So lately I've been thinking a lot about communities in general and my running community in particular, No surprise since this is the focus of my dissertation. But what is a little surprising is the difficulty I'm having teasing out my community of runners from my other communities, such as what I would consider to be my work, or professional, community. 

You see, we are a community inter-weaved within a larger community. I believe this is primarily due to two factors. There is the continued blurring between virtual and terrestrial worlds brought about by  social applications, mobile devices, and the seemingly ubiquitous connectivity. We no longer see a difference between the worlds rather they are two sides of the same coin.

Second, and more pertinent to my study, is the fact that online communities are no longer limited to being single application-based. We are dispersed across several applications, Twitter, Facebook, our own blog spaces, and iTunes. This is a recent phenomena. Until a few years ago communities could be safely defined and tied into a single application. This afforded a sense of privacy. Kind of like a separation of church and state. I go to this application to be Jeff the Penn State employee and another application to be Jeff the runner. But now, my running connections flow freely amongst my other connections, be they work, family, friends, school, or other interest groups. I found this also to be true for the others I would consider to be part of my running community.

This raises some challenging concerns. Regarding my research, it makes it more difficult to define my running community for the purpose of my dissertation. Lacking the defined boundary of a single application I'll need to rely on my own constructed definition to frame the subjects. How do I label one as a member of my running community? Is it by role? Are they a fellow runner? I believe that will have to be the key. I can't base it on interaction because of how these relationships overlap. I have non-runner friends who offer support, encouragement, advice on my running and fitness, as well as other things and I have runner friends who play integral roles in other areas of my life.

The second challenge transcends my studly, although it will impact it greatly. That is the need, real or perceived, for self-censorship. Because our discourse is so public and so inter-twined we all self censor out of a feeling of necessity. Will something I say in the context of my running affect my job or my personal relationships? For example, I tend to do my weekday runs over lunch. Does posting them to Twitter and Facebook, including the time of day, impact my co-workers perception of me and the value I bring? Nothing has ever been said to me yet to substantiate my fears but that doesn't quiet the little voice in the back of my mind. Do others censor themselves because of the overlap of communities?

The other day I made two updates on Twitter that combined drew a unique response.

The first concerned the release of the latest Pew Internet report on social media and young adults. My tweet included a link to the report as well as an editorial comment that Pew puts out interesting stuff.


Tweet 1 about the Pew Internet report

The second wan an RT (re-tweet in the vernacular) about an article on a class two colleagues of mine are teaching on disruptive technologies in the classroom. Again I included the link along with the editorial comment, "cool stuff by cool guys."


Tweet 2 about the Disruptive Technology class

To which another colleague responded that she found the contradiction in my last two updates "amusing." And I thought, What a perfect response!

Life is nothing if not a pool of contradiction. A visceral pool where right-wrong, good-bad, yes-no, happy-sad make up the water we swim in. These dichotomous waves smash up against each other creating the beautiful gray world in which we live. The ebb and flow of chance and circumstance is why what is right today can be wrong tomorrow all depending upon which part of the pool you happen to be in at any given moment. Simultaneously, someone swimming in just a slightly different part of the pool may see things quite differently.

Yet somehow it all works.

Both of my updates centered on the notion of social applications and young people and on the surface contradicted each other. According to the Pew report young adults (18-29 yrs) do not blog much nor do they use Twitter. Preferring instead to use social networking applications such as Facebook to communicate with friends. Yet, the outcomes of the Disruptive Technology class showed that, in particular, Twitter really caught on as the tool of choice. Students were also required to blog but these posts did not generate as much buzz as the students Twitter updates according to the article.

So how can this be?

I think there are several factors at play here. First off, while the technologies may no be familiar the devices the students use to access them, smart phones and laptops, are so there is a measure of familiarity with how the tool may work.

Second, I think it may have helped the class that these spaces were not where the students prefer to hang out. Separation of personal and professional space could be like separation of church and state. This may have helped keep an air of formality for the class space and eliminated the creepy factor of faculty hanging out where the students live.

Third, I think human nature came into play. People, in this case the students, want positive experiences so most will look at the situation through this lens and remember it that way.

But there are still some outstanding questions. Does this approach facilitate learning? Particularly when the class is not about the technology? Are professors willing to go where the student input takes them? Is there still time for reflection?

