Learning Alliances

It was really hot on August 13, the last day of my vacation visiting my brothers in Puerto Rico. But, in more ways than one, it was really cool inside the library at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras, where all of my friends from high school went to college.

I was hosted by José Sanchez-Lugo, a UPR professor I met in the Connected Futures workshop last May. He and his colleagues are doing fascinating work. They are way beyond the “ills of bestness” that Patrick Lambe describes. When I think of fights I’ve had with program evaluators who are trying to make a community of practice initiative fit into a neat pigeonhole, it’s inspiring to see someone launching a bunch of active communities with the original funding from an evaluation effort. Not only have they developed their reflective practice in areas such as collection development or research support, they’ve cooked up new directions for innovation, such as virtual reference or uses of Second Life.

Here’s Liz Pagán’s report (titled, roughly, “yet another distinguished Puerto Rican” :-).  There is a lot of activity in the various blogs and wikis of the communities launched by this project.  (One great thing about this visit, apart from a couple hours with José himself) was that it gave me the chance to practice my “communities of practice” vocabulary in Spanish a week before a project in El Salvador.  Talk about just in time practice!)

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Guy Nadivi of http://www.intronetworks.com made some interesting comments on my post about his company’s software in an email. It’s really messy to take comments out of an email in MS Outlook at put them into a posting in Word Press, but I thought they were so interesting I’d quote them here with his permission. His comments are in red, and my original statements are in black:

When I first logged on I was somewhat put off by having to complete yet another profile. Isn’t there a way to bring profile stuff in from somewhere else? Yes, in fact we do it all the time. However, there was no registration database to integrate with this time, so attendees were left with no option but to manually input their profile information. And after the conference, is there anyway to carry the profile forward? Yes, but only if the destination you want to carry it forward to is willing to accept the data. And what about sharing my profile with the rest of the world? If by “rest of the world” you mean other social networks, unfortunately that’s not feasible at this time as there is no“profile standard” everyone adheres to. BTW – the vast majority of our deployments are for private communities where almost everyone would prefer to keep their profile information just that, private. Yours might be the first request we’ve ever gotten for sharing profile data. I wonder whether the business model for the software company favors captive content and hermetic boundaries where openness may be more useful socially. Our business model favors deploying as many instances of introNetworks as possible. Whether the data is private or public has no impact on our bottom line.

Each of the main Instant Messenger types are listed separately (AOL IM is separate from Yahoo IM which is also separate from MSN): what about Trillian users, who can speak to all three?). Maybe Trillian should have been added during the configuration phase of the deployment. Nevertheless, a Trillian user would still know whether they’re connecting to someone on AOL, Yahoo, or MSN, right? As I’ve thought about the tag categories it seems to me that push-back and complaints such as this one are an indicator of engagement. We appreciate constructive feedback of any type.

Although it’s conventional to put “me” at the center, I know that in reality it’s not the case. Actually, that is the case. We are providing you with what we call an “ego-centric” perspective of this community. The pins represent a view of that community with you as THE central reference point. There are others who are at the center of this particular conference, but IntroNetworks lies and tells me that it’s “me” that’s at the center. “Lies” is not only inaccurate, but a bit harsh. Again, we’re showing you an ego-centric perspective of this community as you relate to it, or as it relates to you if you prefer. When someone else logs in, they see the same thing as it pertains to them. We’re not “lying”. We’re simply showing a “you-driven” view of things. I wonder whether it would be more productive to find and show some “us” and “them”? Please note that the legend in the lower right is “active” and allows you to quickly narrow down to any of the constituencies with one-click. Additionally, the Search, Build Advanced Search, and Filter Search Results panels on the left offer a number of ways to find and show whoever you want to see in the community with the greatest of ease. I guess that’s what the “Discipline” and “research interests” tags are really trying to do: get at personal history and participation in specific, learned communities.

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I’m continuing to use High Speed Conferencing as a phone bridge because it combines Skype and POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) as I described here. The economics of communication shape how communities get together: many of the groups I work with include some people who can’t participate without Skype and others who can’t participate unless it’s POTS. So even when there seems to be a lot of noise to contend with, this kind of hybrid Skype/POTS bridge is necessary.

Coping with noise on the line. For most of us a POTS call has high fidelity and doesn’t hurt our ears. But even the highest-cost phone bridge is subject to unexpected and uncontrolled noise (as when one of the callers puts the call “on hold” and subjects everyone else to a musical interlude that essentially ruins the call because typically you can’t figure out who’s goofed). I find that one-to-one Skype calls are more variable in terms of noise than POTS, but when some of the callers on a phone bridge are calling in with Skype, the chances are that at some point you will have crackling, echoes, and other noisy irritations. Therefore it’s very nice that the mute functions in the High Speed Conferencing web control page now work correctly:

The Skype names on this page are usually recognizable, even when a participant is a relative stranger. The phone numbers, however, are masked in the same way as caller-id numbers are on your regular phone. Having a handle for each line (a nickname, or even a national flag like the one that the Skype Firefox extension inserts on a page) would be very helpful for managing the noise.

