Expanding on the previous post.
All making has aesthetics and ethics and is concerned with crafting narrative while at the same time living in narrative (causation, explanation, coherence, breach). When we set out to craft an experience that other people will participate in, we think about what form it should take in order that the experience "works" the best. As we get into the planning and crafting, subtle and not-so-subtle shifts and changes occur as the materials and the situation "talk back" to us as we work with them. If we are collaborating with other people in this crafting, those shifts and changes compound in complexity (and rapidity) due to our personal interactions, the conflicts and synergies and mutual inspiration that invariably happen in collaboration. Finally we have our instrument crafted ready for the participative session. We get into that session and a mix of the expected and unexpected happens. We shift and adjust and improvise as necessary, sometimes a lot, sometimes not much. What we came in with as the goal and the form and the intended sequence of events and outcomes sometimes remains intact, often is interspersed with small changes, sometimes is radically changed or inverted as a whole.
From an analytical point of view, looking at the Rutgers and Ames workshops as well as the earlier Mobile Agents materials, all can fall into the above. There is the "intended" aesthetics and ethics -- how we have shaped the materials that will be used in the live sessions and how we envision them being interacted with and operated on by the participants -- and then there is the "live" or "situated" aesthetics and ethics of how these play out in the actual sessions, how we act on the materials and use the tools and interact with the participants in service of having a successful session.
So for my framework purposes, this could be looked at as the narrative organization of both Preparing and Enacting. In each, there are the two dimensions of narrative: the narrative we actively create (the materials and representations) and the narrative we are living in (how we view ourselves, our participants, our effort, our outcomes, the context we see them fitting into, why they are the way they are). In both Preparing and Enacting, we can (and usually, but not always, do, at different levels of intensity) experience disruptions that require sensemaking and improvisation. In both Preparing and Enacting, we act and make in ways that can be characterized from aesthetic and ethical viewpoints, whether they are improvised or not. In both Preparing and Enacting, we can look analytically at the kinds of things that were in my original analyses: verbal moves, representational moves, engagement with the representation and with each other (whether those "others" are makers/practitioners or participants).
Really, in any Preparing and Enacting there are degrees of the unexpected that happen. Even if things don't go wrong per se, they unfold in ways that have to take into account any divergence from the canonical. In Preparing, often this in itself is a kind of improvisation, since you're thrust into a new situation, with new constraints, people, subject matter, etc. Unless it's completely rote, Preparing is nearly always a sensemaking effort. The degree of unexpectedness varies from radical disruptions to just the simple ways that new input comes in and must be factored and adapted to. (Someday in the future I will write this out better, and provide examples and illustrations of all these).
These phenomena are recursive. The experience of living in and constructing narrative happen at many levels simultaneously, as do comprehension, engagement, and interchange. In Preparing, plans emerge through the back and forth between the different levels, interplays with each other. Materials are brought together and composed in the hotbed, in keeping with the directions established, negotiated, agreed to, adjusted on the fly as more becomes clear, even up to the last minute.
Then you enter into the live Enacting and the process repeats. Some goes according to plan and some doesn't, to greater or lesser degree. Adjustments are made within the established boundaries (sometimes stretching, breaking, or reinventing them), keeping the coherence, engagement, and motivation going (if possible!).
Mark's ideas about the usefulness of normative models of communicative practice seem really helpful here. There is both my own, evolving normative model of PHC practice, that I can use as an analytical tool to examine particular instances of practice, and the "model-in-action" that practitioners (whether solo or collaborative) develop and apply, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, in the course of their practice. At the Rutgers event, in the Planning session, you can hear the group discussing and negotiating how the exercise they were putting together was going to work, what it was intended to bring forth from the participants, how it would lead up to the desired outcome and denouement.
More to come on this. I think the outline of how I can now incorporate all 8 instances of practice I'm going to analyze for the dissertation is coming into focus, even though they vary so much (two solo expert practitioners working with very different groups (a small face-to-face planning meeting in the MDRS hab, a virtual meeting of RST geologists), the 4 Ames workshop groups and the 2 Rutgers workshop groups).
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Saturday, June 16, 2007
They can still do it
Last night we saw the Subdudes at the Towne Crier in Pawling. Great show. About halfway through, four of the 'dudes left the stage and came out amongst the tables to do 2 acoustic and a capella songs. So much energy and happiness generated, and after that part even their electric playing went to a different level. And that tambourine-powered percussion is truly amazing.
I was thinking that some of my emphasis on looking at expertise in the moments of interruption/disruption kind of miss the point. There is also expertise in the maintenance of flow, keeping an effort the maximal state of creativity and productivity. I saw that (to a degree) in the Rutgers experiment earlier in the week, where both small groups accomplished their goals with little need for on-the-fly sensemaking. And watching the Subdudes play so gorgeously, reaching peaks of their kind of artistry, reminded me that beautiful recoveries are not the only, or even most interesting, form of artistry -- they're just a particular thing to focus on for research purposes. I'm not trying to enshrine them in some theoretical way and my writing shouldn't make it look that way.
I was thinking that some of my emphasis on looking at expertise in the moments of interruption/disruption kind of miss the point. There is also expertise in the maintenance of flow, keeping an effort the maximal state of creativity and productivity. I saw that (to a degree) in the Rutgers experiment earlier in the week, where both small groups accomplished their goals with little need for on-the-fly sensemaking. And watching the Subdudes play so gorgeously, reaching peaks of their kind of artistry, reminded me that beautiful recoveries are not the only, or even most interesting, form of artistry -- they're just a particular thing to focus on for research purposes. I'm not trying to enshrine them in some theoretical way and my writing shouldn't make it look that way.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Compendium: new media software
What I want is for people to approach Compendium like a new media tool, rather than as "business" software targeted at a particular application. In fact there are many applications for it as a piece of software. But they don't define it. What it is, is a tool for making knowledge/concept/idea maps whose elements can appear in many different maps. That kind of representation is the real point, and what you can do with it. A different kind of multidimensional representation than other tools let you make. What you use those representations for, the world(s) they fit in, can vary widely.
