I keep thinking and learning more about coaching because it seems that “coach-like” interactions are a useful way of structuring interactions with clients. But I always feel a little uncomfortable with the baggage around and lack of theory about “coaching.” I wonder how it is that coaching helps people learn? Reading a wonderful article by Jean Lave for a little writing project turns up this gem:

Teaching certainly is an object for analytical inquiry, but not an explanation for learning.

Reasoning by analogy we wouldn’t say that coaching is an explanation or a cause of improved performance, would we?

One of the main findings of the project I did with Lauren Klein and Theodora Fitzsimmons was that there is some kind of spectrum between coaching and mentorship. We put the slides from our presentation at the C&T Conference on slideshare:

| View | Upload your own

I just had a look at a previous posting on defining a coaching relationship, which still makes a lot of sense to me.

References:

Jean Lave, “Teaching, as learning, in Practice,” in Mind, Culture, and Activity 3(1): 1996, pp. 149-164.

• CNET Bandwidth Meter Speed Test – Bandwidth Test
  The CNET Bandwidth Meter speed test will check the bandwidth and speed of your connection to DSL, cable modems, and more. Page size: 380KB
  (tags: bandwidth free tool testimonial)
• Speedtest.net – The Global Broadband Speed Test
  A utility to test your connection to the internet. The site’s main page is itself 180 KB
  (tags: bandwidth free tool test)

• apophenia: more reasons to love Jean Lave
  Lave said that “you don’t have to do what the IRB says.” IRBs are there to protect the university, to make you think about ethics, but they don’t know how to handle ethnography and the most important thing is to really be accountable to yourself.
  (tags: jeanlave research)

I was listening to a client deal with the increasing utility and popularity of ClearSpace as a platform for several of their communities of practice that are in formation. The good news is that people are sharing and learning from each other using their new tool. The challenge (and I was accused of being a “glass is 120% full” kind of guy 🙂 is that page loads take too long for low-bandwidth users.

I decided to compare the size of several arbitrary pages. I chose 5 platforms: ClearSpace, two tools that participants in the Foundations of Communities of Practice are currently comparing to each other, Moodle (because I’m doing a project on it) and Web Crossing (which is where the Foundations workshop is held). I saved 5 pages and added up the bytes according to the several different types of files that made up a page. A quick and dirty way of making the comparison:

Some data is better than none

The html file for ClearSpace contained a lot of java script code, so the comparisons within categories are rough. ClearSpace clearly produces a big page. Ning and Facebook have large pages and they can be even larger if you add more graphics, RSS feeds, videos, and auxiliary applications. Web Crossing was so small, I thought I should go back and try to find a bigger page, but I was too lazy. All of these pages were the page you might typically land on if you were going to go find or do something in a community space, so they were roughly equivalent from a functional perspective.

And a picture is worth more

It looks to me like ClearSpace falls right in the middle of these 5 in terms of page size. Of course a community member’s experience depends on a lot of other factors, including navigation (which with ClearSpace is partly the result of site structure that will be constantly evolving), how long the server takes to put together a page, and the amount of data that makes up a page. And different kinds of pages will have different sizes.

In the conversation there seemed to be several leading proposals about what to do:

• Get more bandwidth for community members who needed it
• Ask Jive to consider whether ClearSpace has a performance issue

I kept arguing that there was more concurrent stuff to be done than waiting for these, which sounded like somebody else’s job. Ideas that came up:

• Work on making the member’s trajectory through the site more direct
• Create a separate directory of some sort (e.g., del.icio.us links into it) so that fewer page loads are needed
• Provide some kind of intermediary person or service who can retrieve stuff that low-bandwidth people request
• Automate the production of a CD image of appropriate sections of the site and send it to people by snail mail every month or two

What else?

• Leading Campuses International Network
  Evolved from the WebCT Institute. Has monthly sessions.
  (tags: copexample)

• Sunlight Foundation
  using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing. Publishes several APIs, provides tech support to grantees.
  (tags: activism government web2.0 technologyforcommunity drupal)
• Finding the primary pivot – Bokardo
  Over time, the primary pivot of social software has shifted away from the topic thread and toward the person.
  (tags: socialnetworking design)

• Communities and Tehnology Conference 2007-Proceedings
  Proceedings of the Third Communities and Technologies Conference, Michigan State University 2007, Steinfield, C.; Pentland, B.T.; Ackerman, M.; Contractor, N. (Eds.) 2007, XIV, 566 p. 102 illus., Hardcover, Springer Verlag

  ISBN: 978-1-84628-904-0

  (tags: CCT2007 conference proceedings research communitiesofpractice technology)

Ruby on Rails is a new and increasingly popular web application framework. Like many technologies today, it has an active community of developers and they have the customary suite of wikis, file repositories, email lists, blogs and RSS feeds. One thing that catches my eye about the Ruby on Rails community is its very active, open-ended, ongoing conversation on an IRC channel. Its shop-talk goes 24 hours a day.

Last April, I captured about 12 hours of conversation overnight (Pacific time). (I guess I could have just used the archive and picked any day back to August, 2004.) During that 12 hour period, almost 150 people posted some 2,500 messages, asking questions, offering answers, clarifying questions, trading insults, and making jokes. All community of practice stuff and mostly serious business. Almost 100 messages pointed to external resources such as documentation, specifications, discussions, or examples on blogs, wikis and all maner of other websites. Nobody seemed clearly “in control” but the conversation went on and on. Everybody seemed quite happy with the conversation — conflicts blew over quickly, new questions came up, and the conversation continued. An open-ended, continuing conversation.

The strictly sequential nature of an open IRC channel makes it somewhat difficult to have more than one thread of conversation at a time or to direct a statement to one individual. The way people in this community handled that was to put an intended recipient as the first word in a statement. About 1/5 of the statements begin that way, allowing two people to address each other in a public single-thread fashion that’s directed to one other person.

During that 12-hour period there were some 400 people “listening” (like I was) which, with this technology, could mean people intermittently reading what’s being said or a robot saving the transcripts of the conversation for future use. I take this number of listeners as a vote of some confidence in the conversation. They take it seriously enough to keep an archive.

What can we learn from this example? Here are a few thoughts:

• An ongoing conversation works within an ecology of interaction media (wiki, discussion lists, blogs, and many others).
• Real-time help is a real productivity help — when you’re up against a problem, there’s nothing like your community of practice to help sort out what’s going on.
• Members of the Ruby on Rails community are sophisticated enough to take advantage of the multi-platform nature of the IRC protocol.
• Fleeting, in the moment interactions often contain information of lasting value.

What else?

• socialsoftware07 » home
  A class on social software that used social software for delivery.
  (tags: web2.cop.workshop socialsoftware education)

• In Crackdown, Myanmar Junta Unplugs Internet – New York Times
  Unplugging the interent is in line with earlier efforts to control / unleash news about repression.
  (tags: technologyforcommunity internet history)
• Learning Histories: A New Tool for turning organizational experience into action
  Art Kleiner and George Roth describe the learning history strategy. Date: June 3, 1997
  (tags: learning.history organizational.learning evaluationmethods)