tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52955412011-12-19T09:39:28.238-05:00Exploring the tools and practicesAlnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1411100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-25355189719383570892011-12-19T09:39:00.000-05:002011-12-19T09:39:28.244-05:00

The final version of my doctoral thesis has now been published online as a Knowledge Media Institute tech report: Making Representations Matter: Understanding Practitioner Experience in Participatory Sensemaking. Comments welcome here.

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-27828149083252087522011-10-08T11:15:00.001-05:002011-10-08T11:15:47.127-05:00

The 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 mid-

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-46133139045172404812011-10-02T08:50:00.003-05:002011-10-02T09:15:31.786-05:00

I 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

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-44282503529120337732011-06-10T06:31:00.008-05:002011-06-10T06:40:30.760-05:00

I 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

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-67719857387425283902011-03-12T14:42:00.007-05:002011-04-23T15:15:03.254-05:00

Update 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 Media

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-1120317950605817362011-02-05T12:27:00.010-05:002011-02-12T07:53:23.922-05:00

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. I'll do a better version when I've actually finished the thesis!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

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-67023294175850801362010-12-23T08:41:00.004-05:002010-12-23T11:14:43.852-05:00

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 (for

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-7028570089970196142010-12-22T18:17:00.002-05:002010-12-22T18:38:33.497-05:00

Coda—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

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-67426476794021860482010-12-22T13:56:00.004-05:002010-12-22T15:00:21.275-05:00

Exploring 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

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-19213019714716587302010-12-05T15:56:00.005-05:002010-12-05T16:37:05.731-05:00

Complementing 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

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-7806810134690932212010-11-28T11:22:00.005-05:002010-11-28T11:41:59.123-05:00

For 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

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-67530288084686794122010-11-27T13:20:00.001-05:002010-11-27T13:22:16.178-05:00

How 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

Alnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-54386662168875227512010-11-21T17:55:00.002-05:002010-11-21T18:08:25.362-05:00

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,

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-33720452190396853582010-10-16T09:00:00.003-05:002010-10-16T09:13:22.233-05:00

A 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.

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-29484033849775415672010-10-15T09:34:00.004-05:002010-10-15T10:36:19.219-05:00

A 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

Alnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-75872926064587954332010-10-09T08:44:00.005-05:002010-10-09T08:59:05.282-05:00

An 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

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-1812459454415195732010-10-07T06:50:00.003-05:002010-10-07T06:57:54.032-05:00

Two 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 mapping

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-57953406557462343712010-09-05T10:51:00.007-05:002010-09-05T11:34:26.321-05:00

I recently gave a talk and mini-workshop at the Knowledge Media Design Institute, University of Toronto, titled "Making Representations Matter: The Practice of Shaping Participatory Media Artifacts." The session started with a review of the research to date (see slides below), but the bulk of the evening was spent with the attendees doing a collaborative exercise followed by a discussion using

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-28290945154772777152010-08-29T08:42:00.007-05:002010-09-04T16:30:54.092-05:00

Check out this post, and its 31 responses (as of today), on Julie Stuart's blog. It's a response to a mostly favorable Harvard Business Review post on graphic facilitation. Several things are interesting to me from a research as well as practitioner perspective.From the research viewpoint, what's of interest is the way Julie and her community talk about their practice and the ways the aesthetics

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-75010805324150060612010-08-15T08:22:00.003-05:002010-08-15T09:09:05.702-05:00

“So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?”- a student quoted by William Deresiewicz in his The Disadvantages of an Elite EducationIt's funny that I just read Deresiewicz's article (following a link from eekim) after reading the novel The Good Son by Michael Gruber, and seeing the movie Inception last week, all while visiting a bunch of colleges and thinking and talking

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-48676264547999706422010-07-24T12:26:00.004-05:002010-07-24T12:37:48.171-05:00

A refreshingly honest article about the realities of participatory design and involving users in systems design projects. It accords with my experiences as an IT/usability/PD practitioner for the last two decades."It is time to speak honestly about the gap between our intentions to build working systems and our ability to do so in practice. This gap is typically not caused by a lack of effort on

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-29168243597450756102010-06-27T10:59:00.002-05:002010-06-27T11:06:02.430-05:00

Something quite compelling in this statement, when reflecting on the ups and downs of pursuing a large, lonely research project:"Canny people tend to succeed in their own lifetimes; uncanny people tend to be recognized and appreciated only centuries later, because during their time their actions appeared to be either insane or pointless."From "The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-45199335937139304202010-06-04T08:02:00.002-05:002010-06-04T08:06:51.533-05:00

