University of California at Berkeley freshmen, classical adoption and diffusion models (e.g., Rogers [1962; 2003]) proved inadequate. Rather than being characterized by a few individuals who diffuse knowledge to others in a somewhat linear fashion, many students’ pattern of technology adoption signaled situations in which various people were at times influential in different, ever-evolving social networks. The term “techne-mentor” is used to help to describe this pattern of information and knowledge diffusion….  Techne-mentor refers to a role that someone plays in aiding an individual or group with adopting or supporting some aspect of technology use in a specific  context, but being a techne-mentor is not a permanent role.

“In the Freshquest study we found many cases of techne-mentors. The kind of roles they played varied from case to case and situation to situation. On one hand, the techne-mentor may simply make someone aware of a technology. On the other hand, he or she may play an integral role in demonstrating the technology practice or even installing the technology and ensuring its status as operational. Sometimes students we interviewed had one primary techne-mentor in their lives, but in turn the students would take on the role when they passed this information on to other groups. In fact, it is this constant flow of information about technology among a student’s multitude of social networks that accounts for the fluidity of the role of techne-mentor. In all these socially situated contexts, techne-mentors were an integral part of informal learning and teaching about technology and technology practices.”

Techne-mentors show up in all the genres of participation but their role is probably more visible at the geeking out end of the spectrum.  That is, as technology becomes a more central concern, learning and talking about technology also becomes more central and so does mentoring.  It’s really important that the way Hanging Out uses the concept, kids are involved both in being mentored and mentoring others.

A “tech steward” is a specific kind of techne-mentor, working on behalf of a community, mentoring and being mentored in the context of that community.   A technology steward is influenced by their social context.  In geeky communities such as the Ubuntu community that Andreas Lloyd studied, everyone is concerned with technology in one way or another, although some people are more influential than others.  In thinking about the “hanging out” end of the spectrum it occurs to me that the job of technology stewards is partly to make technology disappear.  People really want to be hanging out with each other, talking about hawks in Central Park or milking cows in Portugal. The more intuitive and habitual a community’s technology infrastructure becomes, the more authentic and direct the experience of being in the community.

As we wrote Digital Habitats and began focusing on technology stewards who we encountered in different communities, we were struck by the fact that they came from many different backgrounds.  That as far as their role was concerned, they were not “trained” in any conventional sense.  Looping back to Hanging Out, that makes a lot of sense:

“Sociocultural approaches to learning have recognized that kids gain most of their knowledge and competencies in contexts that do not involve formal instruction. A growing body of ethnographic work documents how learning happens in informal settings, as a side effect of everyday life and social activity, rather than in an explicit instructional agenda.” (p. 21)

That’s a very polite way of saying that school is, in some important respects, irrelevant.  It applies to kids as well as to grown-up technology stewards.

“One of the key innovations of situated learning theory was to posit that learning was an act of social participation in communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991). By shifting the focus away from the individual and to the broader network of social relationships, situated learning theory suggests that the relationships of knowledge sharing, mentoring, and monitoring within social groups become key sites of analytic interest. In this formulation, people learn in all contexts of activity, not because they are internalizing knowledge, culture, and expertise as isolated individuals, but because they are part of shared cultural systems and are engaged in collective social action.“  (p. 14)

Learning to learn about technology (in particular) from this point of view is a fundamental skill that results from hanging out, messing around, and geeking out.  To me this suggests that people who learn about technology in school are cheated because they miss out on some fundamental hanging out experiences.  In this sense, the “digital divide” between older people who have been subject to training and younger people who came by their knowledge more socially may be more of a “learning divide.” That makes a lot of classroom instruction about technology irrelevant.

Beware of any technology steward who tells you that they learned how to do it in school.

“He started from scratch, worked nights and weekends, did thousands of cold calls to build up his book of business.  And you’ve seen him now.  His efforts were so successful that now he’s driving a BMW, and takes every Wednesday off to play golf.”

Bob’s story didn’t include selling the new policies or making big changes when the company’s management decided to change direction: it was a story about arriving.  Bob’s story was invisible because it was never told as such: it only existed in snippets, as an unspoken but potent reference point in people’s minds that shaped career expectations and choices.  It came into explicit existence when the ethnographers from the Institute for Research on Learning constructed it as part of a massive ethnographic project in the 1990′s and presented it to the company’s management.