Occasionally there is one line that’s noisy. If you mute everyone, the host can then progressively un-mute each caller until the noisy line is identified (and then switch the noise-maker on and off as needed).

On one recent call, for example, there were many noisy lines, so I found myself muting everyone except the one or two speakers. Guessing who needs to speak next means that the host has to really be in tune with the flow of conversation. It’s inherently clumsy, unless you have a chat going where people can raise their hands, pose questions, or explain that they’ve fallen off the Skype call.

I’m upgrading to a “premium account,” which has two important features: 1) the phone bridge can do its own recording (which is important for people who miss a call); and 2) supposedly callers can “raise their hands” by pressing a key on their keypad even when they’ve been muted (I haven’t found this to work from Skype yet).

I’m also happy with the email that you get after a call:

It’s helpful for weaving a phone call back into the a-synchronous life of a community. I always think that the length of the call for each participant is useful information when you need to be thinking about who was there and who wasn’t. Unfortunately, in this little report the Skype names are replaced by a string of numbers, so for large calls it’s hard to work out who was actually there unless you kept a screen-print from the control panel.

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An important question that frames many others in evaluating an event is “How long is our collective ‘now’?” or, in other words, are we evaluating a one-off event that’s over and done with or are we evaluating a moment in the course of a longer relationship?

There are risks when you assume that the context is a longer relationship than is really the case. People may be offended by the assumption or its apparent consequences. At the CIRN conference in Prato last October, Patricia Arnold, Beverly Trayner and I appeared to be assuming too much familiarity.

But it occurs to me that one of the issues in the feedback people were giving to Nancy White was that they were assuming that there was no future relationship involved. But one of the ways that technology changes face-to-face events is that it allows for relationships to begin sooner and continue later. (And that holds both for relationships between the “audience” and the speaker as well as within the group of people formerly known as “the audience.” So I would add to Nancy’s suggestions in onlinefacilitation that asking people whether and to what extent their connections with each other developed in a face-to-face event (conference, workshop, or meeting) is something that’s important to include.

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“Average response” vs. response of the “average person”. The point of using the middle response as a representation of the whole group is that you capture what the person in the middle of the distribution said, without being influenced by the tails (whether positive or negative):

Middle:

• Invigorating. Very interesting dialogue on 3 tensions
• Interesting, topical, relevant and well presented
• Interesting to get another perspective

People were engaged in Nancy’s presentation. They connected with her and with the topic. It’s interesting to to me that none of the responses commented on the fact that audience feedback was being collected in a wiki. Good to see the “3 tensions” from our tech study project mentioned. What people in “the middle” said is the main message.

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The data analysis strategy here is to chop the whole sorted list in half and then continue chopping the parts in half again. I picked out comments at the cut-points; similar to the median, here are the quartile and the “eighth” and the extreme:Positive Quartile:

• Fantastic � her delivery style and encouraging participation by audience was great
• Excellent entertaining presenter. It was good split up into 3 parts with food breaks which gave you a breather and time to refresh yourself

Positive Eighth:

• Comprehensive review of e-learning resources in community environment
• An inspiring speaker � I was a bit disappointed as I had registered my mobile beforehand (via an email) but I didn�t get messages � a very engaging and entertaining speaker

Positive Extreme:

• Fantastic � the best. Excellent speaker
• Absolutely excellent!! Inspiring, informative and innovative

There was a lot of enthusiasm for the session. Seems like quite a bit of variety, ranging from enthusiasm for the topic, for the process (e.g., SMS) and for Nancy herself as as a presenter.

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The negative comments were what first caught my eye because they were painful and so I picked out three comments at each of the cut-points in the distribution to provide a bit more to think about.Negative Quartile:

• Ok � food for thought
• Some thoughts and concepts that had not considered before. Great how split into 3 parts
• Food for thought. Good presenter

Negative Eighth:

• Too long � I can�t concentrate that long
• Started well but went on for too long, became boring
• Rather long � not particularly stimulating

Negative Extreme:

• Why do we need an American who is full of herself to tell us what we already dabbled in during our LearnScope projects?
• Long, elitist
• Hard to follow � esoteric. I didn�t warm to her and felt she presented poorly which immediately creates a barrier to an audience (read �me�). She was disjointed in my opinion. Not clear on outcomes.