There are other tools in the category I'd like for Compendium to be considered in. I don't think its category is argument mapping or concept mapping, although those are certainly applications for it. It's more of a creative software, like PhotoShop, GarageBand, Windows MovieMaker, Camtasia, iMovie, FinalCut, even PowerPoint or Word. None of those packages are about creating certain kinds of outcomes, unless you define the artifacts you can make with them as the outcomes. Similarly none of them promise (if they're honest) that just by virtue of using the tool you'll be able to produce a well-crafted artifact. What they do promise is that they'll provide the resources you need to hitch to your own creativity, skill, and knowledge, and that they will let you do things that expand your reach. If you know what you want to express and how you want to express it, these tools will help get you there and do it with the speed, quality, depth and density of pallette you need.
There are other tools in the category I'd like for Compendium to be considered in. I don't think its category is argument mapping or concept mapping, although those are certainly applications for it. It's more of a creative software, like PhotoShop, GarageBand, Windows MovieMaker, Camtasia, iMovie, FinalCut, even PowerPoint or Word. None of those packages are about creating certain kinds of outcomes, unless you define the artifacts you can make with them as the outcomes. Similarly none of them promise (if they're honest) that just by virtue of using the tool you'll be able to produce a well-crafted artifact. What they do promise is that they'll provide the resources you need to hitch to your own creativity, skill, and knowledge, and that they will let you do things that expand your reach. If you know what you want to express and how you want to express it, these tools will help get you there and do it with the speed, quality, depth and density of pallette you need.
And by the way, this is the transliteration of Compendium in Hindi: कोम्पेंदियम
Sunday, June 03, 2007
2007 Workshop notes, continued
Some more thoughts about the second day of our workshop. See this post for the first installment.
Simon led off the morning of the second day with a presentation on where he (et al) is going with the Cohere project, building on all the (amazing) work bringing together ScholOnto, ClaiMaker, Compendium, Memetic, OpenLearn, and Clara Mancini's research. Listening, I was thinking that there is a distinction between the idea that a particular approach and/or software tool will (in and of itself) achieve some positive goal, and the realization that achieving the goal is always and only a product of human effort and engagement (and expertise, and luck).
This doesn't limit or trivialize the role and potential of tools and methods, but rather says that they always need to be coupled with the human side. Human intelligence, performance, and creativity are always a (or the) chief ingredient for the tools and methods to be successful and provide any value, at least in domains outside the purely computational. Even Google doesn't do anything in and of itself, it's only what someone does with the search results that matters in terms of achieving a goal (other than the enrichment of Google and its AdSense and other beneficiaries).
We often tend to talk as if the tools and approaches bring the benefits by themselves. It almost seems to be a bias in the software world to do this. But they don't. They need us and the right situation. It's like with poetry. Some people have the assumption you can just read some great poem and immediately get the meaning and the 'value'. I know I can't, I'm not good enough at understanding poetry to do that. I have to work at it (with the exception of, very occasionally since I'm not much of a poetry person, of hearing a poet reading their (or others') work out loud, and with the resonance and emphasis they can give it from their own artistry, I can get something more immediate).
After Simon, Jeff spoke on 'Lessons learned from NASA Lunar Dust Workshop' (this may be slightly out of order, I'm going from the published program which has it differently, but this is how I remember it). This led to a very engaged discussion on what does and doesn't go well with a) using Compendium for discussion capture, and b) how best to move from facilitation/maps to reports/documents and what some of the common pitfalls are. It seems that at that workshop and among the facilitators, there were a lot of pushes and pulls of Compendium vs conventional transcription, whether or not Compendium added value, etc.
I don't want to recapitulate that discussion here, but it points for me to the need to move towards collaborative artifact construction as the emphasis. I don't say that it is the only successful mode, but having spent hundreds (probably thousands) of hours trying to use Compendium as an alternative focus for conventional discussions in meetings, I personally am ready never to go that way again. As I've tried to write about here, here, and elsewhere, what works is getting people to engage in the construction of the maps themselves, not to try to change the way they talk to each other or how that works in meetings (especially when there is no clear buy-in on using an alternative meeting approach in the first place, from participants or sponsors of an event).
After that, Ale Okada presented the OpenLearn work in the context of eLearning, and Anna de Liddo spoke on using Compendium as a method for participatory, multimedia project memory with public policy groups in Italy. This got a lot of positive reception, especially in the integration of FlashMeeting video recordings with Compendium maps so that the maps became indexes into the video record. This seems like a very promising approach. As Maarten put it, a step towards true knowledge management.
Following this I gave a brief presentation on the work Maarten and I had done at NASA Mission Control/Johnson Space Center last year, doing collaborative modeling with launch controllers, making extensive use of stencils and templates to construct process flows and activity models on the fly in two intensive day-long sessions. Diana Brooks spoke about her experiences using Compendium for her work with public water policy. Jack Paulus presented his TruthMapping work, Jack Park talked about the work he will shortly pursue as a fellow KMi doctoral student, and Simon talked about... something else... will have to add that sometime!
The last session of the day was a spontaneous brainstorming facilitated by Jack Paulus on the topic of how best to promote Compendium in a short video (I mapped, will have to upload those maps somewhere eventually). More on that at another time.
Simon led off the morning of the second day with a presentation on where he (et al) is going with the Cohere project, building on all the (amazing) work bringing together ScholOnto, ClaiMaker, Compendium, Memetic, OpenLearn, and Clara Mancini's research. Listening, I was thinking that there is a distinction between the idea that a particular approach and/or software tool will (in and of itself) achieve some positive goal, and the realization that achieving the goal is always and only a product of human effort and engagement (and expertise, and luck).
