Apr 13 2013
Over the years I’ve accumulated more than 1,000 links in http://delicious.com/smithjd. Delicious (in its various versions) was my preferred tool for storing, retrieving, and sharing bookmarks. Far better than bookmarking things in a browser. But I’ve gotten impatient with the delicious browser widget in Chrome (and the website was just too much overhead) so I [...]
Oct 25 2012
Next week Nancy White and I are doing a talk at USAID on “Keeping Our Eye Out for Learning: How to identify learning practices and leverage them more strategically” We are inviting people to step back and consider a wider range of learning as a step toward asking what, exactly, learning is (and how to do [...]
Jul 15 2012
In an open space conference like the Community Leadership Summit, according to Harrison Owen’s second principle of Open Space Technology, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.” But when we don’t exactly like what happens, we always want to know, Why did it happen that way? I tried to organize a session and [...]
Jul 13 2012
I’m always on the lookout for how technology changes “being together” — especially how it can change the sense of a group and of our “place” in a group. For that, NodeXL and Twitter have real possibilities. On Saturday, July 14, I’m going to host a session at the Community Leadership Summit to play with [...]
Jan 25 2012
This is cross-posted from CPsquare.org… My fellow-conspirator Sylvia Currie posted a reflection on her blog, too. We’ve had a regular series where CPsquare members and friends go on a virtual field trip to observe something about a community of practice, it’s activities, technologies, or challenges. Today Sylvia Currie and I organized something new — a [...]
Jul 19 2011
This post gathers the #chifoo Twitter feed from a presentation by Will Reese (@willreese) at CHIFOO on July 13, 2011. Both Robert Hughes (@rlhughesPNW) and I (@smithjd) were posting during the session. I’ve been thinking about whether or how tweets during a talk or a conference can serve as a first draft of a report, [...]
Sep 11 2010
I’ve written before about finding the Skype mute button because it’s hard to explain to people during a call (especially when they are the possible source of noise). Now Skype has reorganized and improved its interface. I’m using the Beta version of Skype 5, which has a few surprises. For example, when you call someone [...]
Jun 07 2010
Several people from the Fall 2009 Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop have continued meeting every few months to catch up with each other, find out what people are working on, and swap stories. In a way it’s a CPsquare dream that people should connect so much during a workshop so that they would want [...]
Mar 14 2010
You probably already know that Skype is a great tool – especially for community leaders. If you are a technology steward, you’ve got to know how to use it and talk about it, too. To really talk about how to use a tool we’ve got to talk about all the buttons and about the user’s [...]
Sep 24 2009
Last May’s CHIFOO presentation was a great talk about reading by Cathy Marshall. Here are Marshall’s slides from which I’ve borrowed some images to talk about her work in this post. Marshall read (out loud, from the slide on the screen) that: “Nothing is more commonplace than the experience of reading, and yet nothing is [...]