In the Special Issue on Creativity and Rationale in Software DesignJohn M. Carroll, Guest EditorOur article is: The Practice Level in Participatory Design Rationale: Studying Practitioner Moves and ChoicesAlbert M. Selvin, Simon J. Buckingham Shum and Mark Aakhus

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-43067289346141369592010-05-30T09:22:00.008-05:002010-05-30T09:53:18.119-05:00

Further on the idea of integral representations and the role of practitioners in making representations matter...As I was working through writing up the "how good/successful was the session" question, it struck me that one way to characterize this was by considering how closely three dimensions were unified in each session -- the purpose, or intended (as well as emergent) reasons or goals for

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-5928099742355960352010-05-29T10:01:00.002-05:002010-05-29T10:11:52.473-05:00

As I've been working through writing up the comparative analyses, one thing that's struck me is that a key differentiator of practice styles and expertise is how much (and in what ways) practitioners make the representations themselves matter to the participants and to the proceedings, as opposed to being (in varying ways) a sideshow, background, or decoration.For example, one of the Shaping

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-74408974958417721922010-03-28T14:54:00.002-05:002010-03-28T15:14:54.825-05:00

Cross-session Shaping comparisons (table version) (Compendium version)Cross-session Framing comparisons (table version) (Compendium version)

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-43567919098812737982010-03-28T13:30:00.004-05:002010-03-28T13:32:30.223-05:00

Some 'raw' comparisons of the "CEU" (Coherence, Engagement, and Usefulness) analyses across sessions are here.Next and final step for the comparative analysis -- create a summary of the cross-session Framing analysis.

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-91553835313047209022010-03-27T20:14:00.000-05:002010-03-27T20:15:19.975-05:00

Compendium version here.One more piece of cross-session analysis to go -- CEU comparisons. I hope to finish those tomorrow, then it's on to start writing up the first draft of the analysis chapter.

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-47380876613266652072010-03-15T09:58:00.002-05:002010-03-28T13:53:26.166-05:00

A fuller writeup later, but in case you would like to look:In Compendium formIn summary tables

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-48963147482951534012010-03-06T11:44:00.006-05:002010-03-06T16:54:27.181-05:00

I've finished the first round of comparative analysis (earlier steps described here). This morning I translated the mapping of each session along the 29 shaping dimensions into Excel. It's not a perfect or exhaustive study (that would take another set of years) but did yield some interesting comparisons.In the mapping linked above, I'd ranked or grouped each of the 8 sessions for each of the

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-81077119826113364612010-03-04T12:36:00.001-05:002010-03-04T12:38:01.285-05:00

I put up some charts that show how the practitioners in each session group compare along skill/experience lines.This is not the main cross-session analysis I'm doing, which is more qualitative in nature, but it will help in the overall comparisons.For example, it's easy to see that Ames Group 2, which was in many ways the least successful of all 8 groups in terms of getting participants to engage

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-15468794371409605582010-02-28T19:12:00.003-05:002010-02-28T19:27:54.822-05:00

Following up on this post.I was able to spend some time this weekend working on this, and got about a fifth of the way through the first round (shaping analysis). What was enjoyable was working with the material in Compendium. I want to be able to do all sorts of comparisons between the sessions as well as look across and through the data in unforeseen ways, which doing this part of the analysis

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-67376116766409602802010-02-28T10:39:00.002-05:002010-02-28T10:44:52.516-05:00

I've posted anonymized versions of all the individual session analyses done to date here. As I start completing the comparison analysis documents I'll post them there as well.You can also access this pre-print version of a forthcoming journal article that I co-wrote with Simon Buckingham Shum and Mark Aakhus. It's the fullest description to date of the phd research.

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-8815284669384968362010-01-31T10:19:00.002-05:002010-01-31T10:23:11.800-05:00

I thought it would be useful to note my thoughts about how the cross-session analysis will unfold before actually starting it.First I'll look at each of the individual session analyses and compare them horizontally. For example, look at each of the eight shaping forms and look for interesting correlations and differences between the ways shaping happened, look at each of the sensemaking moments

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-43760301134493459302010-01-24T11:42:00.005-05:002010-01-24T11:51:35.419-05:00

This post is only to gloat over completing a sub-milestone on my PhD work, the second of the three analysis phases.As the picture shows, I first did a set of six different kinds of analysis on each of the eight sessions I'm looking at for the thesis. I finished that about a month ago (after more than two years of work). The piece I just finished was comparing the questionnaires that I gave each

