tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52955412024-03-18T22:15:57.233-05:00Knowledge ArtExploring the tools and practicesUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger149125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-62248243094101242642014-10-30T06:24:00.003-05:002014-10-30T06:24:59.638-05:00New book: Constructing Knowledge Art
Morgan & Claypool has just published a new book by Al Selvin and Simon Buckingham Shum titled Constructing Knowledge Art: An Experiential Perspective on Crafting Participatory Representations, in the Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics series, edited by Jack Carroll.
This book is about how people (we refer to them as practitioners) can help guide Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-39114536372642539202013-10-13T14:24:00.001-05:002013-10-13T14:24:30.529-05:00Experiential dimensions and practical action
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Last weekend we visited Mass MoCA, a contemporary art museum located in a dazzlingly restored old factory in the Berkshires town of North Adams, MA. I hadn't spent any time in North Adams since the late 1980s, when it was a depressed, and depressing, mill town that had lost its mills. Now it is full of galleries, nice restaurants and small businesses, spurred by the renaissance that Mass MoCA Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-1911617867896501382013-09-29T19:42:00.000-05:002013-09-29T19:42:22.771-05:00Acting with shared purpose and understanding
Simon Buckingham Shum and I are working on a short book based on my doctoral thesis, which will put across the main conceptual and practical aspects of that research in a more digestible form. An early version of the introductory chapter is posted at http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/2013/07/new-book-chap1-v01/, and we welcome your comments.
Below are some further thoughts on Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-85102970152108543472013-05-27T12:01:00.002-05:002013-05-27T12:01:16.799-05:00Playing Uncle George's piano
A routine family visit to my uncle's house in Teaneck, NJ in the mid-70s. A teenage boy is banging out blues on a yellow spinet piano in the living room. This upsets his uncle in the kitchen just behind the wall, who can't hear any of the conversation through his hearing aid with the music in the background. After a time (not long enough in the boy's estimation, he needs at least half an hour Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-8576071676577101692013-04-29T21:57:00.003-05:002013-04-29T21:57:52.617-05:00Subject for future investigation
Why exactly is it, that sometimes when I pick up a guitar after not playing at all for a while (in this case, several weeks at least), I can play far more fluidly than usual? Especially if not playing that close attention, e.g. while watching a movie at the same time. It's as if my fingers do better if my mind is not watching them. The moment I start paying closer attention -- or even more, if IUnknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-6644391590344476052012-11-20T11:39:00.000-05:002012-11-20T11:39:16.197-05:00Seeing in networks vs trees
Relevant to some recent conversation on the compendiuminstitute yahoogroup, it is worth taking a look at this bravura performance in visual mapping. It's great just for what it is, whether you agree with all the ideas or not.
Among many things I like about it, it resonated for me with what always attracted to the true hypermedia aspect of Compendium -- the ability to show interconnections Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-74212606626700547582012-01-29T13:01:00.000-05:002012-01-29T13:01:25.611-05:00At a siding
Close followers will have noticed few postings this year. This is mainly due to a manic focus on writing, defending, revising, and wrapping up my doctoral thesis in the midst of an enormous project at my day/night/weekend job.
Now that the above has mostly calmed, I've been letting the dust settle on the research sphere, at least for now, and thinking more about what's most important to me in Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-25355189719383570892011-12-19T09:39:00.000-05:002012-02-05T16:32:12.373-05:00Making Representations Matter - thesis published
The final version of my doctoral thesis has now been published online in the Open Research Online repository: Making Representations Matter: Understanding Practitioner Experience in Participatory Sensemaking.
Comments welcome here.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-27828149083252087522011-10-08T11:15:00.001-05:002011-10-08T11:15:47.127-05:00R. I. P. Steve JobsThe first 'PC' I had any real exposure to was a Mac in 1984. I was a film and video person with little computing background (one intro to programming class, in Pascal). The Mac made perfect sense to me -- moving pictures of documents and folders around on a desktop, drawing things, painting things. When I later saw what most computers were used for, and what their UIs were like (this is the Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-46133139045172404812011-10-02T08:50:00.003-05:002011-10-02T09:15:31.786-05:00Transparency in designI want user interfaces, and for that matter all representational artifacts intended to help people do or make sense of something, to be clear and transparent. When it comes to design, this is the ethic that possesses me. One should not need pre-existing specialist (arcane) knowledge to make sense of a UI, or at least the need for such knowledge should be minimal, and not require knowledge of Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-44282503529120337732011-06-10T06:31:00.008-05:002011-06-10T06:40:30.760-05:00Slides and video from the 8 June KMI webcastI gave a talk at KMi on 8 June, summarizing the research that led to the thesis (I had passed the defense a day earlier; watch this space for updates on thesis revisions). Here is a link to the video from the webcast. The slides are below. View more presentations from alselvin Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-67719857387425283902011-03-12T14:42:00.007-05:002011-04-23T15:15:03.254-05:00Thesis title, abstract, and cover artUpdate 23 April Submitted versions: thesis, abstract.Final version after 7 Jun w/corrections & acknowledgements.I've recently completed a draft of my PhD thesis, which I'll be revising over the next few weeks for final submission. Here are the working title, cover art*, and abstract.Making Representations Matter: Practitioner Experience in Participatory Sensemaking Albert M. SelvinKnowledge Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-1120317950605817362011-02-05T12:27:00.010-05:002015-06-28T09:47:10.512-05:00Using Compendium for research (video)
This video contains a brief overview of how I've used Compendium as both an analysis and a presentation tool as I've worked through the latter stages of my phd research.