But these are questions for another post. My point here is to illustrate a good example as to why data at a meta level may not be so in any given classroom. I'll bet most of the students in the Disruptive Technology  class did not blog or tweet prior to the class and most probably won't continue to do so after the class ends. But if it worked for that particular experience, if the students got what they needed, then wasn't it worth it?

A beautiful contradiction.

I find this commercial very disturbing. It features a grown man coming in and asking for a specific Taco Bell employee he thinks gave him an inside deal. I find it creepy on two levels. First, the fact that an adult would come in and expect an employee to, in effect, steal him food. Second, the employee is presumably a minor, or just of age, so there's the adult/child dynamic at play.

I get that the deal applies to everyone and this guy's just dense. But, that's what makes it creepy. He doesn't know that. He's pressuring a young employee to do something he knows is not right.

Honestly, it doesn't make me want to eat at Taco Bell. What were the marketing folks thinking?

The underlying current in all the ELI 2010 sessions I attended concerned managing the flow of information in a small pieces loosely joined world. The concern was how can these pieces be aggregate in a way that something meaningful could be gleaned from them. This was true for students, faculty, and the program at large.

The CMS, and it's notion of being a knowledge container, is rather quickly becoming dated. For students this is good. Information flows like it flows in the real world. However, for the traditional academic model it presents a challenge. If instructors, and be extension the programs they teach in, cannot control the flow of information then, how can they make sense of it?

The rise of social media has made everyone a player in the game. Smaller, stronger portable devices have made participation mobile, a participatory sport. Each in their own way have put pressure on how a CMS is used. Once a closed container where the instructor controlled the spigot, information now needs to reside in other places and flow freely in and out of the CMS.

In short, these technologies have made it possible, no necessary, for the educational experience to move outside a set of individual closed buckets, classes, and morph into a more holistic experience.

We encourage students to create electronic portfolios to reflect and talk about their entire college experience. For some classes they even put their homework there and faculty use the PSU Voices option and a class tag to aggregate assignments. Students then take the feedback from their peers and instructor and create a mash-up of their best work and put it on their portfolio's showcase page for potential employers to see.

We're beginning to look at tools on the program level where information from all courses can be gathered and sorted both for the purpose of course evaluation and also for program evaluation and accreditation.

As designers we need to keep this new model in mind when designing courses. A model of tapping into the flow of information that exists in the natural rhythm of the world rather than a model of collecting it in a constrained environment.

This report actually covers the last two week and begins with me finally facing the reality that I'd let myself slip. After 11 months of sporadic, to non-attendance at Weight Watchers (I'm a lifetime member) I rejoined, tail between my legs and with 17lbs to lose to get back to my goal weight.

My weight gain was the gradual result of not watching what I eat. I certainly exercise enough. One of my problems is I'm a stress eater. I associate food with comfort and I've had some stress in my life that, quite frankly, I let get the best of me. But that is not the entire reason for my weight gain. The fact is, I fell back onto some bad food habits. No excuses. That's the reality of it.

But over the last two weeks I've begun the process of righting myself. Sticking to program (I do the points system) I've dropped over 5 lbs and feel a whole lot better about things and where they are headed.

This past week I was able to get in several long, satisfying outdoor runs. A 10 miler last Sunday, two eight milers while I was in Austin for a conference, and a 12 miler today. Fingers crossed, I'm looking ahead.



Sunday, January 24, 2010

An e-book, short for electronic book, also known as a digital book, is an e-text that forms the digital media equivalent of a conventional printed book, sometimes restricted with a digital rights management system. An E-book, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English, is "an electronic version of a printed book which can be read on a personal computer or hand-held device designed specifically for this purpose." E-books are usually read on dedicated hardware devices known as e-Readers or e-book devices. Some personal computers and cell phones can also be used, especially to read documents in pdf format.

Attached is a summary paper documenting my initial findings while exploring the Kindle and the Kindle DX.

Initial_Thoughts_on_the_Kindle_for_Education.pdf

If we hold a workshop in the woods and no faculty show, did we make a sound? Did we achieve our goal? Did we have an impact?

That was the over-arching question we tackled in our workshop yesterday on the challenges facing IT Leadership. Specifically the focus was on the diffusion and adoption of new initiatives. From getting buy-in to scaling support if and when the initiative takes off. The problems we face are the same, whether a large or small institution, the only difference being the economy of scale. Getting buy-in from the key players. Marketing and promotion Scaling support as we move from pilot to production. And so our are solutions.