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-10511458159856971312010-01-03T12:09:00.007-05:002010-01-03T13:00:16.763-05:00

As the light at the end of the PhD tunnel starts to turn from a pinprick to a dime-shaped glow, several people that have recently listened to me talk about my research have mentioned that they see similarities in the work I do at my day job.I work in software usability and user interface design for systems used by call center reps inside a large company. Like the practitioners I've been looking

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-57476229297953180652009-12-27T17:30:00.000-05:002009-12-27T17:30:02.830-05:00

This is part 3, last of a series. Back to part 2In this post I look at the ways Small applies his work to self- and peer- learner assessments, and how that might be useful for my research.The practical application of the theoretical framework and analytical methods described in the article is in techniques for assessing learners that respect the continuum from aesthetic and experiential to

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-18510085392584719612009-12-27T13:13:00.014-05:002009-12-27T17:31:54.194-05:00

This is part 2 of a series. Back to part 1In this post I focus on Tim Small's analytical methods and compare them to the approaches I've developed.In his article, Small describes a method for analyzing students' responses to poetry that he developed for his doctoral thesis. He created a model for "analysis of written responses to poetry on the continuum between text and self" (p. 256), shown in

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-47855869129906785892009-12-06T08:43:00.010-05:002009-12-27T17:32:39.001-05:00

This is part 1 of a series.I've recently spent some quality time with a paper Simon sent me: Tim Small's "Assessing enquiry-based learning: developing objective criteria from personal knowledge". Although Small writes primarily about student learners, there are many resonances with my research on participatory representation practitioners. In many places you could substitute "practitioner" for "

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-8022713063488180122009-11-29T14:35:00.009-05:002009-11-29T15:28:17.241-05:00

This was meant to be the first in a series reflecting on a presentation I gave at the IFVP 2009 conference in Montréal a few months back. Though it's actually the second since I put up this post last week when I got the participant evaluations back.The session, held on August 6, was the first chance to put the concepts and tools I've developed in my research in front of an audience of

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-74289856705170240452009-11-21T11:30:00.005-05:002009-11-21T11:52:18.260-05:00

Yesterday I got an email with scans of the evaluation forms that 22 participants at my IFVP session in Montreal in August filled out. They were mostly positive and/or constructive. A few were negative. These were mostly of the "this is too academic" variety, which is understandable.I certainly could have done better with constructing the session itself, since I was still figuring out, up to the

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-1736478378454823792009-09-25T09:30:00.002-05:002009-09-25T09:54:41.264-05:00

I haven't posted here in quite a while, but it's not because of lack of thought or activity. In fact the last few months have been very active, working on my analyses (almost done!) and quite a bit of synthesizing work associated with a) presenting at KMi in June, b) giving a talk and 'demo' of the research at the IFVP '09 conference in Montreal (more about that in another post), and c)

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-55016855408495433552009-07-05T09:39:00.003-05:002009-07-05T10:02:01.986-05:00

This connects both to a recent post here, and to an email conversation between some of Compendium's inner core, where we've been debating some feature/design decisions. One hot topic has been the idea to retire the idea of IBIS / argument node types (Question, Idea, Pro, Con, Argument) in the default set. The debate reaches back to some of the early decisions and motivations when we created

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-60858880974848498462009-06-05T08:10:00.002-05:002009-06-05T08:15:28.639-05:00

Based on the discussions on the compendiuminstitute yahoogroup, and even more on the "nature of interest in Compendium" entries in our download log, there's been a surge of interest in Compendium in recent months. Much of this falls into two categories: people who are interested in Compendium's argument-mapping capabilities, or -- the larger category -- people who are investigating Compendium as

Alnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-49034220250266378642009-05-24T09:27:00.007-05:002009-05-24T10:01:48.921-05:00

A few weeks ago I facilitated a Visual Explorer session for a social services agency for mentally disabled children and adults in the Hudson Valley. A friend is the IT director at the agency, and asked me to help run a communication session for the IT group and its internal clients.This was the first time in several years that I've done a true, extended VE session with enough time and mandate to

Alnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-43584759774084014972009-03-21T18:09:00.004-05:002009-03-21T18:30:27.431-05:00

The jazz-and-gado-gado-fueled conversation in Tilburg with Aldo de Moor was permeated with his ideas about “activating engagement.” This is what’s needed to activate a collaborative effort, especially over the web, where many start with great ideas and tools, then peter out. Active engagement is what makes such efforts rise to the level where things start jumping, infused with active energy. We

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-46085473413319900612009-03-15T13:57:00.007-05:002009-03-15T14:40:15.041-05:00

On a recent trip to the Netherlands, I spent a very enjoyable evening of Indonesian food and conversation with Aldo de Moor in Tilburg. After the meal we walked through the streets to find a jazz cafe. Aldo had heard of a performance by some students and faculty of a local jazz academy. We arrived in the middle of a set. There were more people on stage than in the audience, about nine players.

Alnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-61988265122757903152009-02-22T09:46:00.003-05:002009-02-22T10:14:40.487-05:00

We watched "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" last night. While it was certainly damning, and infuriating to watch these con men smoothly invoking moral rectitude while they stole hundreds of millions of dollars and manufactured the California electricity crisis, I found the film disappointing. Although it showed many people talking about the scams and frauds and the crooks who perpetrated

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-62407388360221418462009-02-14T08:24:00.007-05:002009-02-14T08:46:55.088-05:00

I've been neglecting this blog for a while, so it's fitting that the first post of 2009 should announce the BIG NEWS: Compendium will now be true open source, under the LGPL license. This is something that Simon and I have been working toward for a long time, slowed by the inherent inertia of huge institutions concerned with larger matters. But the stars aligned, good people helped, and the right

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-80786248079810335992008-12-17T12:26:00.004-05:002008-12-17T12:42:35.418-05:00

More on this post, triggered by some recent responses to a couple of our papers on sensemaking."As an individual moves through an experience, each moment is potentially a sense-making moment. The essence of that sense-making moment is assumed to be addressed by focusing on how the actor defined and dealt with the situation, the gap, the bridge, and the continuation of the journey after crossing

Alnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-24413757705215324672008-11-22T12:23:00.003-05:002008-11-22T12:34:10.144-05:00

One of the sessions at the Ames workshop was particularly problematic for the practitioners. In an oft-seen pattern, the discussion veered away from focusing on the map almost from the very beginning of the session. In the debrief afterwards, one of the facilitators said the following (note: not a native English speaker):“One of the problem I always have, I don’t know how to face, is how do, I

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-72835843700781350072008-10-19T19:45:00.007-05:002008-11-25T20:54:47.515-05:00

This is the last of a series.Back to Part 7Time moved on. By 2001, the original team of Compendium practitioners and developers at what was now Verizon had mostly moved on to new responsibilities or left. Various mergers and reorganizations left the effort without executive sponsorship. We were able to license the software development to KMi, where Simon Buckingham Shum was successful in

Alnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-30663749558965342962008-10-19T19:43:00.006-05:002008-11-22T11:29:35.383-05:00

This is part 7 of a series.Back to Part 6Despite these exciting developments and collaborations, however, we still faced difficulty, and sometimes even active resistance, in attracting new practitioners. This was the case both within what was by now Bell Atlantic as well as within CCL, as well as other organizations. Demand for us to provide Compendium services within Bell Atlantic continued to

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-51016770868957236072008-10-19T19:42:00.007-05:002008-11-22T11:06:05.929-05:00

This is part 6 in a seriesBack to Part 5As we were puzzling about this paradox of having a powerful, successful, flexible technique that we could not convince many others to take on for themselves, a further major influence came into the picture. In 1998 and 1999 we began several collaborations with outside groups. One of these was with the New Lenses on Learning research group at the Center for

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-32769298137445214832008-10-19T19:41:00.006-05:002008-11-08T09:22:56.571-05:00

This is part 5 of a series.Back to Part 4We soon began to identify desired enhancements for the software, and tried to work with CMSI to build them in to the tool (by then renamed "QuestMap"). QuestMap offered great speed and capacity for navigating even very large maps, and worked extremely well for managing IBIS (argumentation) nodes and links. We wanted greater ability to access and manage the

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-60830526551029139602008-10-19T19:40:00.008-05:002008-11-08T09:23:42.569-05:00

This is part 4 of a series.Back to Part 3We (mainly Maarten Sierhuis and me) began experimenting with this approach. With growing excitement, we found that the approach seemed to hold together, and even to scale to be able to handle weeks or months of working with a project team. Working “undercover” mostly at first, we applied the fledgling approach in a variety of contexts. Each time we met

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-10608163257757166952008-10-19T19:38:00.009-05:002009-03-02T17:16:52.544-05:00