Click here to play the video
(Note: Your browser window may need to be maximized to see all of the video. If the sides are cut off, please enlarge the window).
For more details and examples on the comparative analysis portionUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-67023294175850801362010-12-23T08:41:00.004-05:002010-12-23T11:14:43.852-05:00The experience of studying representational artifacts (like a film)When I was a freshman at university taking my first Introduction to Film class, the professor said "up until now you've just let movies wash over you. After this class you'll never experience a film that way again."He was partially right. In that class, we drilled deeply into editing, color, lens length, mise-en-scene, and the hundred other techniques that make up a film, looking at how (forUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-7028570089970196142010-12-22T18:17:00.002-05:002010-12-22T18:38:33.497-05:00And another terrific one covering the same terrainCoda—Creativity and Improvisation in Jazz and Organizations: Implications for Organizational LearningFrank J. BarrettORGANIZATION SCIENCEVol. 9, No. 5, September-October 1998, pp. 605-622This widely cited article (276 according to Google Scholar) is full of evocative quotes from and stories about jazz musicians (Coltrane, Miles, Sonny Rollins, many others), with parallel organizational learning Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-67426476794021860482010-12-22T13:56:00.004-05:002010-12-22T15:00:21.275-05:00The best paper relating jazz improvisation to organization theory I've readExploring the Empty Spaces of Organizing: How Improvisational Jazz Helps Redescribe Organizational StructureMary Jo HatchOrganization Studies, January 1999 vol. 20 no. 1 pp. 75-100The paper uses improvisation as a "redescription" metaphor (Rorty) of organizational structure. It has strong ties to writing on experience, sensemaking and aesthetics. It's full of theory relating the art and Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-19213019714716587302010-12-05T15:56:00.005-05:002010-12-05T16:37:05.731-05:00And one of the most useful on mediationComplementing this post, here is another excellent paper that looks at dispute mediation from a reflective practice point of view.It's titled "Mediating Ethically: The Limits of Codes of Conduct and the Potential of a Reflective Practice Model" by Julie Macfarlane (Osgoode Hall Law Journal 49, 2002), and lives up to its title.The article criticizes reliance on codes of conduct to guide Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-7806810134690932212010-11-28T11:22:00.005-05:002010-11-28T11:41:59.123-05:00One of the most useful papers on facilitation I've come acrossFor my research, anyway, in terms of research methods chosen, subject matter, and clarity:Jean-Anne Stewart (2006). High-Performing (and Threshold) Competencies for Group Facilitators. In Journal of Change Management, Dec 2006, Vol. 6 Issue 4, p417-439.Based on her doctoral thesis, it describes a qualitative study of UK facilitators with the aim of identifying the key competencies for effective Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-67530288084686794122010-11-27T13:20:00.001-05:002010-11-27T13:22:16.178-05:00One-paragraph description of my dissertation researchHow to make participatory visual representations (pictures, diagrams, knowledge maps) coherent, engaging and useful. I study the ways that fourteen practitioners using a visual hypermedia tool engage participants with the representations on the screen and the ways they make the representations matter. I'm especially interested in the sensemaking challenges that the practitioners encounter in the Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-54386662168875227512010-11-21T17:55:00.002-05:002010-11-21T18:08:25.362-05:00Logically, aesthetics and ethics are identical (Leach 1954)I saw this quote:Leach (1954) claimed, "to understand the ethical rules of a society, it is aesthetics that we must study."in Deb Orr's dissertation*. I Googled it to its original appearance in a 1954 essay titled "Ritual as an Expression of Social Status." Here's the surrounding text, all of which is worthwhile (boldface added):From the observer's point of view, actions appear as means to ends,Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-33720452190396853582010-10-16T09:00:00.003-05:002010-10-16T09:13:22.233-05:00Making public policy visually clearA great example of demystifying and de-gobbledygooking a public policy document, on Jeannel King's site. It would be very interesting to hook it up with a web-based visual discussion system like DebateGraph or Cohere, and even more (from my perspective) to map a live discussion based on it with Compendium.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-29484033849775415672010-10-15T09:34:00.004-05:002010-10-15T10:36:19.219-05:00Engagement in face-to-face meetingsA helpful post from Susan Nurre on the IAF forum points to an article on meetingsnet.com that in turn points to a Cornell University School of Hotel Administration white paper (free registration required) on "The Future of Meetings: The Case for Face-to-Face," by Christine Duffy and Mary Beth McEuen of Maritz*. I'd never thought about looking at this area of literature (hospitality studies), but Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-75872926064587954332010-10-09T08:44:00.005-05:002010-10-09T08:59:05.282-05:00Paying attention to a representation -- or notAn interesting photo and comment from Eugene Eric Kim about participant attention (or the lack of it) in a graphic facilitation session. Of course the photo depicts just one moment out of a session that might have had periods of direct participant engagement, but it's a good illustration of the main questions I am trying to get at with the research:What (and when, and how, and why) does a Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-1812459454415195732010-10-07T06:50:00.003-05:002010-10-07T06:57:54.032-05:00Great posts on improvisation & visual practice, and dialogue mapping from child's point of viewTwo posts that both, in different ways, take a child's viewpoint that illuminates a) 'rote' practice, skill development, improvisation, and graphic facilitation, and b) dialogue mapping.a) from Jeannel King in her blog Process Arts and Facilitation: The Practice Will Set You Freeb) from Kailash Awati in his blog Eight to Late: What should I do now? A bedtime story about dialogue mappingUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0