Like many, I was skeptical of blogs at the beginning. I thought blogs were only used by people writing online diaries so they would be visible in public and accessible to everyone. Indeed, many bloggers make use of the medium to present themselves. Over time, however, I realized that you can use blogs for professional purposes …
Deutsche Bank Research report (2005) on corporate blogging. Offers a systematic overview of where (everywhere) corporations might use blogs to enhance communications.
Twitter queen Laura Fitton’s consulting firm, where you’ll find lots and lots of articles on the use of Twitter in business.
Browsers are wonderful tools for surfing the web, but they are not especially good at saving more than a few dozen links. All they can do is save your links in a stack, maybe allow you to move things around a bit later, but in order to do anything with browser links you pretty much have to look at all your links organized in limited ways: not good for complex work.
Once you start collecting dozens and then hundreds of links, you’ll want to store them thoughtfully, and you’ll be able to do that when you can move them around to meaningful categories and organize those categories.
But that’s only for starters. To manage complexity even further you’ll want to be able to search and add notes and tags.
Let me suggest that you start slowly and cheaply by learning how to use the Outline feature in Word, which you probably already have installed, or play with a lighter, more flexible application like Treepad (cost-free, works on any platform). Using these applications will give you important lessons in hierarchical organization — as I discuss in my notes on binary tree structures.
When you have a free moment, or feel a pressing need, you might go further and learn how to use applications that offer faster, single keystroke methods to save save web links, sorting in folders with simple drag and drop, and and keyword and tag searches, such as Evernote and Zotero, which plug into your browsers, or more powerful (and more expensive) stand-alone applications like Zoot (Windows), Circus Ponies Notebook(Mac), and Devonthink (Mac).
Whatever technologies you might use, the problem here is to save links, clippings, images, and your thoughts in meaningful, findable ways, so that when you sit down to write you have both everything you might need and prompts to help you remember what you have learned along the way.
A Note on the B-Tree
The Solution. To keep track, we are first going to learn how to use the Outline feature already installed on your computer. To understand the outline feature, please first spend one minute visiting the following animated example and observing how tree structures are used to sort the addition of new information and offer logical guides for information retrieval.
B-Tree Example. Even just 15 seconds viewing this fascinating animation will illuminate what you basically already know: the “tree structure” looks like a tree. But unlike the tree which distributes resources evenly from one end to the other, our tree structures are designed to help us sort things into categories, and categories of categories, and categories of categories, etc., so we might better think about relationships and findwhat we need. In addition to helping you keep track of notes, learning how tree structures work and gaining practice by using Outlines will help you understand the hierarchical structures we will be using with our websites and which are used everywhere on the web.
Tree Structure. This is from Wikipedia, and if you skim this article you will begin to learn about the principles of tree structures. It is named a “tree structure” because the classic representation resembles a tree, even though the chart is generally upside down compared to an actual tree, with the “root” at the top and the “leaves” at the bottom. You will find here a number of examples and a discussion that introduces you to the deeper logical dimension of this very important, useful structure and, as we are learning it, method.
I would suggest that you create a limited number (seven, max) general categories for things like class notes, group work, and your reflections. Assign them the top-most level of your outline, which Word has identified as “Heading 1.” Nested with each “Heading 1”, on the next level, you can assign “Heading 2”, and so on.
What I often do is list all the items in my class notes, for example, which are often best remembered chronologically, by headings that begin with the date and in an order that is easily sorted, like this: “10.04.14 Topic X”. In this way, all of the dates line up, you can move them up and down by selecting a line and, while holding down the shift-ctrl keys, and hitting an up or down arrow: outlines where you can move things around easily can be VERY useful when composing!
Under each class heading I use the next level, “Heading 3”, for the basic topics, which in our class would be our three major projects: data analysis, group work, and reflections. The text for each section I assign to Heading 4.
When I am all done, I can “collapse” all of the levels and end up with just the three or four major headings for my class, then expand one of them to see all the dates, for example, then open up a date to see what we did on that day. With just 3-4 clicks I can find anything, and if you think about it, you might now be able to see how structuring data in such logical hierarchies would increase a computer’s efficiency tremendously. In this class you will learn about other ways data is organized to reduce the operations needed to read or write things.
Creating Speech Outlines. The Outline feature is used for sophisticated data management in many fields. In this a fascinating explanation of the use of the Outline feature in Word for the design of scripts to be read into speech recognition software. In addition to explaining how to structure presentations in the outline format, it offers advice on writing coherent, effective sentences that might be of special interest for those of you interested in developing your language skills. As we will discuss later in this course, advanced language learning is often less about grammar and vocabulary and more about discovering, adapting, and using the phrases one finds in professional literatures or, as we teachers say, “we read in order to write” and “we speak in order to write”: we encourage students to grasp whole phrases and ways of speaking as we ourselves study the peculiar ways our languages are used. I often put it this way in class: “if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck; if you learn how to walk like a marketing person (for example) and talk like a marketing person, you will become a marketing (or whatever) person.
You have no way of knowing precisely when your computer will crash, burn, or be lost or stolen — it could happen in the next hour — so please develop the habit, starting today, of saving your work EVERY day on a memory stick, an external hard drive, or an online service such as Dropbox. Mac users have it easy with Time Machine and ChronoSync. Windows tries to make backups easy.
Now is a good time to develop a system for creating your own sufficiently complex and memorable passwords. Find an online password generator by typing “password generator” or “strong password generator” in Google, and choose a generator, such as strongpasswordgenerator.com that creates complex passwords that you might nonetheless remember with phonetics, like “36V=!g”, which would be easily remembered as: 3 6 VIRGIN = ! google. To learn more about the science behind such passwords, you might visit the Password Strength Wikipedia article.
To help you deepen your reading I’ve started to write up some advice on reading strategically.
The problem is that the reading, note-taking, and writing methods you have developed years ago may not be adequate to the complexity of the professional texts you are reading today and demands for explanation that will likely be made of you in the near future. What I’ll offer you is a strategy for reading that includes four stages — skimming, scanning, reading intensively, reading extensively — as well as developing a second, “meta-level”, where we look not simply at problems of data analysis that are the text’s primary lesson, but also at how the authors invite us to learn about them and find both method in their approach and a way of talking about data analysis on a higher level.
Skimming for the Overall Shape
First, read the whole text quickly to grasp its overall shape, main themes, and modes of explanation. Identify what is to be found and where. You might first think of skimming as reading superficially and fast, and you are right, but we do that as part of a four part strategy: we look first the text’s overall shape so we have a better idea of how we might break it apart for more detailed analysis.
Then, even though you think your reading is superficial, and it might well be, summarize briefly (1-3 sentences) what problem this chapter is trying to solve and how it suggests you might go about solving it. What will happen, or I hope will happen, is that you will add your impressions and other questions and comments to your partial understanding, including, your questions of this text’s purpose, how it might relate to the preceding chapters, and any “aha” experience you might have that pay good respect to your intuition.