I recommended it to a rather bookish consultant friend who wrote back that he couldn’t see what was actionable or practical about it.  I’ve been wondering about that comment for a while, even as the book continues to influence how I think about storytelling in organizations and communities.  Why, exactly, do I think this book is so practical and relevant?

At this particular point in history, if you doubt that it’s important to understand what’s on the minds of people who sell financial instruments, why sales agents sell (or don’t sell) something, I would suspect you’ve been living a very sheltered life. Misreading or misunderstanding organizational culture brings systemic risks.

One reason this book is not hugely popular with the storytelling or organization development communities is suggested by the fact that the story about Bob is not in the index under “Bob.”  You can find it under “discourse unit, paradigmatic narratives as, 148-49″.  So the book is a long hard slog unless you like that kind of stuff.   For better or worse I read it twice.   After I finished it the first time, I left it on a plane.  When I started over, with the idea of skimming it to re-construct my notes, I found that it was worth reading slowly a second time.  The book is chock full of big and small insights.

A fundamental point is that “remembering” is a human activity that’s situated in time and space.  Talking about “memory” as a disembodied and abstract entity is problematic and misleading. Remembering (most frequently through storytelling) is something we can observe and therefore influence if we understand what’s happening:

“A story not having a proper occasion on which it can or must be told exists in an archive if it exists at all…. If there is any place where the process of institutional remembering can be deliberately altered, it is the creation, maintenance, or abandonment of narrative occasions.” p. 222.

You have to be listening at the right time and place.  In fact Linde has a scheme for classifying narrative occasions on p 47:

Whether this is the frame you want to use or not (where exactly would you place my story of reading Linde’s book twice?), it seems to me that having some frame or other is really useful.  The situation matters: where a story is told, when, with what purpose, to whom, and how it is varied to fit the situation are fundamental to making sense of it.  A frame like hers does a lot of work, like helping you detect repeated stories, commonplace stories that anybody can tell (e.g., you can tell it in some situations even its about events you yourself did not witness), or even detect stories that are not told (I think detecting meaningful silence is a big deal: “Just listen for it” says Linde).

Linde’s emphasis on the situated nature of storytelling connects with another fundamental with practical implications: stories are social, jointly produced by teller and listener.   Telling stories that make sense is a social obligation:

“This creation [of narrative coherence] is not a light matter; it is in fact a social obligation which must be fulfilled in order for the participants to appear as competent members of their culture.” p 4.

If we live in times of change, then this should be a good time for telling stories and for understanding what we’re doing when we’re telling them:

“Times of change are rich in occasions when the past is invoked.  The past is used to reaffirm a sense of identity, to provide a ground form which to assess the effect and meaning of changes, and to provide a basis for critique of changes.  It is at times of change that a particular way of being is constructed as the past.” p. 43

When you think about how many books on storytelling come down to endless bullet lists and instructional bromides, it makes you appreciate what a huge accomplishment it is that Linde’s Working the Past is actually a good yarn about storytelling.

After more than 5 years working on it, Digital Habitats (the book I wrote with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White) is here.  (At least a couple proof copies have arrived in the mail.  Copies for sale are on their way.)

It has been really fun.  What’s next?

Stay tuned.

There’s a practice. This book is more than just a manual on how to use Twitter. (There are certainly enough of them out there by now.) What struck a chord with me was the feeling that it gave me a window into some of what being a pastor in a church is about. Pastors are pivotal leaders who play a very complex role in their communities. Sometimes they are domain spokespersons, sometimes team leaders (of volunteer or paid teams), and sometimes learners trudging along the path. Most interesting, you get the sense from reading this book that there is a widely distributed community of practice of church pastors who have a lot to learn from each other. (It’s a professionalized occupation, or calling, where seminaries have had a gate-keeping role, so learning from each other may need more support than it did a generation or two ago.) But the book suggests that pastors need to learn from each other about handling issues of connecting with church members selectively and impactfully, with personal privacy, and with marginality (e.g., not just being ‘relevant on Sundays only’). All these issues come up in the context of using Twitter for a church. So, bottom line, the practice of being a pastor is similar to that of leading many other communities of practice. There could be a lot of learning on both sides.

There’s a community. I love the way Coppedge suggests that there’s a real social network out there that can provide examples and support. (And he just names names like spiritual entrepreneur Dave Ferguson or digerati pastor Terry Storch). Following them or Anthony Coppedge himself obviously gives you access to that community. But I found it surprising that his book didn’t mention hashtags. Beyond increasing traffic with such things as #followfriday, hash tags are an obvious way for conversations within a church or among a community of pastors to take place. Why not advocate hashtags like these?