This doesn't limit or trivialize the role and potential of tools and methods, but rather says that they always need to be coupled with the human side. Human intelligence, performance, and creativity are always a (or the) chief ingredient for the tools and methods to be successful and provide any value, at least in domains outside the purely computational. Even Google doesn't do anything in and of itself, it's only what someone does with the search results that matters in terms of achieving a goal (other than the enrichment of Google and its AdSense and other beneficiaries).
We often tend to talk as if the tools and approaches bring the benefits by themselves. It almost seems to be a bias in the software world to do this. But they don't. They need us and the right situation. It's like with poetry. Some people have the assumption you can just read some great poem and immediately get the meaning and the 'value'. I know I can't, I'm not good enough at understanding poetry to do that. I have to work at it (with the exception of, very occasionally since I'm not much of a poetry person, of hearing a poet reading their (or others') work out loud, and with the resonance and emphasis they can give it from their own artistry, I can get something more immediate).
After Simon, Jeff spoke on 'Lessons learned from NASA Lunar Dust Workshop' (this may be slightly out of order, I'm going from the published program which has it differently, but this is how I remember it). This led to a very engaged discussion on what does and doesn't go well with a) using Compendium for discussion capture, and b) how best to move from facilitation/maps to reports/documents and what some of the common pitfalls are. It seems that at that workshop and among the facilitators, there were a lot of pushes and pulls of Compendium vs conventional transcription, whether or not Compendium added value, etc.
I don't want to recapitulate that discussion here, but it points for me to the need to move towards collaborative artifact construction as the emphasis. I don't say that it is the only successful mode, but having spent hundreds (probably thousands) of hours trying to use Compendium as an alternative focus for conventional discussions in meetings, I personally am ready never to go that way again. As I've tried to write about here, here, and elsewhere, what works is getting people to engage in the construction of the maps themselves, not to try to change the way they talk to each other or how that works in meetings (especially when there is no clear buy-in on using an alternative meeting approach in the first place, from participants or sponsors of an event).
After that, Ale Okada presented the OpenLearn work in the context of eLearning, and Anna de Liddo spoke on using Compendium as a method for participatory, multimedia project memory with public policy groups in Italy. This got a lot of positive reception, especially in the integration of FlashMeeting video recordings with Compendium maps so that the maps became indexes into the video record. This seems like a very promising approach. As Maarten put it, a step towards true knowledge management.
Following this I gave a brief presentation on the work Maarten and I had done at NASA Mission Control/Johnson Space Center last year, doing collaborative modeling with launch controllers, making extensive use of stencils and templates to construct process flows and activity models on the fly in two intensive day-long sessions. Diana Brooks spoke about her experiences using Compendium for her work with public water policy. Jack Paulus presented his TruthMapping work, Jack Park talked about the work he will shortly pursue as a fellow KMi doctoral student, and Simon talked about... something else... will have to add that sometime!
The last session of the day was a spontaneous brainstorming facilitated by Jack Paulus on the topic of how best to promote Compendium in a short video (I mapped, will have to upload those maps somewhere eventually). More on that at another time.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Engagement with the artifact
This is really the crux, inculcating engagement with the artifact itself, its construction, its meaning. When I started my research I was looking at experts in that art, but if the focus becomes engagement itself, how people try to achieve it, what means they use whether verbal, gesture, or actions on the artifact itself, particularly when obstacles are hit, I think that can be looked at as a generic phenomenon, not just one that experts do.
The difference with an "authoring" focus is that the spotlight is on getting the engagement of others. What the engagement consists of and means is different with each context, but the problematic of constructing the artifact, situation, and interactions themselves so as to keep that engagement 'alive', that is consistent. What are the actions a practitioner (a practitioner is anyone trying to create and maintain that engagement) takes.
For narrowing-down purposes I want to focus on actions taken on and with the artifact itself, as well as actions taken in the moments when easy progress is disrupted or things go wrong, but it is a problematic that persists throughout not just sessions but over the life of a project or effort. What can I do to keep this thing worthy of the engagement of the participants, where "this thing" is the artifact in the context of the overall effort. Because if the engagement is not there, the quality and usefulness of the artifact itself suffers (if what the artifact is is defined as a participatory creation of some sort, for context-specific reasons). Practitioner actions taken to create/preserve constructive engagement with the artifact.
The difference with an "authoring" focus is that the spotlight is on getting the engagement of others. What the engagement consists of and means is different with each context, but the problematic of constructing the artifact, situation, and interactions themselves so as to keep that engagement 'alive', that is consistent. What are the actions a practitioner (a practitioner is anyone trying to create and maintain that engagement) takes.
For narrowing-down purposes I want to focus on actions taken on and with the artifact itself, as well as actions taken in the moments when easy progress is disrupted or things go wrong, but it is a problematic that persists throughout not just sessions but over the life of a project or effort. What can I do to keep this thing worthy of the engagement of the participants, where "this thing" is the artifact in the context of the overall effort. Because if the engagement is not there, the quality and usefulness of the artifact itself suffers (if what the artifact is is defined as a participatory creation of some sort, for context-specific reasons). Practitioner actions taken to create/preserve constructive engagement with the artifact.
Friday, June 01, 2007
More on the main concepts — narrative
Following up on this post, a clarification of what I mean by 'narrative'.
Narrative is really a multi-threaded concept. It's both something that we make or tell, as an artifact of some kind (a story, the weaving together of maps, etc.), and something we live in (more of a psychosocial construct). It's always multiple -- that is, we might only be consciously engaged in making a particular narrative artifact, but we are living in many at once.
As Chuck P. said in response to the earlier post, narrative as something we make also has aesthetics and ethics. But it is the other sense, of the narrative(s) that we live in, that is kind of a different animal. The work a PHC practitioner does is both the crafting of narratives (in their creation / manipulation of maps), and as a 'character' in other people's narratives (their sense of what is going on with their projects, organizations, lives, why things happen the way they happen) as well as in their own.
It's this latter sense that I am more interested in from a research perspective. What narrative(s) are going on in a situation, what kinds of "breaches" occur in them, how do the actions of the practitioner(s) repair the breaches.
