The other day, I was rushing to follow up on a planning session with Susan Nyrop, where we preparing for the next session with Steve Denning. I had agreed to send an email to people who were involved in the discussion. But who were they? I had the choice of either sending a message to all CPsquare members (some of whom weren’t involved or interested in this event) or use my “member directory” program which lists members who had posted in one of the several discussions that are part of the event. But some people only show up in one discussion, say, that’s discussing one chapter of Denning’s book, or looking at one facet of what he’s presenting. They come early or late in the event. I thought that this “member directory” program in Web Crossing, has some useful, standardized information about each individual as well as providing a handy list of email addresses, so it was worth making an effort to modify, if only I had the time.

For several weeks I had been thinking that I wanted to have the program look at all the discussions in a folder, producing a directory of everyone who’d posted in any of the discussions contained in the folder. I avoided looking into it, thinking it would take too long. It turned out to only take me about an hour and a half to modify the program to do what I wanted, and a good bit of that was attending to the aesthetics, navigation and titling. It’s nice to have a specific situation where the reason for investing the time in an enhancement is really clear but you also have the extra half hour to play with the tool and make it do what you want.
It seems to me that our brains are very subtle about forming groups of people that we want to address as a group, compared to the tools we use online. Face-to-face communities have so many different places or times that set up different social formations (like the coffee shop, the locker room, during kitchen clean-up, in the classroom, etc.) so we can wait for the right time for an audience to form. Online tools, on the other hand, force you to think in terms of on or off, in or out. I think there’s a lot of work to be done in creating tools that let us address different degrees of involvement within a given community. Although having many different tools available in a community makes participation more complicated (which is especially hard on new people), more tool choices can also mean you can have more nuance in addressing the people you want to speak with.

The Portland Ed Cluster ( http://www.portlandedcluster.com/ ) is a consortium of Portland companies working in the learning / elearning area. It’s a small community of practice that I’ve felt I should connect with, even though what I do seems pretty different from their norm. I’ve been to a couple meetings and hopped on my bike on Bastille Day to hear Ken Kay, chairman of Infotech Strategies, ( http://www.itstrategies.com/ ) talk about “21st Century Skills: A New Vision for K-12 Education.” It turns out that Infotech is a consultancy that combines “public relations, public affairs, marketing strategy, business consulting, and coalitions & alliances services to deliver maximum results” for their clients.
The good folks at http://www.learning.com/ provided box lunches and there were about 15 of us that showed up for the presentation. The main topic that Kay was talking about is the Partnership for 21st Century Skills — consisting of many companies and funded in part by the US Department of Education.

Among other things, Kay was asking, “Why are 21st Century Skills so critical?” His response:

“Twenty-first century skills, combining technology literacy, critical thinking, creativity and mastery of core subject matter are the lifeblood of a productive workforce in today’s global, knowledge-based economy. “

He’s mostly talking about high schools and high school curriculum. Kay is a really good speaker.
It’s hard to quibble with his argument for change. But I wondered about some of his answers.

• First of all, I can imagine schools as institutions being less “bricks and mortar” than they used to be. The trend toward home schooling in the US or toward online education generally may change the experience of high school students a lot. Creating online community, of course, may be a critical element for that online world to succeed.
• Second, the way high school students use technology changes their world a lot more than curriculum can change it. See this panel discussion at a Microsoft Research Conference on Social Technologies suggests that high school students can organize a lot of their own learning. Planning a curriculum without a clear vision of a student’s world seems dubious to me because the informal communities that students create are so very powerful.
• Finally, I was struck by the apparent assumption that “professional development” to help teachers live and contribute in this new world would be no different from what we have today. It can’t bee that all we need is more of what we have, can it? It seems to me that communities of practice for ongoing professional development have to be a key element for the kinds of improvisatory skills that a 21st Century workforce will need.

Setting up a blog — getting all the technology right — is a bit of a project, even though I hear tell it’s just the beginning. I’ve been thinking about what to do and how to do it for a couple of months. There are lots of decisions, aesthetic, functional and technical. Not to mention questions about what to say, to whom, and about what.

At this point, I see the goal of this blog as gathering all the observations, insights, and work that I do in different venues into one place. For the past eight years I’ve been completely immersed in understanding and supporting communities of practice, which often has involved a degree of self-effacement that puzzles friends, colleagues, and clients. It’s time to say, “Hello World!” So, Howdy!

Fortunately there are a lot of good examples out there, so if you see that I’ve copied something from your blog, I hope you’ll consider it a compliment, whether I’m copying an esthetic element, a functional feature, a technical hack, or a marketing strategy. 🙂