This is part 3 of  a series. Back to Part 2At the same time as our experiments with CM/1 were occurring, another thread in the lab was concerned with developing a model-based approach to system and business process design, influenced by traditional systems analysis methods a la Yourdon, the European knowledge modeling methodology called CommonKADS, and other approaches such as Soft Systems

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-87285456093783935412008-10-19T12:34:00.006-05:002008-10-25T08:35:34.366-05:00

This is part 2 of a series.Back to Part 1Over the next few weeks in early 1992, a small coterie of lab members tried to build out discussions and plans within CM/1, mostly working individually to build on others’ contributions in collective maps. Somehow, however, these never seemed to amount to what we expected. Some maps withered with few contributions, while others got very large very

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-25237457446624269442008-10-19T12:11:00.008-05:002008-10-25T08:37:08.156-05:00

I've talked about Compendium's early days in some previous posts, such as this. This summer I wrote a longer treatment for a workshop, so I thought I'd serialize it in some posts here. This is part 1.What later become Compendium, as an approach and as software, dates back to early 1992. I was a member of the Expert Systems Laboratory at NYNEX Science & Technology, the R&D arm of the telephone

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-81086131850607105412008-10-19T11:52:00.004-05:002008-10-27T07:02:15.093-05:00

This article gives hope to those of us well past the prodigy stage. Gladwell writes about Cézanne, Ben Fountain, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Alfred Hitchcock, and others, all who did much of their best work when they were past 50 years old.I will try to keep this in mind as the finish date for my PhD oozes beyond next year's birthday. Some take years of

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-40509463897953314662008-08-24T10:57:00.003-05:002008-08-24T11:17:19.124-05:00

I often don't agree with Ben Stein's writing, but his column in today's NY Times Business section hit home....what I have seen of the loss of solitude and dignity is terrifying among those who travel and work, or even who stay still and work. They are slaves to connectedness. Their work has become their indentured servitude.I feel this more and more. Despite, or because of, having worked, played,

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-9353869518579146922008-07-20T10:41:00.009-05:002008-07-20T11:40:30.554-05:00

Some thoughts after reading the recent Atlantic article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains" by Nicholas Carr.Part of the motivation behind Compendium is to augment the human ability to create and shape large collections of ideas and relationships in a shareable, collective manner, not just within an individual's head or a single document. And also, not just as

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-36815663729071916132008-07-07T08:44:00.004-05:002008-07-07T09:14:22.801-05:00

During our conversation on the waterfront at World Financial Center a couple of weeks back, David Price, Mark Aakhus, and I were talking about some of the ideas underlying our respective approaches. I mentioned a few of the ideas expanded on in a previous post, related to transformative mediation and multi-perspective communication. Mark said something about how approaches like transformative

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-57493613640743475772008-07-06T09:08:00.007-05:002008-07-06T09:53:01.847-05:00

Some more thoughts behind what Compendium is about as a project. In transformative mediation, the goal of the mediator is to help the parties in a dispute bring about increased recognition of the situation of the other person, better ability to articulate one's own position, and enhance the ability to see connections between the two.This means bringing about the ability to see the world as each

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-51769313290316475972008-07-05T12:31:00.005-05:002008-07-06T08:15:49.921-05:00

(Continued from Part 1)Perhaps surfacing rationale as a resource for fostering creativity in design, has to be thought of more as something to tap into. As, counter-intuitively, a generator of creativity. It's the very attempt to do it, to have the different kind of conversation, using different words, tools, and methods, that can bring about creative leaps. However, as I write this I think of

Alnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-61299211732784990052008-06-29T08:21:00.004-05:002008-06-29T08:30:01.854-05:00

I think the title phrase is a good summary of my current central concerns, both in research and practice. It's what I want to understand: how to do it, how to enable others to do it, what they are doing when they do it. Not at all limited to Compendium though it is my main exemplar for now.It came to me as I was laboring up South Quaker Hill on my bike yesterday. A lot of good, or at least

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-25407988376307874202008-06-29T07:20:00.012-05:002008-07-06T08:16:14.977-05:00

The title phrase ("slow design") occurred to me halfway through writing this piece. I was intrigued to find out that it already has a wikipedia page, a manifesto, and an organization behind it, although one that seems... slow... to get off the ground.A perspective that occasionally surfaced in the Creativity and Rationale in Software Design workshop was the idea that time spent intentionally

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-23865101882642514632008-06-07T07:06:00.003-05:002008-06-07T07:46:15.049-05:00