Narrative is really a multi-threaded concept. It's both something that we make or tell, as an artifact of some kind (a story, the weaving together of maps, etc.), and something we live in (more of a psychosocial construct). It's always multiple -- that is, we might only be consciously engaged in making a particular narrative artifact, but we are living in many at once.
As Chuck P. said in response to the earlier post, narrative as something we make also has aesthetics and ethics. But it is the other sense, of the narrative(s) that we live in, that is kind of a different animal. The work a PHC practitioner does is both the crafting of narratives (in their creation / manipulation of maps), and as a 'character' in other people's narratives (their sense of what is going on with their projects, organizations, lives, why things happen the way they happen) as well as in their own.
It's this latter sense that I am more interested in from a research perspective. What narrative(s) are going on in a situation, what kinds of "breaches" occur in them, how do the actions of the practitioner(s) repair the breaches.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
The experience of crafting an experience
While moving around the kitchen early Sunday morning, the phrase "the experience of creating an experience" popped into my head. It kind of summarizes what I'm interested in as research. People that create mediated experiences for others (filmmakers, musicians, teachers, mediators, PHC practitioners) themselves are having experiences and their experience can/should be characterized and understood. Schön et al give us clues to this and of the value of doing it, which I myself am not yet quite able to do, but this question has always occupied me and seemed important. Simon refined the catchphrase as "the experience of crafting an experience", which is better.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Misc. thoughts about the 2007 Compendium Institute workshop at NASA Ames
Some overdue thoughts on our recent Bay Area workshop, held at the NASA Ames Conference Center May 2-3, 2007. Work has been unrelentingly busy since the workshop, so no time to reflect until now. Today is Memorial Day, so a hiatus.
The workshop was small, about 16-17 people, but very engaged. Most people came from the Bay Area though there was a KMi contingent of five people, including me, that came from the UK and NY. We did something different this time than our previous workshops. In the past, we've generally had our standard tutorial on the morning of the first day. (We've been offering versions of that tutorial since the mid-1990s when Maarten and I developed the first version. It's a subject for another day, but even though I think there is a lot of good material in the tutorial, it has never landed with the impact that I'd like. It is too much "in the head", I think; concepts and exercises that, seemingly, assume you have already internalized the "Compendium Way" as we have (drank the Kool-Aid)).
This time we spent almost the entire first day on an experiential exercise rather than a tutorial. This was excellent -- at least for me since it ties into my research. I had prepared some advance materials that people could download with images about space (in honor of NASA, our host) and sample formats (the idea of providing people a set of evocative images to work with in the construction of a dialogic exercise owes much to the Center for Creative Leadership's Visual Explorer tool).
At the workshop we divided people into small groups and gave them the assignment of preparing an exercise that they would lead the larger group in, with the sole restriction that it had to involve getting people to engage with, and add to, Compendium maps. Each group had about 90 minutes to devise their exercise. Since I was going to use this for part of my research data, I kept myself out of it except to help with logistics when necessary. Mostly I flitted around the cavernous ballroom to each of the small group locations, taking pictures and making sure that each group had their Camtasia screen/audio recording going.
It was interesting to see the different group styles that emerged. Some groups jumped right in creating their exercise; one spent 2/3 of the time on a meta-exercise, mapping how they were going to approach the problem. But all were very engaged. To me the main point of Compendium is the engagement with the representation, having maps be the focus of a collaborative effort to express something that matters. Our previous tutorials never achieved that, they were much more individually oriented. This exercise got people doing that from the start. (Since my research focuses on the choices practitioners make in the course of constructing participatory hypermedia representations, this is very encouraging, but that is again a subject for a different day). Each group worked hard to come up with something they thought would work well for the large group exercise.
After this prep period, we took a break and then began the large group sessions. Each small group set the stage for what they wanted the large group to do, usually with one person acting as the facilitator up in front of the room and another serving as mapper (hands on the keyboard). The idea was that each group, particularly the less experienced members (the "masters" -- Simon, Maarten, Jeff, Eugene -- were explicitly instructed not to act as facilitators or mappers for the large group sessions), would get the experience of trying to get the large group to focus on and add to the map, then get feedback on how well they accomplished this and what they could have done better.
Each of the four groups struggled (to varying degrees) to get the large group to focus on the maps and keep the session from being just a normal discussion. In each case the subject matter and people's desire to talk about it directly to each other without focusing on the map itself seemed to hold the upper hand, though some of the small groups were successful at returning the group's attention to the maps themselves. After each of these 15-minute sessions, we had an additional 15 minutes where the "masters" and the other attendees gave feedback to the small group that had just presented. The nature of this feedback ranged from facilitation styles, to Compendium software tips and tricks (quite a lot of learning and sharing of 'best practices' in those bits), to meta-questions on the purpose of Compendium.
OK, I have to digress from the above narrative to discuss the general phenomenon of getting people to engage with maps. We had much discussion at the workshop on the theme of "discussion capture" (someone mapping out the flow of a discussion as it happens) vs. more directly engaged forms of group Compendium use involving collaborative construction of an artifact of some kind. Having done both myself hundreds of times with groups over the years, my bias is toward the latter. What Compendium is especially "good for" is providing the means (through our host of tools, techniques, and concepts) by which a group can engage with a visual map of something they're concerned with -- and more to the point, that the map is not a single artifact but an interlinked set of artifacts, with ideas and objects related to each other in multiple dimensions -- and even more to the point, that the whole corpus is set up in such a way as to be available to other tools and applications and settings, so that what you collectively or individually do in one form is not limited to that form but can be exchanged with, and used in, other forms in all sorts of ways.
Even yet more to the point, for me, is the idea that non-technical people (that is, non-programmers) can do computationally powerful things just by understanding and manipulating the visual and textual relationships (nodes, links, tags, transclusions), without having to know what is going on with the code and database. These principles have underlay (underlied?) everything we have done architecturally with Compendium over the years. And yet, we still often find ourselves talking about Compendium in the same ways as tools that don't do any of these things (e.g. note-taking in Word, or mind mapping software -- nothing against those sort of tools but they are not about the above).