• #pdx1stbaptist
• #t4pastors
• #t4church

There’s a learning agenda. Finally, the book is filled with nice quotes that suggest an authentic learning agenda. For example:

“The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture.” — Robert MacAfee Brown

Although the worry may not be stated in terms of stained glass, I’ve heard Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Buddhists voice very similar concerns. Relevance and connection are very important.  Addressing the issue will take more than Twitter.

Until now, using an idea from Phillipp Lenssen, Google Apps Hacks (Sebastopol, CA: OReilly, 2008) http://isbn.nu/9780596515881.  Here’s how you do it, following the idea on page 202.

Open a new google doc:

Insert the unique data (e.g., “the key”) from the one source (preferably sorted):

The typical case is a list of email addresses.  Note that you’d only put the email addresses themselves, not all the other information that you have associated with the email address.

Save it.  Then overwrite it by “selecting all” and inserting the corresponding data from the other source (also sorted) and then save again.

Now, under the “Tools” drop down menu, select “Revision history”,

Check the boxes and press “Compare versions”.  You get this very nice little listing:

The lines that are in one source but not the other are colored and you can easily tell which source they come from.  The lines that match (are in both sources) are black. Now you can go back to your Excel spread-sheet or wherever and do the rest of the process by hand.  It’s much easier to do because you have an easy-to-use listing showing where matches (and mis-matches) occur.

Talking about communities of practice can be pretty tricky, straining the patience of the action-oriented folks if it goes on too long and making the analytical types anxious if conversations get too loose.  These communities face a raft of issues about leadership, technology, boundaries, and purpose.  In a couple of these meta-communities I’ve introduced the concept of regular “experiments”, borrowing an idea in Derby and Larsen’s Agile retrospectives. (They aren’t talking about communities of practice, but in a way that’s what their book is about.)  Collective experiments are a useful activity no matter what a community’s domain might be, but with a CoP meta-community the can be especially helpful.

Here are some of the questions that come up in meta communities, all of which are in some way a matter of balancing opposites:

• What exactly are our goals as community leaders?  Is it legitimate to find new goals as we go and if so, how do we do that?  Could we develop richer and more useful frameworks to evaluate our selves and our work?

• If we’re trying to “improve our practice as leaders” we have to figure out what, exactly, our practice is.  How do we do that?  Compared to what other roles do we define ourselves?

• How do we get into the nitty gritty of making comparisons between practices and experiments of different members — so that we dig in enough without getting too personal?

• Can we simultaneously stand inside and outside of our practice?  We want to be critical enough without too much navel-gazing and without getting mechanical about what we’re doing.

The point about experiments is that none of these questions need to be answered in the abstract or “for ever.”  They need to be answered in practice, for the moment.  Swapping stories is obviously a core practice in this kind of work, but that can be too sloppy and too informal.  Charlotte Linde’s discussion about places and occasions for remembering and telling stories suggests to me that “experiments” are a great umbrella to get the right stories out.  Just as Jerome Bruner talks about how the law is all about formalized stories, I think that “experiments” are a nice framework for formalizing stories about community leadership.

From that perspective the whole art of community leadership might come down to providing good occasions for practitioners to remember together what works and what doesn’t.  It applies to meta-communities as well as garden variety communities of practice.

—- References:

Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, Agile Retrospectives; making good teams great (Raleigh, NC: The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006) http://isbn.nu/0977616649

Charlotte Linde, Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)  http://isbn.nu/9780195140293

Jerome Bruner, Making Stories; Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)  http://isbn.nu/9780674010994

Outside the EPIC Conference in Copenhagen
Originally uploaded by xeeliz

Beverly Trayner and I had been corresponding with Gitti Jordan about a CPsquare-sponsored dialog on Sunday October 19, so to get the conversation going we snuck into the EPIC conference to join a workshop she was leading on Mobile Work and Mobile Lives. After we’d looked around to determine whether we could get in, we had a coffee waiting for the conference attendees to finish lunch and talked about billing rates and business models.