The writer Roland Barthes once said that we read when we lift our eyes off the page: that’s what you do when you are summarizing: making sense of it, reading it for understanding, and writing about it in phrases that you will remember if they are your own. He also said that if you read a story only once, you read the same story everywhere: that at first we see what we already know, but when we look at things a second time, reading things more closely, we discover what is different and things we likely did not know.
So, with this skimming, lifting your eyes off the page, and then writing a general summary, you might be led to address a more general question, one that might mean a lot to us personally: what’s here, and what’s in it for me?
Consider the pyramid metaphor I offered you in class: With this skimming, you are looking for the overall shape, a triangle, the chapter’s general outlines. Next, when you look for its components, you will be looking for the pyramid’s stones — the chapter’s “building blocks” .
Scanning for Arguments
Now, read the text a second time, scanning not for its overall shape, which now you already know, but for its main Arguments.
When we are just starting out, we often think we are supposed to go find the facts, and when we are asked to talk about the texts we often think we are supposed to give opinions. I am advising you here to do both and do so in a special way: report on what the authors are doing as you understand them.
By “argument” we mean here not conflicts and being argumentative — though as we are learning the “they say / I say” structure of academic writing does indeed recommend that you note your differences from ongoing arguments and what you might contest — but argument in the sense of examining evidence, analysis, and evaluation to come up with different interpretations.
Here, on top of definitions of terms and methods of calculation, the authors are making a very special, problem-solving argument about how one might best learn how to analyze data, including, that one become self-conscious of one’s assumptions, that one be critical every step of the way, that one seek additional sources, that one negotiate carefully with one’s boss … this is a problem-based approach (different, say from an approach based on mathematics, statistics, algorithms, technology, etc. … just to list some of the various ways these courses are being taught. I’m asking you to develop an understanding of this approach: we learn not just “data analysis,” but, “how one approaches data analysis.” And for that you need the self-conscious, meta-level.
Scan the text, write phrases identifying the main arguments in the margins, and list 4-6 (and not more than seven) of the arguments, the most important ones, with page numbers, in your notebook, like this:
169 “to uncover not-so-obvious insights”
170 problem with diagnosis: “accuracy”
171 go on the web, find “accuracy analysis”, statistics
172 problem with “guesstimating”, it’s probably way off
If this seems to be a bit strange, well: try to walk in my footsteps and evaluate the difference between what you might have written on your own and what I have written. I think what you’ll conclude that what I’m doing is “talking about” the text, what it seems to be doing and how, and talking about what it might mean to me (for example, “ooops! I would have made that guess too! I have something to learn here!), and what I’m trying to show is that this meta-level frames, helps you to understand, the purely analytical lesson — which I think the authors argue is necessary but in itself insufficient to become a professional in this field.
Learn How to Read a Text Upside-Down
As a reader, my job is to make sense of what I am being presented, and that means putting things into proportion. If I understand the beginning of a text to be in the business of offering the main topics and reasons for learning them, and if the business of page 169 is “this chapter is about uncovering not-so-obvious insights,” then there is not much need here for me to note right now what the authors have emphasized, put into “bold” type, including such terms as “straight up probabilities”, “Bayes’ rule,” and “base rates”, or?
…
Your target language includes the words, phrases, idioms, grammars, and issues used by those in your chosen field and expected of those, you, who would join them. While you may not know this language right now, within weeks of starting an internship or job you will be swimming in it. These exercises are designed to give you a head start.
Where do we find our “target language”? (in conversations)
We start by looking for conversations, because among the first things that we do in business when confronted with something new, difficult, and challenging is talk about it. In the workplace, we find these conversations in working groups, but also, in the corridor, kitchen, elevator, out on the street, in conferences, bars, on the telephone … and on the web nowadays on blogs.
Why not stick with the textbook? (we want to add to it)
We go to the textbook if we want to find the solution to last year’s problems and to the important different principles and practices derived from them, but it often takes months or years for today’s problems to find their way into the textbooks, and by the time today’s problems get into many textbooks they have been cleaned up, stripped of much real-world complexity and uncertainty and confusion.
It may also be that for all practical purposes our “learning the fundamentals” is conceptually flawed: our fields are changing so rapidly, competence in our field is about learning how to adapt to change, and so “learning the fundamentals”, rightly understood, might best be thought of as “learning the fundamentals in a context of change”.
It may also be that if we wait until things appear in the textbooks some vital things are lost, too, such as the ability to view problems as puzzles, to see them unfolding through time, and to learn the skills that one needs to learn to discover emerging opportunities in time to do something about them — as competitive business environments often demand. The skills of reading textbooks (and taking quizzes and tests) are likely far different from those needed to apprehend emerging problems and opportunity, relate them to established principles and practice, and imagine innovative solutions.
We read the newspapers, so why not blogs?
If we want to find today’s problems in the making we go to the blogosphere much as we go to the newspapers. And just like reading the news, we read the blogosphere critically, taking the author and his or her perspective into account, comparing what we hear to what we know, presenting what we hear carefully, provisionally, using report structures (and not as “the facts”), and if we are interested we run around to check other sources …
For example, BP
For example, on the topic of “corporate social responsibility”, it is very important that one learns the normative assumptions (concepts, methods, practices, etc.), which is what one gets when one types “corporate social responsibility” into Google, but when one uses Google Blog Search, adds “bp”, and limits the results to the past month (May 2010), one finds these assumptions tested: one finds wide-ranging discussions from all over the world, because with the current disaster just about everything — government regulation, environmental issues, cost/benefit analyses, etc. — has been thrown into question.
Here is where I love to quote Colin Powell, the former U.S. Secretary of State (and before that, general in the U.S. Army), who said something like: “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”: that all these wonderful plans are very nice in peacetime, but the true test is in contact with reality.
Plus, more generally, many of us think that what you want to prepare for are the challenges of the future, which likely do not yet exist. In business in professional life, the chances are very good that the ability to research current issues so you might help solve emerging problems will earn you a high premium.
How Do We Find Current Conversations on the Web?
If you’ve not yet found these conversations, your first tool is most certainly Google Blog Search, but you’ll need a sophisticated method as well: one that begins with any number of field-specific terms but includes whatever peculiar idioms speakers in your target language use when writing on the web.
Simple searches produce simple results
For example, if you look up “corporate social responsibility” using google.com, the first site you will be served is a wikipedia entry, and most of the sites that follow offer definitions and official corporate policies, which of course you’ll want to read and get to know.
How to narrow your search to find relevant conversations
But if you want to know about current problems, you will likely have to choose terms that shift your results considerably to the present and problematic, which you do by adding words associated with current topics, like “bp” for British Petroleum, or when you are shooting in the dark, the languages of informal conversation, such as “joke”.