The problems with this set of points are many. The "discussion" trap is one of them. We -- including me -- like to talk to each other directly. We saw that in the large group sessions -- once the participants got warmed up talking about some issue about the space program, any thought of Compendium flew out the window and people got into highly engaged conversations with each other about the topic. The facilitators had to interrupt this flow to get people to look at their ignored maps. But, here is the thing. My feeling is that this is not a fault of Compendium or of the idea of getting people to engage with each other and their subject matter via the vehicle of hypertext maps. Rather it is our relative inexperience with this medium and mode of communicating. We have seen, many times, that it is possible to have deep and engaged "conversations" while in the midst of working together on the Compendium artifact. In some cases people say that they are able to get to a deeper level of mutual understanding and dialogue than they would have done talking normally.
But to me that (whether talking normally is better or not) is not the point. Rather it is how to construct the hypermedia "event" in such a way as to be inviting, engaging, purposeful, and productive -- so that it becomes a form of collaborative authoring that doesn't feel foreign, "technical", or abstract. It becomes a way for people to make something together, the same way that making a film or video (or collage or whatever) requires people to engage in the medium itself as part of their overall interaction -- it is not an either/or. That is what I strive for -- creating tools and artifacts that invite and extend human interaction, not replace it. And I think we are only at the beginning of that. It *can* be done -- we have seen and experienced it many times -- but it is often difficult to do well.
We spoke many times at the workshop about how discussions, transcriptions, notes etc. can be done conventionally, and using Compendium for any of them is often compared unfavorably to these conventional means. To me this misses the point and is a mark of the medium's immaturity. People don't say, why have a concert rather than a discussion; why make a film rather than have a meeting; why engage an architect rather than just start building a house. We engage in those highly developed media forms, that require expertise and artistry to pull off, because they are accepted ways of having a valued experience or producing a particular kind of outcome or artifact.
Constructing Compendium maps together has that same potential. We have to learn how to do it right. I think events like the first day of the workshop are steps on that path. I have seen before that it is not at all difficult to get groups to tightly engage with artifact creation if they have the right structure and scaffolding, as the small groups did. For me personally, when I finish with my current trajectory of research -- I am on the downhill slope of completing a PhD -- that is what I want to concentrate on; creating engaging Compendium events that get people working together on constructing sophisticated hypermedia artifacts that both express something of importance to the group, and bring the participants and authors together in unique and rewarding ways. The focus should no more be on Compendium itself and whether it is better or worse than other tools, than the focus of a film-making effort is on the brand of camera used. What's important is what is expressed in the unique medium, not the medium itself (see this related post).
Along with generating loads of useful research data for me, the first day exercises seemed to bring the workshop's attendees together. Many of the folks hadn't met each other before but by the end of the first day they seemed to be very friendly and informal with each other (see this photo of our happy first night group dinner at the Grand Indian Buffet restaurant in Sunnyvale). Most of the second day (as usual for our workshops) was more conventional talks and presentations on various Compendium topics, but my feeling (shared by at least some of the other organizers) was that the participants were much more engaged and interactive with the presentations than we have often seen in previous workshops, because they had a basis of shared experience (and reflection on that experience) to draw on.
It's a beautiful spring day here in near-upstate New York, so I will stop here for now to get out on the bike while I have the chance. I'll write more about the second day soon. Before closing, though, I have to give special thanks to Maarten Sierhius and Eugene Eric Kim for all the work they did to get the workshop organized. Along with all the advance deliberations (conducted with unremitting harmony and consensus (not)), Maarten got us our terrific setting at the NASA Conference Center and dealt with all the food and drink logistics (an unrewarding but highly appreciated task), and Eugene managed the flow of events during the workshop itself with aplomb, even improvising the schedule on the second half of the second day. We haven't yet planned our next workshop (East Coast USA? UK?) but I think we learned much from this one that will enrich all our subsequent gatherings.
The workshop was small, about 16-17 people, but very engaged. Most people came from the Bay Area though there was a KMi contingent of five people, including me, that came from the UK and NY. We did something different this time than our previous workshops. In the past, we've generally had our standard tutorial on the morning of the first day. (We've been offering versions of that tutorial since the mid-1990s when Maarten and I developed the first version. It's a subject for another day, but even though I think there is a lot of good material in the tutorial, it has never landed with the impact that I'd like. It is too much "in the head", I think; concepts and exercises that, seemingly, assume you have already internalized the "Compendium Way" as we have (drank the Kool-Aid)).
This time we spent almost the entire first day on an experiential exercise rather than a tutorial. This was excellent -- at least for me since it ties into my research. I had prepared some advance materials that people could download with images about space (in honor of NASA, our host) and sample formats (the idea of providing people a set of evocative images to work with in the construction of a dialogic exercise owes much to the Center for Creative Leadership's Visual Explorer tool).
At the workshop we divided people into small groups and gave them the assignment of preparing an exercise that they would lead the larger group in, with the sole restriction that it had to involve getting people to engage with, and add to, Compendium maps. Each group had about 90 minutes to devise their exercise. Since I was going to use this for part of my research data, I kept myself out of it except to help with logistics when necessary. Mostly I flitted around the cavernous ballroom to each of the small group locations, taking pictures and making sure that each group had their Camtasia screen/audio recording going.
It was interesting to see the different group styles that emerged. Some groups jumped right in creating their exercise; one spent 2/3 of the time on a meta-exercise, mapping how they were going to approach the problem. But all were very engaged. To me the main point of Compendium is the engagement with the representation, having maps be the focus of a collaborative effort to express something that matters. Our previous tutorials never achieved that, they were much more individually oriented. This exercise got people doing that from the start. (Since my research focuses on the choices practitioners make in the course of constructing participatory hypermedia representations, this is very encouraging, but that is again a subject for a different day). Each group worked hard to come up with something they thought would work well for the large group exercise.