The quartile comments are actually pretty positive, so you can say that three-fourths of the audience actually had a good experience. The “Negative Eighth” comments all seem to be about length, making me wonder why people stayed, particularly since it sounds like there were breaks where people could have left or stayed in the lobby. Were people being rewarded with “continuing education units” of some sort? The “Negative Extreme” comments stand out so that you might either pay a lot of attention to them or completely ignore them.

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One question that I’m left with is about how “personal” these kinds of evaluations are � and whether they should be.What do you see in these comments?

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Although Nancy White’s posting on “Feedback from Sydney LearnScope Event” was written at the end of her marathon in Australia, I’ve thought about it quite a few times since then, perhaps because of the strong feelings I had after our workshop at the Prato Conference during the same month. Capturing feedback in a wiki is an interesting example of how technology inherently changes our experience of face-to-face meetings just as it changes what’s possible. Reading what the more than 64 people said about the session with Nancy was a bit overwhelming so I made a note to myself to come back and take another look. One easy way to do it was to put the comments into a tool like http://tagcrowd.com/ (a tool that happened to hear of from Nancy). Here’s the output:

<!– #htmltagcloud{ font-family:\’lucida grande\’,trebuchet,\’trebuchet ms\’,verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; line-height:2.4em; word-spacing:normal; letter-spacing:normal; text-decoration:none; text-transform:none; text-align:justify; text-indent:0ex; background-color:#fff; margin:0 0 2em 0; border:2px dotted #ddd; padding:2em}#htmltagcloud a:link{text-decoration:none}#htmltagcloud a:visited{text-decoration:none}#htmltagcloud a:hover{text-decoration:none;color:white;background-color:#05f}#htmltagcloud a:active{text-decoration:none;color:white;background-color:#03d}span.tagcloud0{font-size:1.0em;padding:0em;color:#ACC1F3;z-index:10;position:relative}span.tagcloud0 a{text-decoration:none; color:#ACC1F3}span.tagcloud1{font-size:1.4em;padding:0em;color:#ACC1F3;z-index:9;position:relative}span.tagcloud1 a{text-decoration:none;color:#ACC1F3}span.tagcloud2{font-size:1.8em;padding:0em;color:#86A0DC;z-index:8;position:relative}span.tagcloud2 a{text-decoration:none;color:#86A0DC}span.tagcloud3{font-size:2.2em;padding:0em;color:#86A0DC;z-index:7;position:relative}span.tagcloud3 a{text-decoration:none;color:#86A0DC}span.tagcloud4{font-size:2.6em;padding:0em;color:#607EC5;z-index:6;position:relative}span.tagcloud4 a{text-decoration:none;color:#607EC5}span.tagcloud5{font-size:3.0em;padding:0em;color:#607EC5;z-index:5;position:relative}span.tagcloud5 a{text-decoration:none;color:#607EC5}span.tagcloud6{font-size:3.3em;padding:0em;color:#4C6DB9;z-index:4;position:relative}span.tagcloud6 a{text-decoration:none;color:#4C6DB9}span.tagcloud7{font-size:3.6em;padding:0em;color:#395CAE;z-index:3;position:relative}span.tagcloud7 a{text-decoration:none;color:#395CAE}span.tagcloud8{font-size:3.9em;padding:0em;color:#264CA2;z-index:2;position:relative}span.tagcloud8 a{text-decoration:none;color:#264CA2}span.tagcloud9{font-size:4.2em;padding:0em;color:#133B97;z-index:1;position:relative}span.tagcloud9 a{text-decoration:none;color:#133B97}span.tagcloud10{font-size:4.5em;padding:0em;color:#002A8B;z-index:0;position:relative}span.tagcloud10 a{text-decoration:none;color:#002A8B}span.freq{font-size:10pt !important;color:#bbb}// –> audience bit boring clearly concepts delivery delved didn e-learners eb email engaging enjoyed entertaining esp excellent experiences feel felt flow food globally informative inspiring interaction interesting kept key learnscope loved messages mobile nancy ok parts practical presented presenter provoking really relevant resources sms speaker split stimulating techno tensions think via

The comments have an inherent linear structure that tagcrowd misses and which seems important. There’s an implicit “good to bad” Likert scale behind much of what people wrote. I thought that I could make up a kind of 5-number summary that systematically throws away some of the noise. This approach comes from John Tukey’s stem-and-leaf plots (I got interested in computing because of a long-standing interest in exploratory data analysis and statistics). So I did a rough sort of all the comments from the most positive to the most negative, and picked out the middle, the extremes, the quartiles, and so on.

(The text editor in WordPress seems to have trunkated some of the text, so I’m going to post the second part separately.)

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