The communities I work with seem to be using telephone bridges more and more. Those phone bridges are acquiring more features (so I think of them more like a platform with several tools on them rather than simple tools). For example, phone bridge platforms can send email announcements scheduling a call and make a recording of a call and serve up the recording to people who didn’t make it to the call. Phone bridges are also integrating (or not) with other platforms. Here are some reflections on recent experiences and observations.

Freeconference.com has a sophisticated conference call scheduling set-up, together with an email list management tool. I just noticed that they’ve designed a sophisticated application to do your conference scheduling from Outlook. For example, if you can look at other people’s schedules in Outlook, that might be very important. With some groups, it could be very helpful to have a voice come on the line and say, “Your call ends in 5 minutes.” I’ve found that to be intrusive and irritating. Worse, the bridge hangs up on you when your time is up. I think it’s important to let people decide when the call is over.

It used to be that joining a call on Freeconference or Freeconferencecall.com via Skype-out was clumsy or impossible because it was hard to enter the passcode. I just tried doing it and it does work if you go slowly. One thing that Freeconferencecall has over Freeconference is that the bridge has an important extra tool: it can record your conference call.

Recently, I’ve been on several calls using Iotum’s bridge. It has a very nice interface with Facebook, so that you can invite people using Facebook and the host can control the call from Facebook. During the call participants can see who’s on it, who’s muted, and click on their picture to see their profile. Very nice.

You can also see who’s been invited to a call and who’s said they will attend. Iotum’s facebook application provides “a Wall” that can be used for note-taking during the call. It’s like a primitive chat room. Very nice.

It also has a page from which to download MP3 recordings to which you have access. (Not sure whether the nice list has the calls I was invited to or the calls that I attended. Controlling access and managing storage becomes important.) Very nice, provided it gives you adequate control.

When you have people calling into a phone bridge from regular phones, cell phones, Skype, from all over the world, noise reduction matters a lot. Because so many of the calls that I’m on involve just such a messy mix, I’m still finding that the noise reduction features of High Speed Conferencing make it worth paying money for the service. Having two people on a conference call that can’t hear each other makes all the other features and tools irrelevant. I never use the scheduling tools on any of the phone bridges I use. There are tools to do that on the other platforms that my communities use that are preferable, so for me the conference scheduling tools on all of these phone bridges are irrelevant. I just recently noticed that I could label the recordings that the phone bridge makes and serves up (via Skype or by phone or for downloading). Very nice.

It would be nice if you could label callers (especially those calling from a phone number or using an obscure Skype name) so that you could take a guess as to who to mute when there’s noise. Although the high definition audio quality that High Speed Conferencing provides mostly means you don’t need the web interface to mute people I do need to occasionally. Their web interface is available only to the conference host, not to the participants.

Tags: skype

Think that TWITTER may not be enough of a platform for your community of practice? Need something more homey than del.icio.us? Think that a full-fledged platform THAT YOU PAY FOR may be needed?

I’ve thought for a long time that how you look at and assess the fit between a community and its platform matters a lot. Writing the book with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White and several other activities in CPsquare have convinced me that an “outsider’s vew” (whatever that means) can be so mis-leading.

Join us at CPsquare, where we’re exploring a half dozen platforms together — attempting to look at the software through the eyes of a community that’s been living on that platform for a while. See registration details here: http://www.cpsquare.org/News/ … Currently we’re expecting to visit:

• xPERT eCommunity (Q2learning)
• CompanyCommand – Eco (Tomoye)
• TBA – Web Crossing
• DITAUsers – Drupal, Timeline, WordPress, Moodle, Yahoo Group and Mediawiki
• CIARIS – Custom-made using Ruby on Rails
• Story-telling in Organizations – Ning
• Best practices in e-learning community – Moodle and Facebook

For each platform / community combination we’re having several levels of engagement:

• Read a post about the community and the platform, written by a knowledgeable person
• View a video that represents a tour of the aforementioned community
• Self-register to use a “play space” where you can get a sense of what the software is about and how it works
• Participate in a discussion on the platform itself with community members about their community and their experience of using the platform
• Participate in asynchronous discussions back here that summarize or reflect on all the foregoing
• Participate in a synchronous phone conference about all of the above
• (Might be follow-on summarization and reflection and meta-conversations)

Rather than asking which platform is “the best” we are asking, “what kinds of communities thrive on each of these quite different platforms?” We’re inviting community leaders, technology stewards, and software vendors to all spend three weeks together thinking about issues of common concern. In the end I’m sure what we understand about some of these platforms will have a superficial aspect, but we’ll know a lot more about what questions to ask…

The event is organized by CPsquare members and is open to guests who register ($100) here: http://www.cpsquare.org/News/ (CPsquare members who are presenting or facilitating can bring a guest for free.)