Once we had begged to be admitted and had sat down to talk with people, we were surprised and delighted at how welcomed we felt and we both ended up being the reporters for our respective discussion groups. Here’s roughly what I reported on for one of the three groups:

1. Looking at issues such as worker and work mobility, work at a distance and with distant partners as daily practices:
   • We tend to frame these questions at an individual level, at the risk of missing opportunities and problems at the ensemble level.
   • Collaborating and living with people at a distance, across many time zones now seems to be the norm, but it’s also a challenge we can’t quite handle or necessarily understand.
   • We need to look at implications both for “the workplace” as well as for “the home.”
2. Big themes for mobile workers who collaborate at a distance:
   • What does it mean to have roots? Where is home?
   • Is multi-location, multi-time zone work liberating or enslaving?
   • How bound up is our thinking about these issues with our own social status, seeing all these issues as pertaining mainly to “knowledge workers”?
   • Is the germination of powerful ideas still necessarily a co-located, face-to-face event?
   • How can we be so obsessed with purposeful research while relying on serendipitous encounters and surprising discoveries?
   • Can we “stand outside” somehow to understand the importance of “where we live” physically and in terms of the succession of generations?
3. There were all kinds of issues on the edge of our awareness, that fell into two main areas:
   • How can we “study” these phenomena? What is “observation” (can we do it at a distance)? What kinds of scale issues are there?
   • What would the value of insights into these issues be (were we to understand them)?

It was really fun!

A few weekends ago I helped design an event that brought together volunteer administrators from Shambhala Centers in the Northwest region.  I had pushed for the idea that the whole day should be focused on sharing administrative, financial, instructional, or technology practices.  It was a great day.

But during afternon the report-outs it was surprising how the people who were in sessions focusing on fund-raising or leadership or schedule coordination had so much more enthusiasm for using technology to do their work than the people we had brought together to talk about technology as such.  I think we didn’t provide enough social proof that technology was relevant to the functioning of a little meditation community.

CPsquare book club: We’ll be reading selected chapters from Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators, edited by Chris Kimble, Paul Hildreth, and Isabelle Bourdon. See the table of contents for both volumes. Several of the authors are members or have been involved in CPsquare over the years. All of the authors will be invited to participate in the discussions. Some synchronous events (teleconferences) will be held, but most of the discussion will be asynchronous. If you want to participate in these discussions you should buy the book immediately. Selection of which chapters to read together will begin late July. Actual chapter discussions begin a week later. It’s free to CPsquare members and $50 for non-members. Registration is at: http://www.cpsquare.org/events/index.htm (shouldn’t you really just join?)

We’re beginning a year-long series of monthly visits about multi-membership and bridging across communities with Davee Evans who straddles two communities of practice: the Wikipedia editors community and the Shambhala meditation community. Our first session with Davee will be on Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 20:00

Karen Guldberg and Jenny Mackness have done a raft of interviews with participants and leaders of the Winter 2008 Foundations Workshop and have written a paper about it, getting at issues such as emotion, connectivity, understanding norms, learning tensions/dualities, technology, and identity. We’re scheduling a session in September where previous participants and CPsquare members will be invited to talk about these findings and their implications and application.

The next Foundations Workshop starts on September 15: http://cpsquare.org/edu/foundations

Our first offering of CPsquare’s “Connected Futures” workshop, about new technologies for communities was very exhilarating, although exhausting for both participants and leaders. We used Twitter, Skype, blogs, wikis, Facebook, social bookmarking, and Web Crossing. It was challenging to keep track of each other but we managed to. We all got a lot out of the experience and we’re intending to offer it again in later this year, after the Foundations Workshop. http://www.cpsquare.org/edu/CP2tech/

Before walking the dog, at 6:15 am, I went through the previous night’s email on Outlook, looked at my schedule and made some plans:

• A workshop payment mix-up (money going to a personal Paypal account rather than the CPsquare account) has been fixed. Still 2 transactions to resolve.
• Got the draft of a contract with a government agency. Need to print and send back.
• Ward agreed to write a blurb for the book! Yay! Sent him the 4 MB file right away.
• Got the glossary edits from Peter + Trudy — they look great! Need to respond to their extensive annotations.
• Got plenty of SPAM.
• Jotted a short-to-do list on my composition notebook: send “thank-yous” to the several people who helped during the talk I gave last night at ODN, post the slides on slideshare.

After walking the dog, got to my office around 7:45 am.