I was reading this article by Burkhard Bilger in the April 28, 2008 New Yorker, about the last remnants of original folk musicians still living, and the obsessive collectors who search them out and record them. Along with making me want to go out and get the gospel collection called "Goodbye, Babylon", it reminded me of a night in the early 1980s when I heard probably the most amazing music I've

Alnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-12841723296354716932008-05-10T08:50:00.009-05:002008-05-10T09:47:26.344-05:00

I had a conversation recently with someone just finishing a master's degree about directions he could take with his career (somehow I've begun to be an elder statesman dispensing advice to the young, though it feels like I just got out of school myself -- and actually I'm still in school). He asked me about what, if any, connections I saw between music (which has been a huge though now less

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-19942980122814297562008-04-25T06:46:00.018-05:002008-04-26T13:50:35.785-05:00

Both because I have to do this for my thesis, and because I think about this a fair amount in any case, here is how I'm currently thinking about the rationale for the line of research I'm following.More than ever before, society must deal with complex, "wicked" problems, where there are competing definitions of the nature of the issues, where people have divergent interests, ways of talking and

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-15614087180344643372008-04-22T09:39:00.007-05:002008-04-22T19:58:18.980-05:00

I attended a workshop on sensemaking at the CHI conference on April 6. It was a full-day gathering of people representing several different perspectives on the phenomenon of sensemaking. Some of these perspectives have only peripheral connections to one another. They can be roughly gathered into three categories: informational sensemaking, which deals (primarily) with information retrieval (such

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-48332010003046223962008-04-21T12:46:00.003-05:002008-04-21T13:24:50.221-05:00

Over the years, a few of us at the core of the Compendium community have had a number of discussions about whether there are inherent advantages or drawbacks to using maps in meetings, or for post-meeting notes, vs. other more conventional forms like text outlines or slides.For me, there is nothing inherent about a dialog or concept map one way or the other (positive or negative) in terms of

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-54406971249018162162008-04-20T19:08:00.004-05:002008-04-20T19:45:45.492-05:00

This (threadkilling) post came out of a discussion we were having on the compendiuminstitute yahoogroup prompted by a query from Simon about a workshop on creativity and software design rationale.Whenever I think of surfacing design rationale as an intentional activity -- something that people engaged in some effort decide to do, or have to do -- I think of Mondrian's approach to painting in his

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-24933950700422361092008-04-20T18:37:00.003-05:002008-04-20T18:46:09.023-05:00

This came out of an email interchange with a VZ colleague who asked about whether keypad- or other voting-style group decision support systems would help in a Compendium session, and how that would relate to what I'm looking at with my current research. This is pretty much what I responded with.My research has more to do with the activity of trying to work and be effective in this kind of

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-38618530052868090442008-04-20T18:21:00.003-05:002008-04-20T18:28:48.790-05:00

My neighbor Diane sent the link to this talk by the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor about her experience of her own stroke, and particularly the insights about right/left brain that came out of that. I very much like the way she puts her whole self into the talk, with very few slides or script, and says something that feels true on intellectual as well as emotional levels. It makes me think that

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-44798489707097100732008-02-16T10:55:00.002-05:002008-02-16T10:59:31.782-05:00

Simon and I are running a workshop at the ACM Hypertext 2008 conference titled Making Hypermedia Live: Shaping Participatory Hypermedia in June. It will be an expanded version of what we did at Rutgers and Ames, with extra time for discussion and analysis. Hope to see you there.

Alnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-4114501488587149202008-02-10T11:15:00.000-05:002008-02-10T11:30:29.866-05:00

Two sentences of an article titled "Mashups are Breaking the Mold at Microsoft" in today's New York Times business section troubled me. Both quote Microsoft's John Montgomery:Popfly, he said, is for “the 21- to 27-year-old crowd who grew up on the Web.” “They have never known a world without eBay, Amazon, or Google,” he added. “They assume that when you create a piece of software it will be

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-56339866227374698542008-02-10T10:40:00.000-05:002008-02-10T10:46:20.981-05:00

A useful book, though a little lighter-weight than I would have liked. Pink explicates six concepts in terms of right-brainedness: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning, and provides nice links and exercises for each (helpfully summarized here). All quite relevant for knowledge art, and this left-hander appreciates that our kind is the wave of the future.