There’s a pattern that’s developed in CPsquare and that I’ve been purposeful in developing elsewhere. I think it has lots of good learning practice built into it.  I put it on a public Google doc for a while, but since I haven’t received any comments about it for a while, I decided it was stable enough to post as a page in its own right on our tools wiki.  I recommend this practice, especially for coaching conversations.

Recently I read a wonderful article by Jean Lave where she asked the simple question, “what’s a learning theory?” and suggests some questions to ask about learning theory instances.

Jean Lave (1996) “Teaching, as Learning, in Practice” Mind, Culture, and Activity
3 (3), 149-164.

http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327884mca0303_2

On page 156 she says:

“[Martin Packer] asked [what a theory of learning consisted of] because he already had an answer in mind: At minimum, he proposed, a theory of learning consists of three kinds of stipulation: a telos for the changes implied in notions of learning; the basic relation assumed to exist between subject and social world: and mechanisms by which learning is supposed to take place.”Telos: that is, a direction of movement or change of learning (not the same as goal directed activity),”Subject-world relation: a general specification of relations between subjects and the social world (not necessarily to be construed as learners and things to-be-learned),”Learning mechanisms: ways by which learning comes about.”

1. Telos: that is, a direction of movement or change of learning (not the same as goal directed activity),
2. Subject-world relation: a general specification of relations between subjects and the social world (not necessarily to be construed as learners and things to-be-learned),
3. Learning mechanisms: ways by which learning comes about.

To me this is an almost exact match for the good old Buddhist three-fold logic of Ground, Path and Fruition, although it’s usually used in a different order:

1. Fruition: direction of development (not just what you are teaching but what people are learning for themselves)
2. Ground: context, social-network, world-view assumptions
3. Path: mechanisms, activities, and processes for the negotiation of meaning

I actually like “fruition” over “telos,” the Greek word for “end” because fruition reminds us that it’s only a partial end in that it contains the seeds of the next cycle. Learning certainly is that way. Anyway, I’m resolving to use three-fold logic as I explore what it is I’m doing as a coach. I’ve been thinking a lot about who exactly it is that I think I’m helping and how. I think that thee-fold logic applies to individual sessions as well as at larger scales of interaction. It’s a handy meme.

To encourage anybody who’s interested to read the article, here’s a snippet from the introduction:

Theories that reduce learning to individual mental capacity/activity in the last instance blame marginalized people for being marginal. Common theories of learning begin and end with individuals (though these days they often nod at “the social” or “the environment” in between). Such theories are deeply concerned with individual differences, with notions of better and worse, more and less learning, and with comparison of these things across groups-of-individuals. Psychological theories of learning prescribe ideals and paths to excellence and identify the kinds of individuals (by no means all) who should arrive; the absence of movement away from some putatively common starting point becomes grounds for labeling others sub-normal. The logic that makes success exceptional but nonetheless characterizes lack of success as not normal won’t do.

She’s radical.

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For some reason it’s sometimes hard to find the “mute” button on a Skype call. It’s not one of those things you usually pay attention to. But it can suddenly be very important to find it when someone is calling via a poor quality Internet connection that introduces clicks, echoes, and other extraneous sounds into the call. Actually the noise is usually something someone else notices — and they tell you to find the mute button and use it. Kind of like, “Hey, you need a breath-freshening mint,” but you have to find the mint yourself!

When you can’t find the breath-freshening mint, it’s doubly irritating that someone says you need one.That’s it, in the picture on the right.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Skype detected the noise and highlighted the mute button?  In the meantime, we need to rely on our friends to tell us.

See other posts on Skype

Tags: skype

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