I was, however, very pleasantly surprised. Very. The session dealt with storytelling in organizations. Not just the dominant stories told by the organizations themselves, but also the shadow stories that cut in some way against the stories the organization tells about itself.
The dominant story of your organization can be found all around you--in the layout of your office building, the placement of people inside their offices (or cubes), in how you are greeted by the reception desk, to the posters, art, and other images on its walls. Look around you: what is your organization’s dominant story?
But is it the only story?
The need for both dominant and shadow (liminal) narratives is a large part of Tyler’s work. The dominant story need not always be bad (and in fact at PSU is quite good), but we lose something by not attending to the shadow stories around us. In fact, the greater the dissonance between the shadow stories and the dominant ones, the more important it is for us to pay attention.
How do organizations do this? Well, though that’s the topic for next week’s session, I actually have a few thoughts about how it’s done now. Let me tell you a story...
Once upon a time, ‘back in the day’ if you will, I worked at an organization where the production of courses for distant students was paramount. Pressures during particular times of the year were very high, and while the organization was really good at saying, “we support you--we’ll back you,” when push came to shove it was often “we’ll just have to manage this one time, for the good of the order...” There was a lot of turnover, because folks felt so totally overworked, felt that they couldn’t take time to professionally develop, and a host of other reasons.
Enter one of my co-workers. A creative, out-of-the box (box? we don’t need no stinkin’ box!) thinker, she hatched a creative idea that took root and blossomed beyond our wildest imaginings. We launched a little “news” magazine called The Garlic. Modeled after The Onion, it was an underground publication, basically making fun of everything and everyone around us in the most ridiculous way. We put the AVP in a Lenin hat, created a fictional Frankenstein of a ‘perfect’ employee, and also wrote one story where the director needed to attend ‘vegetable sensitivity training’ because he kept offering people produce from his garden. In short, it was ridiculous. Full of hyperbole and exaggeration.However, the items we made fun of were things that frustrated us at work (well, maybe except for the produce. That was just funny). Course tanking in enrollments? Simple! Write a story where we enroll everyone attending a football game, and the problem is fixed! Subject-matter experts not delivering content on time? Put in an ad to “grow your own faculty!” Overcrowding an issue? Photoshop your own “bunk desks” to create more space!
Grow your own faculty!
The issues were hilarious, and of course, word got out. However, instead of shutting us down, we were encouraged this medium as an outlet. It was fun, it was safe (being behind password-protection), and better yet, it gave the administrative types the ability to see what irked us without it becoming personally threatening. I’d like to say that some of the items written about were taken care of due to the stories we crafted, but I don’t know if that was ever the case. It did, however, give us a creative outlet for our shadow stories that we didn’t have before. And it prevented those from blowing up in anyone’s face.
It also created one of the most collegial and cohesive work environments I’d ever been in. Everyone had a story, and ideas poured in. Which brings me to the main point I’m hoping we cover next week--how do we create social spaces constructed for listening to these shadow stories in a way that helps and enables the organization to succeed? And how do we build the trust needed so the storytellers come forth?
Twitter continues to build community in the spaces I seem to be occupying more and more. I was first introduced to this space by Brad Kozlek way back in November of 2006. There was some flurry around this platform at PSU in early 2007, but after the TLT Symposium that year, it seemed to fall off for a lot of folks. This year, however, and again before the Symposium, it really seemed to take off. The community of users around PSU has grown significantly, and I have found connections between folks whom I might never have met otherwise.
Micala's Photo of Her Tweet Meet Nametag
The community spontaneously had what we are calling Tweet Meet yesterday at lunch. It grew out of an idea from James Endres Howell Tweeting a less-than-enticing meal last week. I'd just come from a very good lunch at a local Chinese restaurant, and we ended up deciding (again, via Twitter) to have a lunch there the following week. At that point, Dana Carlisle Kletchka suggested that the Twitnesses (James's term--and I love it) should also be able to come. And thus it began.
We ended up having 12 folks from around campus joining around a table at the same Chinese restaurant, discussing the nature of Twitter, community, and identity. The great part about this, at least to me, was that no one at the table knew everyone else at the table. Given that, there were still some surprising connections between people whom I never thought would know each other. The connections occurred in a myriad of ways, too, from having the same hairdresser to working on Second Life projects together, to meeting over other social networking technologies that might be used for students at Penn State, to just being Twitter friends.