After this prep period, we took a break and then began the large group sessions. Each small group set the stage for what they wanted the large group to do, usually with one person acting as the facilitator up in front of the room and another serving as mapper (hands on the keyboard). The idea was that each group, particularly the less experienced members (the "masters" -- Simon, Maarten, Jeff, Eugene -- were explicitly instructed not to act as facilitators or mappers for the large group sessions), would get the experience of trying to get the large group to focus on and add to the map, then get feedback on how well they accomplished this and what they could have done better.
Each of the four groups struggled (to varying degrees) to get the large group to focus on the maps and keep the session from being just a normal discussion. In each case the subject matter and people's desire to talk about it directly to each other without focusing on the map itself seemed to hold the upper hand, though some of the small groups were successful at returning the group's attention to the maps themselves. After each of these 15-minute sessions, we had an additional 15 minutes where the "masters" and the other attendees gave feedback to the small group that had just presented. The nature of this feedback ranged from facilitation styles, to Compendium software tips and tricks (quite a lot of learning and sharing of 'best practices' in those bits), to meta-questions on the purpose of Compendium.
OK, I have to digress from the above narrative to discuss the general phenomenon of getting people to engage with maps. We had much discussion at the workshop on the theme of "discussion capture" (someone mapping out the flow of a discussion as it happens) vs. more directly engaged forms of group Compendium use involving collaborative construction of an artifact of some kind. Having done both myself hundreds of times with groups over the years, my bias is toward the latter. What Compendium is especially "good for" is providing the means (through our host of tools, techniques, and concepts) by which a group can engage with a visual map of something they're concerned with -- and more to the point, that the map is not a single artifact but an interlinked set of artifacts, with ideas and objects related to each other in multiple dimensions -- and even more to the point, that the whole corpus is set up in such a way as to be available to other tools and applications and settings, so that what you collectively or individually do in one form is not limited to that form but can be exchanged with, and used in, other forms in all sorts of ways.
Even yet more to the point, for me, is the idea that non-technical people (that is, non-programmers) can do computationally powerful things just by understanding and manipulating the visual and textual relationships (nodes, links, tags, transclusions), without having to know what is going on with the code and database. These principles have underlay (underlied?) everything we have done architecturally with Compendium over the years. And yet, we still often find ourselves talking about Compendium in the same ways as tools that don't do any of these things (e.g. note-taking in Word, or mind mapping software -- nothing against those sort of tools but they are not about the above).
The problems with this set of points are many. The "discussion" trap is one of them. We -- including me -- like to talk to each other directly. We saw that in the large group sessions -- once the participants got warmed up talking about some issue about the space program, any thought of Compendium flew out the window and people got into highly engaged conversations with each other about the topic. The facilitators had to interrupt this flow to get people to look at their ignored maps. But, here is the thing. My feeling is that this is not a fault of Compendium or of the idea of getting people to engage with each other and their subject matter via the vehicle of hypertext maps. Rather it is our relative inexperience with this medium and mode of communicating. We have seen, many times, that it is possible to have deep and engaged "conversations" while in the midst of working together on the Compendium artifact. In some cases people say that they are able to get to a deeper level of mutual understanding and dialogue than they would have done talking normally.
But to me that (whether talking normally is better or not) is not the point. Rather it is how to construct the hypermedia "event" in such a way as to be inviting, engaging, purposeful, and productive -- so that it becomes a form of collaborative authoring that doesn't feel foreign, "technical", or abstract. It becomes a way for people to make something together, the same way that making a film or video (or collage or whatever) requires people to engage in the medium itself as part of their overall interaction -- it is not an either/or. That is what I strive for -- creating tools and artifacts that invite and extend human interaction, not replace it. And I think we are only at the beginning of that. It *can* be done -- we have seen and experienced it many times -- but it is often difficult to do well.
We spoke many times at the workshop about how discussions, transcriptions, notes etc. can be done conventionally, and using Compendium for any of them is often compared unfavorably to these conventional means. To me this misses the point and is a mark of the medium's immaturity. People don't say, why have a concert rather than a discussion; why make a film rather than have a meeting; why engage an architect rather than just start building a house. We engage in those highly developed media forms, that require expertise and artistry to pull off, because they are accepted ways of having a valued experience or producing a particular kind of outcome or artifact.
Constructing Compendium maps together has that same potential. We have to learn how to do it right. I think events like the first day of the workshop are steps on that path. I have seen before that it is not at all difficult to get groups to tightly engage with artifact creation if they have the right structure and scaffolding, as the small groups did. For me personally, when I finish with my current trajectory of research -- I am on the downhill slope of completing a PhD -- that is what I want to concentrate on; creating engaging Compendium events that get people working together on constructing sophisticated hypermedia artifacts that both express something of importance to the group, and bring the participants and authors together in unique and rewarding ways. The focus should no more be on Compendium itself and whether it is better or worse than other tools, than the focus of a film-making effort is on the brand of camera used. What's important is what is expressed in the unique medium, not the medium itself (see this related post).
Along with generating loads of useful research data for me, the first day exercises seemed to bring the workshop's attendees together. Many of the folks hadn't met each other before but by the end of the first day they seemed to be very friendly and informal with each other (see this photo of our happy first night group dinner at the Grand Indian Buffet restaurant in Sunnyvale). Most of the second day (as usual for our workshops) was more conventional talks and presentations on various Compendium topics, but my feeling (shared by at least some of the other organizers) was that the participants were much more engaged and interactive with the presentations than we have often seen in previous workshops, because they had a basis of shared experience (and reflection on that experience) to draw on.