There are other things you can do.
Start with your textbook, look for its sources.
One of the first things you might do is establish your baseline understanding of your topic by reading the most relevant passages on your topic in the assigned text and finding the cited articles, if any, offered in the footnotes, because the author has done a lot of homework for you. But what he has also likely done is generalize upon the topic, and what you are looking for is what he, and his sources, are working on now: you want to build on the basics and find the current debate.
To find the author’s sources, go to his footnotes, pasting the article title in quotation (so Google will look for exactly those words in that order), and if you are lucky you will find the original source.
You might want to limit the search to .pdf or even .flv files, learn how:
You might also learn how to limit the search to specific file types as you will find explained here:
If you can’t find the original article, try looking for other articles by the same author by searching for the author name (pasted into Google in quotes, so you will be served that proper name).
Keep track of your target language, take detailed notes
As you read the textbook and examine the author’s sources, keep a list of key words and list as well various ways ways of examining the topic to the end of identifying both you and others think is important. You want to follow your nose and interests, but you need the cooperation of others, and specifically, you need to find those who have identified relevant issues and explored them so you can learn from them and maybe eventually contribute to the conversation.
Next, look for the current debate
The next step is to find CURRENT issues, discussions over the past six months, because your goal is to prepare for the future, and that means finding emerging issues which, by definition, are those being discussed now and recently.
When you navigate to Google Blog Search, click the Advanced Blog Search link and narrow the search in time by clicking the radio button for “… posts written between …” and choosing a reasonable time frame, such as the last 3-6 months.
And even better, compare your work to other case studies.
Something else you might do is begin with existing case studies and build your own after having reviewed, even if briefly, the others. In Google, type “companyname case study”, report on what you find, and conclude by evaluating one or two of the relevant advantages of the others, what you have learned from them, and finally, how you might see things differently. Observe how they have expressed themselves, including what issues and terms and analytical frameworks they have used and learn how to converse with them and see yourself in a conversation with what has come before you. Your readers will appreciate the overview, understand from it where you are starting from, and so be prepared to appreciate your unique insight. This is, ultimately, what we mean by learning your “target language”: that you are part of a larger professional conversation.
For learning current language use more generally, you will do well to learn how to use a Learner’s Dictionary, which is probably completely different from the dictionaries you have been using until now, which are often based not on current use, but ideas going back over a long time.
My favorite illustration of this difference is to note how, when you say “I do” in a cafe, someone will add sugar to your coffee, but when you say “I do” when standing in the front of a church with your girlfriend beside you, you will end up getting married! When viewed and used in this way, language is not just ideas, but action as well.
For example, compare the definition of the word “revision” in LEO and in the the Collins Cobuild English Learner’s Dictionary. You will see that while Leo is very good at preserving the the idea of a word, such ideas are not ordered carefully and appear completely out of context, so you don’t learn where, when, and how you might actually use a term. In contrast, the Collins Cobuild explains the meaning in a systematic way and based on the most common, current uses for its audience of learners.
Let’s look at this more closely. The definition of “revision” in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary starts off with a very general idea of change and only in the third definition does it refer to concrete, real-world examples. But in the Collins Cobuild definition above you are invited to act in the real world and do so boldly from the very start: “to make changes in order to improve it or make it more modern … read things again and make notes …”
Learning Vocabulary in Context
I’ve also observed that students spending a lot of time drawing up lists often have a hard time remembering what they’ve learned: those with good memorizations skills appear to be wizards, but not everyone has such skills. In one class, we tried to draw up lists of the vocabulary we learned in the previous week and came up with very little.
We found this difficult to do, because trying to remember vocabulary taken out of context is like fishing in the dark: it can be done, but without being able to see the landscape we don’t really know where we are and what is going on.
But when these students went back to the blog posts they had written, they were quickly reminded of what they had learned, because they returned to a meaningful context, their own writing, and from there they could remember one phrase after another.
In this class, we discussed how there is a special word for understanding how a term relates to others in a meaningful way: “collocation”. Perhaps more interesting for us, was our coming up with three theories on why it is easier to remember things we have written, including:
— The Body Theory. When we write, our thoughts go through our eyes, brains, back, arms, hand, and pen, paper, and back into the eyes, we think, and so we remember what we’ve done.
— The Context Theory. When we use a word in context, all we need is to start thinking of the context, and then we remember other pieces of the puzzle — other words, phrases, ideas — and a whole family of meanings begins to pour out.
— The Use Theory. When we do not put things off until later, but use the words now, we learn (now). Very simple, very powerful realization this one.
Learning by Listening
So then we listened to the IBM marketing film, “Blogging Means Business”, and we found all sorts of memorable phrases, like “blogging means business,” “collaborate on problem-solving,” and “blogging to build stronger relationships”. These are memorable because they are carefully chosen, they sound like marketing language because they are, but we also found them to be useful.
We compared these power words with the often far less clear phrases that the speakers often used. For example, one VP said thing like he was “engaged in a blogging initiative,” which was difficult to understand, and we discussed how he suddenly became much clearer when he said, “I lead a team.” We discussed how, when speaking, we often use such unclear terms until we sharpen our thoughts and that the thing to do is skim along until things become clearer, for example, when people describe not abstractions, but things they actually do, like “I lead a team”: short, clear, and to the point.
Similarly, in the video, we noticed how the second VB also talked abstract and so not very clearly until she described what she actually does, “I’m also responsible for managing IBM‘s blogging system,” which also sounded much better because it described real actions that she probably really does and in a very realistic, direct, straight-forward way.
Learning by Analyzing Texts
We then went back to finding interesting blog posts and reporting on them. This time I suggested that we get to know Alltop as it presents hundreds of interesting blogs organized by topic and find blog posts of personal interest, which we did.
As everyone has laptops and enjoys working with them, we then developed a workflow whereby we copied our chosen blog post into Word, broke it apart into sections with line spaces in between, and outlined and summarized passages in red.
Learning by Rephrasing Things in our Own Terms
Then we briefly discussed what we found, and the interesting thing was that, when left to our own devices, some of us would explain what we were doing by listing the main points … back we were again to the making of difficult-to-understand lists.
But when I asked, “why is this important?” students lifted their eyes off of their note — a VERY important thing to do! — and put what they had read in their own terms, which we found to be much, much clearer.
Try this yourselves: I think you will find here a VERY important lesson. I think many of you will find that you have gotten good at making lists, but for some reason have not had that much practice, at least in the classroom, putting your learning into your own — more clear, more memorable — terms. Is this really true?
There is a profound difference between working from the text and discussing things with others. When we work from the text, we tend to follow the text’s ideas. But when we discussing what we are doing with others, I argued, we enter into a conversation and where the frame of reference is larger, more interactive, and easier to understand.