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-34502071520052369022008-01-19T11:13:00.000-05:002008-01-19T11:29:32.406-05:00

A quote from Shantaram:The chain restricted my stride to tiny steps. Walking at any faster pace required a shuffling, hip-swinging gait. There were two other men in my room with leg-irons, and by studying their movements I gradually learned the technique. Within a few days, I walked that rolling, shambling dance as unselfconsciously as they did. In fact, by studying them and imitating them, I

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-19672494739174990512008-01-19T08:20:00.000-05:002008-01-19T08:33:18.294-05:00

I'm halfway through this book, pointed out by my sister on a late night visit to the Union Square Barnes & Noble. It's like the book I got halfway through writing about my 1986 bicycle trip in India, but far more intense and far-reaching. The things I feared and hoped might occur on my trip, happened to the autobiographical main character, Lin, in ways beyond my imagination. But I did have

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-29380936431295960862007-12-29T08:33:00.000-05:002007-12-29T09:03:55.185-05:00

Some of the key ideas in Stephen Wilson's 1993 article as they relate to the themes covered in this blog:- engagement in live interactive computer events can't be taken for granted. The technology and new methods alone don't guarantee engaging, quality experiences- creating successful interactive multimedia events requires the creator/practititioner to deal with challenges in "time design",

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-25950361554039252662007-12-28T11:47:00.000-05:002007-12-28T11:51:47.221-05:00

A truly amazing, encyclopedic set of links to artworks influenced by (and integrated with) developments in science and technology.I came across this after reading Wilson's 1993 article on The Aesthetics and Practice of Designing Interactive Computer Events. It contains many ideas of high relevance to my research, which I'll summarize in another post.

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-27973667895952220892007-12-23T09:17:00.000-05:002007-12-23T09:44:52.812-05:00

Driving back from dropping my daughter off at her bakery job, grey rainy morning with mist rising off the melting snow, Tangled Up in Blue in the CD player. She's been listening to that album lately, along with Kind of Blue and Frank Morgan. Inspiring that a 16-year-old would come to this music on her own.There's something perfect about Dylan's recording of that song, and many of the others on

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-17650102771457544292007-12-22T16:43:00.000-05:002007-12-22T16:56:56.682-05:00

I just watched this again for the first time in a decade or so. I've probably seen it between 20 and 30 times since my time as a film major in college nearly 30 years ago. I had to write several papers on it in various classes. The one that always sticks out for me was about the sound techniques in the scene where 'Boss Jim Geddes' has just confronted Kane in Susan's apartment in front of Emily.

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-42884178545351622922007-12-21T09:58:00.000-05:002007-12-22T16:40:30.181-05:00

Further reflections on the Ames videos... looking at them from a research viewpoint, what is the value and contribution of this research? One thing that keeps occuring to me is that practitioner skill in and of itself is not the goal, it's creating engagement and usefulness for the effort. What is the point of using a tool like Compendium (or any other tool) when you're working with a group of

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-51563512932910895762007-12-08T11:26:00.000-05:002007-12-08T12:24:22.851-05:00

Making and shaping in a medium that you love, does not always go well. Sometimes it's a slog, or painful, or frustrating, or just doesn't seem to add up. You can see this with many kinds of making that involve some form of artistry, because these inherently involve some kind of vision (a desired outcome, level of perfection, or set of qualities to be brought about); a degree of sensitivity to

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-88851556188258850282007-12-02T09:25:00.000-05:002007-12-02T09:54:51.299-05:00

Those closest to Compendium have been in a cycle for the last 14 years of tool making, tool using, and studying tool using. This has led to a set of what for me are the essential attributes of knowledge art tool and practices:- mixing of formal and informal, structured and unstructured, analytical and expressive- ability to ask a question of anything (dialogue always an option)- multiple

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-10090774714084704722007-12-01T19:11:00.000-05:002007-12-02T08:31:04.075-05:00

More on this idea of shaping as the focus, as discussed here. I'm starting to think about the following as the analytical questions I will ask of each of the recorded sessions: - What shaping is intended?- What shaping is occurring?- Who is doing it, for what reasons?- If the intended shaping runs off the rails, why does that occur?- What contributions to shaping occur?- How are decisions about

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-46298470287287258532007-11-25T09:05:00.000-05:002007-11-25T09:39:45.755-05:00

For the Rutgers and Ames experiments, I gave small groups the task to construct a Compendium exercise that they would lead a larger group through. They were free to take this in any direction they chose, with the one instruction that they had to facilitate the large group through making changes of some sort to the maps.The successful groups were able to get a large amount of engagement with the

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-16740722752673395432007-11-18T17:55:00.000-05:002007-11-18T18:03:23.958-05:00