Cole Camplese, who is teaching a graduate class on community, identity, and design, was there, and he talked a lot about how his students are finding the Twitter space a useful one to make deeper connections with each other, even though they occupy the same physical classroom for his class. This is the most useful thing I'm finding, as well--Twitter as a way to create and deepen connections that can also occur in the physical spaces I occupy.
Note: I still owe my post on the Symposium. Haven't forgotten, but just haven't gotten there yet. Maybe Twitter also appeals to me because 140 characters is a lot less pressure, huh?
The Pirate's Dilemma
Traditional games have players in the same place playing the same game. Online games generally have distributed players playing the same game on the same site. Web "games" (for lack of a better term) have players in the same place playing the same game on (possibly) different sites (e.g., when you have a resident class do an online scavenger hunt). Here, you have totally distributed players and teams, all playing the same game--but on different sites. There is some aggregation here (like the Colorwars site itself), but the aggregation is the sole means of keeping the game together.
Let's examine the first challenge. I'm to take a picture of myself in my team uniform throwing a rock, paper, or scissors. I upload the photo to Flickr and tag it in a particular way. Tomorrow evening we have a bracket style tournament to see who continues. I'm assuming that they'll use the tags to pull these things in and determine in some technical way who goes "up against" whom.
This to me is really mashing up (for lack of a better term) the concepts of Web 2.0, community, online gaming, and a host of other things (silliness among them). But I like it. It's taking the scavenger hunt/webquest idea one further. It remains to be seen how it'll all turn out, but I'm really looking forward to it!
From the 2006 TED conference. A talk from Sir Ken Robinson
about creativity and education.
Robinson defines creativity as "the process of having original ideas that have
value." This comes about by using an interdisciplinary way of seeing
things. In other words, creative people are generalists, not specialists. But
what are we training people to be?
The talk information notes: “Sir Ken
Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an
education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it.
“Why don't we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it's
because we've been educated to become good workers, rather than creative
thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies--far from being cultivated
for their energy and curiosity--are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible
consequences.”
Robinson says, “The education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip mine the Earth—for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us.” What should be the future of education, and how can we stop educating children out of their creativity?
Video is 20 minutes long, but well worth every minute.
Interview with Scott Gray
Wow. So powerful. Lots of stuff to think about here.
I suggested last week that my group set up a series of "punch meetings" to keep us on track for a project we're currently working on. These would be quick, half-hour meetings to discuss progress on action items and to figure out what each of us needed to do next. Those of you who know me know that I'm not a big fan of meetings. Actually, I should clarify: I'm not a big fan of overly long or useless meetings. If a meeting is over an hour in length, I think it should be a working meeting, not a talking meeting. Know what I mean?
The long and short of it was that no one but me had heard the term before--so my colleague Brian Panulla looked for it. Nothing. So in true "former English teacher" fashion, I consulted the Oxford English dictionary. Nope--no "punch meeting," but enough of the definitions there made me feel justified in using (coining?) the term. Here's what I found:
From various definitions in the OED:
- punch list n. chiefly U.S. a list of items such as small repairs, unfinished work, etc., that must be completed in order to fulfil a construction contract, typically created at the end of a project.
- 2. fig. colloq. (orig. U.S.). A high or impressive level of forcefulness or effectiveness; vigour, effectiveness, impact.
- B. adj. Short and thickset; squat, stout. Cf. PUNCHY adj.1 Now rare (Sc. and Eng. regional (north.) in later use).
- III. To strike or hit.
Thus, my definition of "punch meeting" would be a short meeting where the goal is to hit a list of items that must be completed with the maximum level of impact.
Punch Meeting.. Get it? :)
The last two days, Morning Edition on NPR has done a series regarding online learning and distance education. They focused on the University of Illinois at Springfield. The first piece was interesting, in that the instructor featured was teaching a class synchronously over a tool similar to Adobe Connect or Elluminate Live. The model seemed to be more synchronous than asynchronous. Interestingly, she and one other student were the only ones with microphones, as well.
Today's story focused on the tools faculty use for teaching online, including the ubiquitous blogs and wikis. Faculty members were advocating tools such as blogspot mainly to allow their students to continue working when the university's sites were down. Makes me wonder a bit about their infrastructure out there.
The other giggle I got was yesterday when the NPR reporter referred to posting things asynchronously on a "Billboard." Even my husband (in the car with me at the time) said, "I think they mean bulletin board, right?"
More information and the recordings can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16709807.
