Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Feb 12 2018

Computing on R

R is not just software.  It’s actually a global organism that grows information: insights, discussions, work methods, human relationships, and open questions as well as a massive amount of software and all the resources that document or support it.  Cesar Hidalgo equates growing information with “computing”, claiming, “It is the growth of information that unifies […]

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Aug 25 2016

Tools for a Hack Oregon project

A Hack Oregon project is fun and you get to make a contribution. In a project like the Oregon Hunger Equation last spring, everyone is figuring out both how to have fun and collaborate during the length of the project at the same time.  The fun part means you get to improvise and invent, hang out […]

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Dec 01 2013

Mapping a community – easy and not-so-easy

I’m resonating with how Joitske Hulsebosch has organized “Tools for social network analysis from beginners to advanced levels.”  It’s always safer when you can start at “the shallow end of the pool” and get into deeper and deeper water as you go.  In diving into the real-life river of data, we may not know just […]

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Nov 12 2013

Walking around it to find a problem’s shape

Working together and staying in touch over more than ten years, Sean Murphy and I have tried a lot of different ways of learning together, from each other and from others.   We kept at it and learned from our experience, and we’ve been able to help clients learn. We’ve even helped clients learn to learn.  We’ve […]

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Oct 16 2013

Some ideas about a tool for community reflection

One initiative I took on as part of the IFAD synthesis project got going due to a conversation with Philipp Grunewald where we were wondering how a community like KM4Dev could guide a researcher’s activities.  Philipp was willing to give 2 hours a week to the community in some kind of research effort, but wanted to find […]

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Jun 12 2013

What a webinar can prove

On Monday I did a webinar for a group that Joitske Hulseboch and Sibrenne Wagenaar have been leading on social media for professionals in The Netherlands.  I’ve posted the slides here.  Sibrenne and Joitske posted a summary here. We had interesting difficulties with the audio side of the webinar. If professionals like us encounter such difficulties, […]

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Apr 13 2013

Moving from delicious to evernote

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 […]

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Oct 25 2012

Not just one kind of learning

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 […]

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Jul 15 2012

Meaning of “the only thing that could have happened”

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 […]

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Jul 13 2012

Where is “the us” in the nework?

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 […]

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