• The alert that daughter Liza had logged on to Yahoo IM shows up. I didn’t ping her because I was so busy. When she was with Peace Brigades International in Colombia I always tried to wave, but now that she’s back in the US I don’t bother her as much.
• Had a Skype call with Patricia and Beverly who are spending the day together in Hamburg! At the last minute, we use a Skype chat to move our meeting time forward an hour. Because they were in the same room, we met with Skype Video and took a few snapshots for fun. We talked shop, about books we’re reading, strategies for marketing and survival. We eventually get focused on writing and the deadline. We decide that in alignment with the autoethnographic approach in our paper, the literature review should also be “personal,” focusing on our experience of the literature rather than arguing that we’ve read everything that’s relevant. We decided that June 12 was the “snapshot day” for our autoethnographic vignettes. (Hence, this post, a departure from my habit of reticence.) After the call I find that we had two chat windows going (one with Patricia alone which had most of our notes and another with both Patricia and Beverly, which had some notes from early on) so I pasted them together, interleaving lines using the time stamps. I got the chat transcript in the mail by mid-afternoon.
• Got a phone call from Doug. Thanked him for taking care of the dog while I gave the talk at ODN last night. We talked about sending an email messages to the Portland Shambhala sangha about the building purchase. He needed a phone number, so I mailed him an out-of-date phone list for the community.
• Had a scheduled half hour phone meeting with Rebecka. Send text. Worked on the 2nd draft in Writeboard of a 3-day session for next fall.
• Got an email anticipating Trudy’s surgery.
• Scanned the emails about an effort by the Yi-Tan Guild to document our own teleconference set-up, facilitation, and follow-up procedures. We’ve been using Iotum’s Calliflower tool on Facebook, but it still needs a wiki page to remind ourselves how to do things.
• Exchanged several emails with Naava’s assistant to schedule a meeting with Naava the next day.
• Exchanged IMs with Lauren re: lost password on CPsquare that I’d forgotten to send her, method for avoiding a lost password, scheduling a conference call with 3 community leaders from her company about scope and leadership strategies.
• IMs with wife Nancy who was bragging about her new 22″ monintor. Compared lunch plans, discussed the after-work schedule, grocery pick-up items, and a little blister on her foot. Finished just in time for my noon meeting.
• Had an hour-long teleconference with Debra and four others on her staff (who were together on a speakerphone) about the evaluation report we had just written on the experience of community members in a face-to-face meeting they’d organized. They asked for an overview of the report, although I’d sent it to them a week before. I talked at length — ended up giving a mini-lecture! Recorded it for Louis (partner for this project in DC), but forgot to turn the recording off, so will have to edit!
• At lunch I continue reading Grant McCracken’s “Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture” on the kitchen counter over some warmed-up leftovers. The book has a lot to do with culture and identity construction. I wonder, am I in the business of helping people create new homes for new identities? Today’s snippet gave me some insight into sports and American males that I’d never quite understood (having grown up in Puerto Rico) on p 283:
  

  “As overmighty subjects, they have their own performative powers. A preteen on a basketball court takes possession of the voice-over that belongs to the sports announcer and the color commentator. He uses this to take possession of the pretext, the script, the accomplishment, and the admiration that belong to a celebrity athlete. This is what, in basketball, they call a steal. The preteen has intercepted powers that belong to the meaning makers. It is endemic hubris, a matter-of-fact appropriation of superordinate powers by a subordinate party. The twelve-year-old makes Larry Bird a god and himself Larry Bird. Such subjects are overmighty and increasingly common.”

• Retrieved and formatted the chat transcript for yesterday’s Winter 2008 workshop group “reunion” meeting from Web Crossing. Retrieved the audio recording from the phone bridge, saved it, and put a link to it together with the chat room notes in an email to the whole group.
• The postman dropped off a copy of Groundswell, a book that Shirley read and recommended and that has an amazing publicity machine behind it.
• Finally made some progress with my idea of using screen captures to create a diagram about platform integration and compatibility for our book on Technology Stewardship for Communities. Put five different screen-shots into one diagram with enough room for a lot of annotations and sent it to Etienne. This has been the most troubling diagram in the book.
• Ended the day editing a summary of Marc’s book. His ideas are great and now are starting to emerge from a murky translation.

Sources:

• Outlook – various folders [Inbox, sent messages, project folder]
• Skype history
• Paper notebook (log)
• Trillian history function
• RescueTime

Notice that RescueTime misses the hour-long conversation with Debra et al.