This was something of a revelation, and I explained it by talking about the difference between working from the text and discussing things with others. When we work from the text, we tend to follow the text’s ideas. But when we discussing what we are doing with others, I argued, we enter into a conversation and where the frame of reference is larger, more interactive, and easier to understand. What is going on here? Well, I think it has to do with the humanizing dimensions of having a living, breathing, interactive audience.
We noticed this in the speaking of the VP’s from IBM, too: how, when they first described what they do, they spoke in abstractions that were difficult to understanding, something about “furthering leading innovative leading edge companies”, but once they got going, the talked about managing projects and people in very concrete terms.
Thus, we came up with a very powerful, transformative method: by sitting down and explaining things in plain English to someone else before you sit down to write, you set up a conversation: the trick is, to then write up what you said: to leave your notes behind for a moment, which you translate things into everyday language and in your own “voice”.
So, that’s it: when we blog, we write like we talk. To do that, talk before you write: explain what you are doing to somebody — anybody — letting them help you by asking questions, helping you break out of abstract mode and enter into conversational mode. Then write up what you discussed, person to person, in terms that anyone can understand.
In this post I will review some of English language we bloggers typically use for reporting on what others are saying, discussing how we feel about it, and commenting on each other’s posts.
Reporting
Sophisticated discussion of what others say usually involves an elaborate framing of quotations, paraphrases, or summaries in report structures, such as, “The author suggests … ” or “The writer claims …”, that help us remain honest, think about what we are doing, and build our arguments.
We remain honest when we use report structures to preclude any confusion about the origin of our commentaries: when we learn from someone else, we give credit where credit is due. For more on this, you might consult articles on Plagiarism and more general discussions of Quotations.
We think about what we are doing when we choose carefully the reporting verbs which frame our reports on what others say. We typically start off just trying to explain in simple, direct, and neutral terms what the author “states,” “reviews,” “outlines,” “explains”, and so on. But as we think about what the author is doing and what we might feel about it we might note that the author “claims,” “confuses,” “disregards” or “dismisses” one or another thing that interests or bothers us, and from there we build our case. Google will help you find many lists of “reporting verbs” in the event that you might need more than you find here: Using Reporting Verbs.
Discussing
Just as you might consult a list of reporting verbs and choose among them to clarify your thoughts, so you might consult and try out some of the conversational patterns Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein have identified, in They Say, I Say: the moves that matter in academic writing. For example:
Many assume that ____________ .
invites us to break these assumptions apart …
I agree that ____________. On the one hand, ____________. On the other hand ____________.
In discussions of ____________, a controversial issue is whether ____________. While some argue that ____________, others content that ____________.
Of course, some might object that ____________. Although I concede that ____________, I still maintain that ____________.
Author X contradicts herself. At the same time that she argues that ____________, she also implies that ____________.
Commenting
… to be added in a few minutes
Thanks, everybody, for your enthusiastic attention and good work today! It was a great pleasure to find you responding warmly to the idea of using Communication Preferences of Different Personality Types, from Andrew Abela’s “Advanced Presentations by Design: Creating Communication That Drives Action,” to expand the presentations you have developed thus far by addressing more precisely the diverse expectations of your audience.
I think it is because, as the illustration above suggests, you have worked out excellent communications in your working groups, each found a topic that interests you, developed workflows that enable you to make giant steps forward and, each week, taken the opportunity present your classmates with thoughtful, inspired, and above all, interesting, presentations!
You’ve also learned the value of editing, learned how to feel great about what you’ve accomplished and only to learn how limited it was in light of new advice and resources, and developed the courage to go at it again.
Da Guys, I Want To Ask You Something
Finally, I think it is also because you have learned to work and rework your topics and now find yourselves dealing with issues that you know something about, that are important to you and your classmates, and that you soon will be able to develop into some original research and persuasive advice for your peers. This business of interviewing your classmates and friends, which you’ve so ably photographed, as above, has helped you to see the value of building presentations on real-world encounters with your subjects and audience, so that while you have some abstract ideas and have found some interesting things on the web, you are now learning how to complement your abstract, theoretical orientations and understandings with your own stories as well as imagine your audience responding to you.
We see this in the slideshow presented by “Da Guys” two weeks ago we find images collected by people who were seeking to discover what others actually do to address the questions the photographers have raised, who have engaged their subjects thoughtfully, honesty, and with good humor, and who are building their presentations by developing conversations both in their working groups and with their subjects and audiences. If you would like additional confirmation of the fundamental integrity of your achievement as researchers using photography, compare your work to the portraits of Stefan, the professional photographer in our class, as well as the photographs made by Sonja, a professional manager in my photography course at the Free University last summer. I think you will see that while the professional’s images are more formally composed and exquisitely illuminated and exposed, and while the professional consultant’s images reflect years of leading workshops in business settings, you and they have in common the development of considerable insight, engagement, and warmth. It really is quite remarkable.
Abstraction, theories, statistics, etc., etc., are all important things, but knowing that 60% of your audience is already aware of the problem and is already doing something about it, that the problem of dealing with occupational hazards such as sitting at one’s desk in front of a computer is mostly being addressed through sport, recreation, and sitting on huge green exercise balls — and having the documentation, your own, to prove it — offers you not simply wonderful illustrations for your presentation, but the means to be confident that you know what you are talking about and in a language your audience understands: they will hear you a zillion times better because you are reminding them of what they already know first-hand, can begin to present and discuss the problem from their point-of-view, and likely have already begun to discuss how you, and they, have begun to arrive at workable solutions. From this perspective, the business of presentations is a living, breathing thing and built on “common sense” — the sense, the intelligence, that you and your audience have in common.
This post is also a happy combination of theory and real-world encounters. It is based on an introduction to the modeling of Andrew Abela we discussed yesterday and our conversation about how that modeling might be used to expand and deepen your group projects. Thus, I will discuss here how you might reframe your topics just enough to make them even more directly relevant to you and your peers and suggest that, in a few weeks, you may very well end up producing podcasts online that your friends will want to visit because you will have valuable insight on the “creative self” issues that concern you and your audience, including, how better they might better plan their days, budget their money, work and relax to avoid repetitive stress injuries, design a small business, and stand and present their work more confidently.