It's a beautiful spring day here in near-upstate New York, so I will stop here for now to get out on the bike while I have the chance. I'll write more about the second day soon. Before closing, though, I have to give special thanks to Maarten Sierhius and Eugene Eric Kim for all the work they did to get the workshop organized. Along with all the advance deliberations (conducted with unremitting harmony and consensus (not)), Maarten got us our terrific setting at the NASA Conference Center and dealt with all the food and drink logistics (an unrewarding but highly appreciated task), and Eugene managed the flow of events during the workshop itself with aplomb, even improvising the schedule on the second half of the second day. We haven't yet planned our next workshop (East Coast USA? UK?) but I think we learned much from this one that will enrich all our subsequent gatherings.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Organizing the main concepts
I've been thinking for a while that I needed to have some kind of clear ordering of the central concepts for my research -- that is, what I've seen as the main components of the PHC practitioner experience: aesthetics, ethics, sensemaking, improvisation, and narrative. This is mostly for communicative reasons. People seem to trip over "aesthetics" and "ethics" when I use them as the organizing principles. The concepts feel too heavyweight.
I saw this again in presentations and conversations at the Connections 2007 conference this past weekend. Some clarity also dawned as a result of the conversations with Chuck, Beth, and Mark during the weekend. Two that stand out particularly: listening to Mark's eloquent responses to Beth's insightful questions while I was stuffing my face with Chinese food on Sunday night, and the later-that-evening conversation and Compendium surfing with Chuck, especially when we were talking about the importance and subtleties of aesthetic shaping on representations like Chuck's Visual Explorer PowerPoints and Compendium maps.
I think that narrative, sensemaking, and improvisation are really the ongoing phenomena in which practitioner aesthetics and ethics -- the things I'm trying to characterize and make distinctions about -- take place. I'll try to illustrate that below.
Two stories grabbed from the Metro section of the Saturday New York Times are helpful illustrations of what I want to say about narrative, sensemaking, and improvisation:
From the "Pet Rescue" story:
Equally of interest are the actions taken by the police and firefighters in these situations. As professionals, they expect and very often deal with such situations, and it is in the way they approach these fraught occurences that we can discern their expertise. They make moves (assembling the right tools, wielding them adroitly (I imagine it takes some skill to throw noose over a python's "neck"), dealing with the aftermath, etc.) that "heal the breaches" (Bruner) and restore order. Put a novice in such situations, and it is quite unlkely that we would be effective.
As the latter story of the botched hunt for Ralph J. Phillips illustrates, even among professionals, things can go wrong. Despite the best tools, procedures, and hundreds of highly motivated troopers and officers, the hunt took months and resulted in death and serious injuries among the pursuers. As with Weick's story of the Mann Gulch fire disaster, sensemaking broke down in the face of competing stimuli and imperatives. Actions taken by these professionals were not effective. Coherence among all the competing narratives was not achieved. It took far longer to restore order than anyone anticipated:
Spence's concept of "narrative recursion" is helpful. People live and act in narratives unfolding at many levels simultaneously. In 'normal' times narrative means 'one damn thing after another', events following each other with comfortable logic and easily understood causation, unquestioned expectations. But things always happen to derail this flow. Things don't happen as planned and expected; the unexpected intervenes and throws things off. PHC practitioners work in such a recursive environment, deal with unexpected breaches, figure out what's going on and what to do, then act. We can look at their actions in aesthetic and ethical terms, and characterize how well they serve to heal the breaches.
Below are a number of formulations (suitable for maps or slides) of how the 5 main concepts relate when analyzing either expert or novice (as I am now going to be doing with the video recordings from the NASA Ames workshop) participatory hypermedia construction (PHC) practice.
I think when looking at PHC, narrative is the mother concept. Sensemaking occurs when narrative coherence is disrupted; things don't go and flow as unproblematically assumed. Improvisation happens at those sensemaking moments. improvisational moves have both aesthetic and ethical dimensions.
Practitioners act in sessions with the goal of creating and preserving *narrative coherence* in the representations, flow, discourse, etc. Events occur that break the flow ('breaches in the canonicity') that create *sensemaking moments*. At such moments, practitioners must *improvise* in order to heal the breaches and return to a coherent flow. These improvisational actions have both *aesthetic* and *ethical* dimensions.
So *narrative* is the ongoing goal and state (we construct narratives, are in narratives, etc.).
When narrative flow (one event seamlessly after another) is disrupted, *sensemaking* occurs.
At sensemaking moments, practitioners *improvise* representational and verbal moves and actions.
These moves have both *aesthetic* (what form the actions take and create) and *ethical* (the implications of the actions for the interests of participants, stakeholders, audiences, and practitioners) dimensions.
When narrative is disrupted, sensemaking and improvisation occurs. Improvisation has both aesthetic and ethical dimensions.
NARRATIVE is disrupted
==> SENSEMAKING occurs
====> IMPROVISATIONAL actions are taken to restore narrative coherence
======> the actions can be characterized in AESTHETIC and ETHICAL dimensions
When NARRATIVE coherence is disrupted it forces SENSEMAKING, which
requires IMPROVISATION, which has AESTHETIC and ETHICAL dimensions.
I saw this again in presentations and conversations at the Connections 2007 conference this past weekend. Some clarity also dawned as a result of the conversations with Chuck, Beth, and Mark during the weekend. Two that stand out particularly: listening to Mark's eloquent responses to Beth's insightful questions while I was stuffing my face with Chinese food on Sunday night, and the later-that-evening conversation and Compendium surfing with Chuck, especially when we were talking about the importance and subtleties of aesthetic shaping on representations like Chuck's Visual Explorer PowerPoints and Compendium maps.
I think that narrative, sensemaking, and improvisation are really the ongoing phenomena in which practitioner aesthetics and ethics -- the things I'm trying to characterize and make distinctions about -- take place. I'll try to illustrate that below.
Two stories grabbed from the Metro section of the Saturday New York Times are helpful illustrations of what I want to say about narrative, sensemaking, and improvisation:
- "Every so often a deer will appear in the 190th Street subway station. Or a 2,000-pound bull will escape from a rodeo and gallop along the streets of Long Island City. A man might arrive at an emergency room in need of stitches, bitten, it turns out, by the 500-pound pet wild tiger that lives in his apartment in Harlem. And once again, a strange but true animal event will have slapped the city out of the soul-leaching funk of $4 coffees and $200 theater tickets with the giddy news that someone keeps rats and mice in the freezer.... Few events so rouse the might and majesty of government at all levels as the discovery of a cache of scary or weird animals and bugs."