I inadvertently left off some of the last post. Here's the rest. It talks about how the example in that post can be usefully framed using some of the narrative and improvisation concepts mentioned here.In the example, we see a practitioner confronted with a breach in the expected chain of events, resulting in a sensemaking instance. This was caused by an escalating series of challenges and

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-76850520711009830002007-11-18T17:17:00.000-05:002008-12-11T02:42:48.098-05:00

Courtesy of Google Alerts, I noticed that someone on del.ico.us had commented on a post on narrative and sensemaking, asking for more detail. In this post I provide one example. There will be more in future posts as I further report on the analysis of practice videos I've been doing.The example here comes from video analysis of a workshop setting. It outlines a moment in a live knowledge mapping

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-28921735931827170662007-11-11T14:19:00.000-05:002007-11-11T14:38:23.608-05:00

Another item from the New Yorker, this one from an article titled "Dangerous Minds" by Malcolm Gladwell (Nov. 12, 2007 issue).The article discusses criminal profiling, people who look at evidence and construct psychological portraits of likely perpetrators. It is mostly negative about the practice, drawing similarities between profiling techniques and parlor tricks. But I found this excerpt

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-11455939118803094292007-11-11T08:38:00.000-05:002007-11-11T08:44:47.495-05:00

Some working ideas about the connections we are making between narrative and sensemaking as ways to frame studies of knowledge art practice.Narrative involves a story. It sets up a world with causes and effects, usually introducing some kind of disruption. Something happens that upsets the canonicity of occurrences, the expected flow of events. Something happens to impede the protagonists’ flow

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-62084822898347354952007-11-10T07:53:00.000-05:002007-11-10T08:42:04.987-05:00

From the start of working on my research, I've used the terms "aesthetics" and "ethics" as centerpieces of what I was looking at. Often, though, even people close to what I'm trying to do (the four or five) have stumbled or been put off by the words, saying that the terms feel too heavy to describe what I'm looking at. Or, that they refer only to the most esoteric or advanced forms of practice,

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-5551764086528718002007-10-23T07:03:00.000-05:002007-10-23T07:24:26.686-05:00

I missed the original call for Blog Action Day, which was sponsored to "get blogs posting about a common cause: the environment." But better late then never, here's a small contribution.Today's a work day so I don't have much time to put together a good post, but I'll say a bit about how Compendium relates to the collective effort to reclaim our environment from the forces of destruction and

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-90725745599239867982007-10-20T12:30:00.000-05:002007-10-20T12:52:29.264-05:00

The New Yorker has lately been a great source of material that talks about engagement with a medium and the human drama of aesthetic production. Besides the article on Garry Kasparov that I wrote about recently, this week (the Oct. 22 "Arts" edition) there's an article (by the unfairly talented Adam Gopnik) called "The Corrections (abridgement, enrichment, and the nature of art)". It talks, among

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-8841226696478080522007-10-20T07:09:00.000-05:002007-10-20T07:37:51.967-05:00

When I was scrawling in my notebook on what became this post about outcomes, I ended up with a thought that surprised me. I'd been writing about what kind of positive outcomes this research might result in, particularly in helping practitioners improve their situational effectiveness in the heat of actual practice. And that got me on to thinking about helping my kids (both now in their teens)

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-8829150076315975042007-10-10T12:56:00.000-05:002007-11-09T07:43:48.797-05:00

In a recent issue of the New Yorker magazine, there is an article about Garry Kasparov. I liked the following quote, talking about Kasparov's experience of playing chess in tournaments:. . . the crazy depth of commitment and passion, as well as the daring of his style, made him feel alive. [quoting biographer Fred Waitzkin:] "Chess for Garry was never a game . . . . It was about living and dying,

Alnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-65565879270139110232007-09-25T16:52:00.001-05:002011-04-05T19:19:05.839-05:00

The below is adapted from an e-mail exchange* with Helga Kocurek, who is doing a PhD in Philosophy at Massey University in New Zealand. She had read our paper on using Compendium for doctoral research, and had some questions on how to use Compendium for her work.* * *Al,I am a PhD student in philosophy and the only person around interested in using such technology. I have been looking for a

Alnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5295541.post-23941632337051831822007-09-25T07:30:00.001-05:002007-12-02T10:19:54.653-05:00

The other day I passed some time by jotting down a few phrases that we've used over the years about Compendium as an approach. In this post I list some of the early ones, and give some definitions. Most of them are still valid even though they date from our pre-historical age (1992-1999). They include World Modeling, Conversational Modeling, First Be Useful, Value Now, Value Later, Granular

Alnoreply@blogger.com0