One more thing. Sometimes such classes on “self-managment” as this follow one or another textbook or training protocol based on the research of others as if you need others to tell you how to organize your lives. But in this class, you are researching and presenting the excellent advice that you and your peers have already found and are doing so on your own terms. Without presenting you the standard syllabus, which typically includes advice on organizing one’s time and money, addressing problems of health and safety, reviewing how one goes about researching a business topic, and developing self confidence, you gravitated to these topics quite on your own: for the first month, all I did, essentially, was tell you to go out and play and come back to tell stories about it: the topic of your presentations was up to you. You ended up working on these topics, I believe, because they concern issues that you have in common. All it really took from me was asking what the topic of “getting up in the morning” would look like if we turned it into a problem, of delivering your audience from point a to point b, of looking more deeply at what the issues involved in this almost trivial idea might be. I think this is completely interesting (and much to your, ok, OUR credit): starting off with problems of creativity, with the general topic of “creative self”, and then taking the issue seriously, we ended up dealing with the very issues formally assigned to us under the rubric of “selbst-management”, but very much on our own terms. Good for you! It also suggests that the topics identified by my colleagues at the Berlin School of Economics and Law are indeed those that concern you and that the formal syllabus, no matter how it is taught, is fundamentally correct. Hats off to my colleagues, too!
Now, in the next assignment — on your own terms and those of the art and science of presentation — we will deepen our understanding.
Your task is to prepare a set of eight post-it note sketches, one for each personality type, for 3-6 of the major steps of your argument thus far. Don’t worry about exploring each and every one of your existing steps right now, because your primary goal is to learn, for all practical purposes, how differently you might explain a given step for each of the eight personality types, and more generally, to understand each of those personality types as you see them in yourselves and the people around you. our task is to prepare a set of eight post-it note sketches, one for each personality type, for 3-6 of the major steps of your argument thus far. Don’t worry about exploring each and every one of your existing steps right now, because your primary goal is to learn, for all practical purposes, how differently you might explain a given step for each of the eight personality types, and more generally, to understand each of those personality types as you see them in yourselves and the people around you.
As we have discussed, you will also want to redefine your concept in more local, personally and socially relevant terms.
For example, for the group exploring the occupational hazards of using computers, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, you will want to work out the precautions and remedies you found in your surveys thus far as a series of stories and recommendations that will lead you audience to identify the dangers in their current working habits, explore alternatives, and conclude with action: Abela’s subtitle really is: “creating communication that drives action.” Tell a story of people learning how to sit on large exercise balls, or taking frequent breaks to exercise or play sports, or buy and use pads to support the wrists when using keyboards and mice. lowing Abela’s distinction between the expectations of “introverts” and “extroverts”, you might prepare a brief, half-page handout explaining the problem and your solutions as well as 2-3 questions that you would present to your audience.
For the group that started off asking people how they would spend 5,000 euros, as we discussed, you might reframe your question from fantasy to the practical reality of students living on limited budgets and how they will spend their money tomorrow today and tomorrow, having to choose between meeting in the expensive coffee shop or cheaper mensa, buying a book or using the library, choosing among clubs and what and where and how much to drink, etc.
Following Abela’s distinction between “thinkers” and “feelers”, you might prepare sketches that identify such principles as “be careful not to live beyond your means”, that spell out alternative spending scenarios for having fun in Berlin on, say, 10eur a day, and explore creative ways the people you interview have discovered to stretch their resources. Next to that, you might identify some of the implications of each principle, cost, and benefit for your peers, parents, the environment, and local businesses.
For the group that started off addressing the problem of “stage fright,” you might do more research on the real-world strategies — the “tricks of the trade” — that your friends as well as more experienced adults have found useful. This could, of course, be great fun, because just about everyone has had to overcome fears in order to speak or dance or perform in public and because even the most successful professionals can usually remember some embarrassing moment or great trick. One might even wrap it up nicely for you in the form of a story — a story that you might carefully place near the end of your argument to warm your audience with humor and understanding.
For the group that started off addressing the problem of how to get up in the morning, you might reframe your question in more practical, academic, and professional terms, such as how one prepares for the next working day — such as Silvia has explained in her story of learning how to use the post-it notes she bought for this class to spend a few minutes in the evening writing up her tasks for the next day and pasting them on her wall where she would see them when she got up in the morning.
Here, too, most everyone has developed some little technique or ritual or adopted some nifty technology that they would be willing to share, and if you are lucky at least one of them will tell you some great story about some exotic memory system or ritual, such as my dance teacher Irmel’s ritual of putting a cut flower in the middle of her dance studio after the last class of the day — something I will definitely photograph this week as I find it so touchingly sweet the way she does it, leaving this bit of color in the middle of the floor set against the darkened windows as she turns off the light.
And following Abela’s distinction between “judgers” and “perceivers”, you might experiment with presenting your conclusions up front and outlining a long list of alternatives somewhere along the way, the better to satisfy the thirst of those who want to get right to the point as well as those who let the impatient ones do their thing while they quietly await alternatives that they will appreciate being able to choose from on their own time — especially if you conclude your talk by passing out a list of “tricks” your audience can take away with them (including your name, the title, date, and context of your presentation, as well as emails and websites “for further information.”
While we did not discuss how the group exploring profitable coffee shop design might go about refining their concept, this is as good an example as any to highlight the interesting way Abela’s analysis of diverse audience expectations might lead you to prepare for the “intuitors” who expect a coherent concept for your new shop right at the start and the “sensors” who will want to walk through some of the important details of coffee-making or comfortable sitting/drinking/laptop-using. Knowing how different your audience expectations can be will prepare you for their questions: your “sensors” will be shaking their heads while you are busy explaining the big picture to the “intuitors”, and vice versa, but if you take care to address each in turn you will have “covered your bases” — to use a metaphor from American baseball: you will be prepared to cover those who would steal behind you and threaten to ruin your day. And by addressing these expectations in a coherent fashion, you might even help one group see the merits and of the other group’s interest — and when you are able to do that, boy, you’ll have in front of you a very happy group of campers!
Like me and so many others, you have likely been brought up to view presentations as a business of presenting “the facts” in the form of lists, for that is how Microsoft Powerpoint, with all of its automated outlines and bullet points, was designed, and lists based on shortened versions of written documents. Many of the most competitive presenters nowadays — and this really is a widespread development over the past ten years or so — as conversations and where the purpose is not simply to present “the facts”, but to engage audiences in experiences of thought and exploration, and in business, leading to the making of decisions and action. In this modern view, your success is not about how well you present, but about how well your audience responds: how well they are reminded or informed of the relevant issues, alternatives, and your recommended course of action and how well they are prepared and organized to discuss things, achieve a consensus, and act.
As you are learning from your interviews: collectively, your audience likely knows as much about your topic as you do: they have probably just not thought about it recently and now face the problem of coming up to speed quickly. By interviewing your audience and going on to the web, you learn where people are at and where they might want to go if they were looking at the matter with you. Your job is to move them from point a to point b, and so you really have to learn where their point a is, in very practical, concrete terms, with examples, and hopefully returning with the stories others have told of how they have moved from point a to b. We have long left the time when a few men and women of great genius somehow cooked up great discoveries on their own: research, business, and the work of society is nowadays done collectively, and the collective typically includes far more knowledge and experience than you. This is why you might think of yourself not as the next genius conveying new information, but as a connector, facilitator, negotiator, and communicator.