- "In Queens Fire, Pet Rescue Take a Turn For the Wild." The New York Times, 19 May 2007
- "The biggest manhunt in state history -- the five-month search for Ralph J. Phillips last year in the backwoods of western New York -- was thwarted time and again by communications problems, command confusion, troopers' misjudgements and over-reliance on an elite mobile unit, a state police report says."
- "Hunt for Fugitive Was Beset By Confusion, a Report Says." The New York Times, 19 May 2007
From the "Pet Rescue" story:
- "On Thursday morning, a Fire Department lieutenant, Ed Ireland, played his flashlight across the darkness of an apartment in the basement of a two-story house on 39th Avenue in Corona, Queens, where a fire had just been doused. The beam of his light stopped near the ground on a pair of eyes, followed immediately by 13 feet of Burmese python.... Nearby was a smallish alligator.... "Oh, my God," Lieutenant Ireland said." ... the Police Department Emergency Services Unit was dispatched, complete with noosed poles to hold the business end of the snake and gator... the police put water on the animals for their burns. Then the snake went into a clean garbage can, with a lid."
Equally of interest are the actions taken by the police and firefighters in these situations. As professionals, they expect and very often deal with such situations, and it is in the way they approach these fraught occurences that we can discern their expertise. They make moves (assembling the right tools, wielding them adroitly (I imagine it takes some skill to throw noose over a python's "neck"), dealing with the aftermath, etc.) that "heal the breaches" (Bruner) and restore order. Put a novice in such situations, and it is quite unlkely that we would be effective.
As the latter story of the botched hunt for Ralph J. Phillips illustrates, even among professionals, things can go wrong. Despite the best tools, procedures, and hundreds of highly motivated troopers and officers, the hunt took months and resulted in death and serious injuries among the pursuers. As with Weick's story of the Mann Gulch fire disaster, sensemaking broke down in the face of competing stimuli and imperatives. Actions taken by these professionals were not effective. Coherence among all the competing narratives was not achieved. It took far longer to restore order than anyone anticipated:
- "...the report said that field commanders often did not communicate instructions clearly to 1,400 state troopers and hundreds of officers from local, county, and federal agencies as the elusive woodsman stole cars, lived off the land and moved across the New York-Pennsylvania border at will. The report also cited equipment problems and faulted planning and interagency communication."
Spence's concept of "narrative recursion" is helpful. People live and act in narratives unfolding at many levels simultaneously. In 'normal' times narrative means 'one damn thing after another', events following each other with comfortable logic and easily understood causation, unquestioned expectations. But things always happen to derail this flow. Things don't happen as planned and expected; the unexpected intervenes and throws things off. PHC practitioners work in such a recursive environment, deal with unexpected breaches, figure out what's going on and what to do, then act. We can look at their actions in aesthetic and ethical terms, and characterize how well they serve to heal the breaches.
Below are a number of formulations (suitable for maps or slides) of how the 5 main concepts relate when analyzing either expert or novice (as I am now going to be doing with the video recordings from the NASA Ames workshop) participatory hypermedia construction (PHC) practice.
*
I think when looking at PHC, narrative is the mother concept. Sensemaking occurs when narrative coherence is disrupted; things don't go and flow as unproblematically assumed. Improvisation happens at those sensemaking moments. improvisational moves have both aesthetic and ethical dimensions.
*
Practitioners act in sessions with the goal of creating and preserving *narrative coherence* in the representations, flow, discourse, etc. Events occur that break the flow ('breaches in the canonicity') that create *sensemaking moments*. At such moments, practitioners must *improvise* in order to heal the breaches and return to a coherent flow. These improvisational actions have both *aesthetic* and *ethical* dimensions.
*
So *narrative* is the ongoing goal and state (we construct narratives, are in narratives, etc.).
When narrative flow (one event seamlessly after another) is disrupted, *sensemaking* occurs.
At sensemaking moments, practitioners *improvise* representational and verbal moves and actions.
These moves have both *aesthetic* (what form the actions take and create) and *ethical* (the implications of the actions for the interests of participants, stakeholders, audiences, and practitioners) dimensions.
*
When narrative is disrupted, sensemaking and improvisation occurs. Improvisation has both aesthetic and ethical dimensions.
*
NARRATIVE is disrupted
==> SENSEMAKING occurs
====> IMPROVISATIONAL actions are taken to restore narrative coherence
======> the actions can be characterized in AESTHETIC and ETHICAL dimensions
*
When NARRATIVE coherence is disrupted it forces SENSEMAKING, which
requires IMPROVISATION, which has AESTHETIC and ETHICAL dimensions.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Shared Compendium over the Web -- it can work!
Courtesy of Mark Aakhus at Rutgers, I saw how sharing Compendium (MySQL) works over the web via Citrix. So far what I've seen -- via both DSL from home and via an EV-DO aircard from my laptop at Rutgers -- is way beyond "raw" over-the-Internet access to shared Compendium. The performance was excellent, quite usable (unlike what we've experienced using shared Compendium over the Internet). And this was true multi-user shared Compendium - multiple users accessing even the
same map at the same time.
This is kind of epochal, at least for me. I haven't truly interacted with a shared Compendium or QuestMap project since more than 10 years ago with QuestMap on a LAN, and even then it wasn't over the 'net. I have been happily interacting with this project for the last couple of days, seeing the potential of true collaborative (that is, asynchronous and multi-user) Compendium.
same map at the same time.
This is kind of epochal, at least for me. I haven't truly interacted with a shared Compendium or QuestMap project since more than 10 years ago with QuestMap on a LAN, and even then it wasn't over the 'net. I have been happily interacting with this project for the last couple of days, seeing the potential of true collaborative (that is, asynchronous and multi-user) Compendium.
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