We do outreach, attending campus and college events. We place advertisements in specific publications and send announcements through various listservs. We meet with deans and department heads. We target key faculty to play, we put on workshops, and develop community support systems. And yet we do not feel satisfied. Why is that?

I'm starting to realize it's the nature of the business we're in. We're the diffusion folks. The kids who get to explore the potential of revolutionary ideas and amazing new technological afordances. And our job is to identify the ideas and tools we think can have a big impact on our audience. It's a wild place to be full of unknowns and adventurous leaps of faith. We'll get lost and things will break. Discovery is fraught with frustration and anxiety along with the rush. And that's the rub.

See, a big part of our audience fears to tip-toe into the woods where we reside. And with good reason. Like us they have many demands on their time and competing interests pulling them in multiple directions. Generally when they look to us they're looking for something that's really going to work and if not save them a lot of time at least make their lives easier. Well that's not necessarily what those of us on the diffusion frontier offer. That's more the realm of training and support services.

We play in the forest of flux, uncertainty, and mess. It's a primordial place of creation. And it's just not for everybody. So why do we do it? For me, it's the thrill of journey. The quest for that one thing that will revolutionize everything. Problem is, there's a thousand failed revolutions for every successful one. And we may not be around for it. That's the nature of the beast.

What brings us together is we're all runners. Marathoners. Ultra-marathoners. Triathletes. Whatever. We all enter at different points in our life though, for the most part we tend to be around middle-age. We're teachers, techies, marketers, consultants, and fire fighters. In relationships and single. Some recently available for the first time in a long time. All preferences be they sexual, religious, political are welcome. Some come into the community accomplished athletes and some come in new. For a lot of us it was the desire to lose the weight we piled up over the years that started us down this path.

Why do we feel the need to connect with others like us? What do we get out of it?

There's the obvious--the human need to connect with those like us, Those who walk in our shoes. Those who know what a blister at mile ten means and understand the supernatural urge to eat a quart of ice cream before bed. There's a comfort level in an instant empathetic support system. Kind of like the ones the human books had hiding in the woods at the end of Fahrenheit 451. There's this primitive urge to be among our own. For us runners movement has become synonymous with life.

Out of this basic and visceral connection other needs are met. We share training tips, experiences, and lessons learned. We share resources, articles, and recipes. We report out the progress of our training, with no prompting, we share our triumphs and tears.

Sometimes we even talk about things that overlap our common bond, such as family, work, and school. We communicate by podcast and blog posts and update each other via Twitter and Facebook. We friend friends of friends without question. We assume it's one of us reaching out.

Over the course of my dissertation I hope to glean some insight into my running community and why we are the way we are. I hope to add to the growing understanding of these informal learning communities and how social networking applications have brought up unprecedented growth and dynamic change to them. But, I'm also looking for something more personal. I'm hoping to gain some understanding as to why I am the way that I am.

Last night I had this dream. I was a member of the Australian Olympic Quaohoage team. Why I was not a member of the American Olympic Quaohoage team I have no idea. We were in the Olympic village in final preparation for our event. I soon got the impression I was the star of the team and the best hope for a gold medal. Problem was I had no idea what Quaohoage was nor how to play. Moving through the village, which bore an unusual resemblance to the playground where I grew up, my teammates looked at me. Some with eyes for of disdain for the outsider and apparent prima dona. Some with eyes of hope. Some refused to look at me at all.

The coach called us to gather around for final instructions while we fueled up. I remember trying to make a protein shake but I put too much whey powder in and ended up with a clumpy goop. Next we made our way through the village, which was more like an obstacle course. We climbed over boxes and crates made of thin splintery wood. We climbed a ladder precariously balanced on a board resting on two cinder blocks. And so on.

It turns out that was the sport of Quaohoage. You had to speedwalk through an obstacle course. I had no idea how I was to do this as we made our way into Olympic Stadium and the starting line. The other competitors were dressed appropriately in running shorts and tank tops while my clothes were loose and ill-fitting for the event. They were also speedwalking, with the pronounced twisting of the hips needed to move fas while keeping one foot on the ground at all times while I ambled.

I had no idea how I was going to comptete. My only recourse was not to think and instead rely on whatever innate knowledge of the sport I possessed.