And in this mediating role, your job is to help the “intuitors” see the value of what the “sensors” have to say, and vice versa, all the way through all of four sets of opposed psychology types, because knowing most things and arriving at a consensus likely benefits from the results of reflection AND from the results of conversation, from consideration of principles, costs, and benefits as from evaluation of who something is valuable for and why, and from understanding your conclusions as well as considering the alternatives.
Knowing that your audience is diverse, including members from different and competing persuasions, and knowing through your research what those differences might be and who is holding them and how and why, will help you understand why, with just about everything you might possibly say, you will have some heads nodding up and down and others turning from side to side. Moving adeptly from one persuasion to another will help those heads move in different directions, and ultimately, away from you and towards each other and the solving of problems in common.
Your talk may be well done, but people will thank you much more if you are able to help them solve their problems. Your goal should be to help those suffering from repetitive stress injuries, facing problems starting a business, worrying about how best to allocate their resources, and fearful of presentation to quickly and deeply understand their predicament, overcome their fears, engage the issues, consider your recommendations, evaluate the alternatives, make decisions, and leave the room prepared to act.
A special note on photographs. As we discussed, including your own photographs of people you’ve interviewed or places and things you pass along the way this week will often provide you with compelling images to make your presentation memorable. Above I’ve added a photo I made today of a very kind man teaching another, who is blind, how to navigate the u-bahn. Carrying and using a small, cheap digital camera at every opportunity is a great way to help you meet people, pay attention, get them to pay attention, train your eye, and keep track of them, you, your activities and your memories. Nowadays, visual literacy is just about as important a skill to develop as verbal or written literacy, because images are being used just about everywhere and at levels of sophistication that, apart from the great painting and other arts, are increasing — what with everyone and their brother growing up with digital cameras in their cell phones and widespread sharing on the web as with Youtube — as never before. This is confirmed in the work of Andrew Abela, Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, and many of the TED talks, too: the advances in the field of presentation alone over the past decade reflect a more general, if not fantastic, development of literacy in our culture. This has enormous implications for you and your education: if true, all professionals today must take this increasing general literacy and rapidly advancing sophistication in presentation seriously if they are to remain competitive.
Remind yourself of this proposition by viewing again at least a few minutes of Laurence Lessig’s TED talk to remember how effectively he used single words, images, drawings, etc., to provide his audience with images that flowed along with his talk. Try to learn from him directly: do something like that: collect, draw, find on the web, or photograph people, places, or things that might appear briefly alongside your talk to fix this or that aspect of your talk into the mind of your audience.
What will your final presentation look like? Hopefully, it will look very different from what you did last week and will do this week. The essence of this business is working and reworking your thought, ideas, and materials into better and better form. By playing with the elements you are creating and collecting and taking advantage of such templates as Abela provides, you’ll learn more and more about your topic and ways of thinking about it and presenting it.
A note on project documentation. Make photos of your materials in various forms, make copies of everything you produce, develop collections in a folder on your computer, notes in a special notebook, and take the time to explain what you are doing in emails to your friends and family, which you save as well, and bring copies of everything to class, because at the end of your presentation next week I’ll invite you to explain how you got to where you did: to show us some of your preparation and explain your choices.
What John Seely Brown calls the “atelier method”, which we discussed while viewing his Learning in the Digital Age lecture, depends on the review of what happened and why, including, an honest confrontation with one’s limits (see McGonigal, “Teaching for Transformation”), the modeling of one’s assumptions, critical self-reflection, awareness of alternatives, and experiment with the alternatives, and most importantly, many of us believe, in a supportive context, including, freedom of experiment and conversation with one’s peers and others. Without documents, we forget all too easily. With documents carefully organized, we can map our growth, as well as preserve alternative text, images, and explanation for later use or reflection.
Documentation, such as pasting your post-it sketches in a notebook as shown in the illustration above, offers you a very powerful way of remembering, showing, and reflecting on what you’ve done. It is not just a handy method to help you overcome lapses in memory: it is among the fundamental principles informing professional preparation in schools of art, architecture, design … just about anywhere where creativity is taken seriously and the work involves images and text. While it is true that one can begin to decipher what went on by looking a Powerpoint slides at the end of a semester, such conversations are too little and too late: they depend on tiny abstractions of the materials involved and moreover, after the work of learning has drawn with the semester’s end to a close, they are, outside of the awarding of a grade, basically pointless: the class is over, everyone is supposed to move on to the next workstation. Far better is look for and find feedback from the very start, from the first week, and for every week, because then we have a better chance to look for evidence of learning on the minute level and when you can do something about it. To retrace things later, from memory alone … well, in that wonderful old tale by the Brothers Grimm, Hansel and Gretel found out the hard way that a few bread crumbs scattered about were simply not enough. They would have been much better off bringing their 16gb, 16 hour iPod Nano.
I can’t wait to see what you will do! Your work has been excellent thus far! Keep it up, and your learning and achievement will be truly admirable!
This past week, I was completely delighted to follow Marisa’s post on the Stil in Berlin website, where I quickly became fascinated with the photos of young people on the street looking good that one finds there. So I looked up “stil in berlin” on Google, opened dozens of links, within minutes I’d discovered a world! In this post I’ll walk through my discovery process to demonstrate how I explore the web, and especially, how one might first explore a topic and then zero in on one’s particular interests and reflections and so maybe add to the public record.
Stil in Berlin is a photo blog offering a stack of images made just about every day, and so offers a very current collection of people standing wherever the photographer found them in the fashionable inner city districts. The photographer usually stands just far enough away that there is a balance between emphasis on the person in the picture, the clothing that he or she is wearing, where they happen to be standing.
The photographer has wonderful curiosity and taste, and her consistency of approach sits well within the mid-twentieth century portrait tradition of August Sander, where people of different occupations and classes were photographed consistently from the front and with a clear, even light that allows us to look closely at details of clothing, environment, and expression. The most relevant difference might be that where Sander’s pictures seem to be built to stand forever, the Stil in Berlin photographs are almost throw-aways: they are made daily, with each to be replaced by the next, and they depict a very dynamic, creative mixing and matching of what a steadily expanding wardrobe and in a city of seemingly infinite variations.
But zowie, these folks are popular! We learn from their MySpace page that they have 3033 “followers”, and from the images one readily imagines an audience that is young, in school or fresh on the job, and in the creative fields, from hair-cutting to computer programming with a lot of party-going people mixed in.
Ditto their Facebook page: it claims over 4500 “followers”, with a “Wall” updated, so far as I could tell, at least once a day, if not more often: these people are working! I also learn, as I opened up the first 24 links one after the other, that Google returns first the social networking sites associated with this term: it must be because Google ranks websites according to how often sites are linked and visited.
And I learn that they have just published the first edition of their magazine and that the opening celebration, open to the public, is this Saturday, tomorrow! (OK, Marisa! Here’s your chance to meet these people!) I’ve gotten so curious about these people that I would go if I didn’t already have other plans. For a photographer, it would be open season, and as a public event, I’d probably be able to meet lots of people and get to “hear” the voices behind the images, it would be fun. That’s one of the wonderful things about this city: there are all these “scenes” that one might be a part of, but given my age and bad taste in clothing, I’d definitely have to give myself away with something extra, like wearing my Leica high on my chest, and so identify myself as a journalist or something — isn’t that how it is done?
Two nights ago I was very happy with the new figure we were learning in our dance class and smiling a lot, and as we went to leave a classmate that I hardly know asked: “what is your message?” His partner laughed, because I dance with her energetically all the time (she is a salsa dancer, and so likes dancing fast and furious and spinning like a top) and for us the message is: “zowie, what fun!” But it is interesting: he was asking me what it was that I wanted to project to others and what he ought to be reading in my gestures, and I think that’s similar to the world of these fashionistas and the ones outfitting and photographing them.
Lots of little discoveries here. The next link Google delivered me is a blog aggregator, a website that collects posts using RSS feeds, called bloglovin’, which I’ve not known about. This feed has almost 500 “followers”, and for the curious it offers a mash-up of “people who like this blog also like”: if I wanted to check out this particular scene, I’d find yet another set of links to follow.
Compared to all this, Stil in Berlin on Twitter appears to be a dead end: there are just 77 “tweets” and only 42 followers and no other links or mashups. Interesting: the sites so far have been social networking sites, which make a point of making accessible communities one might join or explore as well as include, as with bloglovin’, an element of randomness: compared to that, Twitter appears to be almost a closed shop! Interesting!
I REALLY like their Flickr site, because it include a wider variety of images (and with more accident and so discovery), and I feel like I might now learn more about the photographer’s social context.
And from Flickr I’m led to the
website of Mary Scherpe, who it turns out is the founder of Stil in Berlin, and on her own site includes more of her work — such as this shot of great legs and shoes! — as well as a CV, the work of some of her friends and links to other interesting sites.
For example, This Wasteland offers a Tumblr.-like presentation of often odd and often interesting posts and videos that would keep one busy on a cold night like tonight — if I hadn’t already made other plans.
So now I can leave Google and follow the links Stil in Berlin and their friends have offered, and so get to know this scene a little better from within. From This Wasteland I followed a link to What’s Wrong With The Zoo, where I found this great photograph of Michael Jackson doing his moonwalk, which is how I like to remember him, and it is a fine symbol of how much fashion is driven by pop cultures.
And from there I found a group web site, whatwearewearing.com, where the posts are from contributors all over Europe and the U.S., and so offering a much broader, international perspective and leading me to ask what might be peculiar about the fashion scene in Berlin.
In comparison to the much more diverse, and often more playful images I find on this site, such as playful pre-teen fashion by “ChantalM, 8 year old Fashion Designer from New York”, the Berlin scene appears to be much darker, grittier, with more techno cool, and with less breadth. In interesting article from the New York Times, Berlin’s Personal Ideas on Technology we learn that the Berlin fashion scene is much smaller and less well supported than the scene in Paris or other large cities, which I suspect is true given the city’s isolation during the Cold War and because it is so poor with a very limited upper-middle class and rich community that might support higher-end fashion. I’ve been told that at little as 10% of the money that art galleries make is from sales in Berlin: they may find talent here, but the sales are elsewhere. I suspect that explains why so many of the fashions I find on the Berlin websites I’ve been looking at so far there seem to be made from inexpensive materials and for local street wear.
I must now confess that much of my idea of the fashion business and the youth cultures associated with it was an MTV-driven image — drilled into my head from televisions in the fitness studio years ago — and which I find on this website of Justin Timberlake, who has built a fashion business alongside his music business. Listening to him talk about his business I think: “like, gag me with a spoon!”
Much of this young German scene, in contrast, appears to be minimally profitable and to be driven by other things, such as the young professional and social scenes in this party city. I think this is also why personalities often break through the public mask such that the fashion shot gives way to the portrait and one has the feeling that we are recognizing real people that are choosing their clothing a bit more carefully, much in the way that many of us make sure we are dressed warmly, except to dress to attract the attention of others and be alive in their networks and communities: that there are all kinds of things going on with clothing and the ways people wear it and feel in it, and having said that, it leads me to ask what good sociology might help us understand fashion’s sociological dimensions.
To do that I’d start with Erving Goffman’s well-illustrated study of gender roles in Gender Advertisemens, and his studies of forms of talk and frame analysis, the better to understand fashion statements in complex semiotic and social systems.
But for the moment I’ll work with the studies I know best in photography, from street to fashion photography.
Consider the honesty and humility of Diane Arbus, the daughter of a clothing retailer who had started out as a commercial photographer until she found her own way into her remarkably insightful, sensitive images of people living at the margins of society.
Consider the contributions of her friend Richard Avedon to fashion photography: his highlighting of both the personality of his models and their engagement with their contexts and thereby making more contemporary and realistic a genre that had long idealized and partly dehumanized models by placing them on an elevated, abstract plane: Avedon brought fashion back down to earth — something described beautifully in this short video on the Kinsky Photo Session.
As it happens, in 2007 one of my former photo students in Berlin, Yoni Leyser, spent a lot of time photographing people he thought to be at the margins of society, including punks at parties, drunk and passed out on the street, and then this completely fascinating series of pictures where he asked young women in parks and other public spaces to take off their shirts and pose for him. Many of the punks, of course, are fashionistas, with elaborate dress codes; this taking off of the costume, of course, suggests a no nonsense communication with the person within.
That he put that earlier work on the Picasa Web Album that he made then, updating it in September 2009, I was pleased to discover just now, I think speaks to his growing confidence with what he and his art are about: connecting, giving respect to, people both at the margins of society but present, as we see with punks and homeless and drug addicts living right out in the open in the city. He is almost through producing a film on William S. Burroughs, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within”, that, from the trailer now online and what I know of Burroughs and writing on Burroughs, is strikingly original, for it explores this very brilliant, human artist who was immensely influential. In the interview on that site, Yoni says of Burroughs and his purpose: “… he was so bold in a dangerous time. I hope that people now can be less afraid of being different.”
Drinking Coffee
But in this post I want to discuss how understanding your personal motivations, and in particular that “showing off” that we do when presenting ourselves in class and online as well as the development of recognition and networks among your peers, will help you organize your time and your thoughts and may well prove to be just as important as learning about your subject: done right, you may end up learning how to use the web to think more deeply and collaboratively than you might otherwise.
For many of us, we first think of the benefits of the web to lie in its efficiency: we expect to find, in addition to such traditional resources as textbooks and the library, that the web typically offers easier access to a wide range online resources, including extensive databases and presentations. This is often the case, and among the things you will learn how to do in this class is search for, report on, and evaluate such resources.
Moreover, quantity (access to more sources) becomes quality (helping us think deeper and better) when, for example, the web helps you and others find and develop conversations that otherwise might have taken months to develop through traditional print journals and widely-spaced professional meetings. Not only that, but the quality of conversations might be different when they are more inclusive, involving a wider range of participation than before: the web can be used to connect people from all over the planet, and also, allow people who are otherwise quiet in class a chance to make their voices heard, become known, and engage with others.
Let’s be sure to acknowledge that enjoying these advantages may not at first be easy for you to do, not least because, when you are starting out, you might not now know many people in your chosen field and don’t really know where to look. So, your first problem will likely be to find discussions that are relevant to you, and that likely will involve first “shooting in the dark” by inserting general terms into such search engines as Google until you discover relevant networks created by references and links. To do that successfully you may well find yourself having to define your topic of interest more clearly and even changing as you discover which networks are talking about what issues, and especially, when these conversations are about things or ways of thinking you have not yet considered.
This is why, in our last class, I started off with a long motivational speech about how much most of us much of the time very much appreciate being able to talk about what we do with our peers and in their responses find confirmation, and in professional contexts, when we find support from others, and especially those different from ourselves and whose opinions we trust, who make evident their own very good reasons for why they offer their support (and suggestions for improvement). At the very least, we find that we are not alone, and for many of us that simply feels good. Perhaps even better, we feel better when our conversations lead us to see things in different ways — assuming, of course, that we want to see things in different ways and are comfortable having others help us to do so.
If you are ultimately to be happy with the results of web work that will likely cost you additional hours and involve the frustrations of chasing down leads that end up nowhere, it will likely have to be because of other factors, lets call them “motivational factors”, including, for example, your liking to play with new technologies, if the web satisfies your “wanderlust”, and if you like to present your work online and so like to “show off” what you’ve found or thought.
Put in this way, the question is: where the pleasures and rewards of your academic work might be. I would certainly count myself as one of those who enjoy playing with the latest technologies and “showing off” what I’ve done. You might call these pleasures mere “playing” or “exhibitionism”, it doesn’t matter to me what you think about it: I have answered for myself that play is a good thing to do in itself, something those who play sports or music or dance or games are likely familiar with and would support.
However this may be, there are two other realms where I have found web work to be of considerable benefit, and I invite you to consider them for yourself. First, as noted above, I find that web work often leads me to see things in new ways because I am often able to find others working on similar issues who offer insights I might not have found on my own. If you like discovery, and especially, learning through others, then the web work might be for you and you might design your web work to this end.
But this, too, I must quickly qualify. I don’t often turn to the web to help me with my photography, something I do alone and have been doing for the most part alone, nowadays alone in abandoned buildings, since I was a teenager. Apart from the occasional viewing of videos on Youtube, I don’t often turn to the web for support with my learning and practicing of the Argentinian Tango, something that I do with others, including a few friends but mostly with strangers, and where, to press the point, I “turn off” my academic and professional brain, so to speak, and certainly don’t talk much about while doing it. And I don’t use the web very much when preparing for most of my academic work, including my studies of the web: while I might download texts, this is merely a fast, cheap way of getting at things I read, and for deeper learning, well, I read traditional sources, like textbooks, including the texts for this class. For much of this, the web doesn’t help me. Here, then, I invite you to narrow and limit your expectations of the web: to see it as one potentially valuable addition to your traditional repertoire, so to speak, subject to specification.
To be sure, sometimes these conversations actually help me to understand my topic better, but sometimes the actual additional insights are limited and the benefit lies in simply connecting, socially, and exchanging support. As noted above, sometimes this support is moral: it is often simply wonderful when someone tells me they appreciate my work. Sometimes I think that may be quite enough. Sometimes this support comes from developing personal friendships, and so I think the web can be used for motivations we’d likely want to characterize in social terms. Once in a while, this support is professional, such as when strangers sign up for my professional services or colleagues learn through my web work what I am about and want to talk to me and even invite me to collaborate on a project.
This is not to say that the fact that many corporations actively support professional web use among their employees is trivial and might not be reason in itself for you to explore the web, including getting to know where to find relevant resources in your field and comment on them on your own blogs and thereby learn-by-doing how tremendously valuable to the pursuit of business web use increasingly might be and so better prepare yourself for the job market. I leave this argument for another post.
I want here to concentrate instead on our exploring our own motivations for web use in our present class, because I think they are important to know and vital to know and rationalize, as noted above, if you are to do this work gladly, but also explain what may be the peculiar “workshop” or “atelier” way we are managing this part of the class.
There are two parts to this and they exist in a somewhat uneasy balance.
The first is the very technical advice on how to search for, report on, and discuss relevant articles/posts in your field using Google; collect your findings, links, images, and impressions on your own personal databases (more on that later); and setting up your own blogs and blogging communities. This technical work is the basic price of admission, and my concern is to help you set up the basic workflow. The work that follows will be to help you better to discover some of the relevant methods and resources that will return you additional knowledge of your field and current conversations about it.
As complement, we mean this workshop to be something different, something connected to but really different from the first part, and given the peculiar features of web work and the conditions of our trying to use it now, we don’t and perhaps can’t really know precisely how you might best proceed. Moreover, we conceive of this second part as the deepening, “learning” part of the course, and if learning meaning anything at all it does not mean simply learning “the facts”, or for that matter, simply blogging “your opinions,” but something deeper — which I like to explain in terms of Humboldt’s neo-humanist conception of the seminar: learning by doing, doing with others, in a situation of relative equality (your instructors here not to lecture, but help in the search), somewhat apart from the world (you don’t do this, at least now, for the money), in the disinterested search for truth (we want to know better what is out there), and at the same time, we want to know more about ourselves as seekers/researchers/learners.
This is to say, that what we are really doing here is only secondarily some very hip, exotic, web 2.0 thing, but is at bottom, if not through and through, precisely what Humboldt spelled out in 1809-10 in his plans for education in Lithuania and Germany, this wondrous thing, among Germany’s many gifts to the world: academic seminar.
So let me conclude by summarizing. I would suggest that you may well soon find that web use may well complement, but not in any way replace, the lectures and classroom discussions and detailed study of the assigned texts, and that this complement may well be in:
That is to say that the evaluation of your work, which I will as promised begin to spell out in an evaluation rubric as you will find (from last year) here, will for starters be formative, what we’ll call “the coffee test”: the evaluation of our peers as they see the value in it and help you add to it.