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Teaching Web 2.0 skills without technology

February 5, 2009 By Collaboration, Learning 5 Comments

I was thinking the other day about how to teach kids in school Web 2.0 skills, prompted by my friend Brad Ovenell-Carter’s blog post on figuring out how young is too young,

Now my kids, don’t go to school, but they work actively in non-technological settings with collaboration.   They spend a lot of time together co-creating games, scenarios, worlds and activities.   My daughter, at 11, is helping out in a friend’s store and she helped train other workers on the inventory system the other day before taking inventory with her new trainees.   She has also been working with another friend to start up an Amnesty International group on our home island.

The discussion on Brad’s blog has been about critical skills in reading, learning how to read content that is user produced on the web.   To me Web 2.0 is about co-creating, so responsible writing is a key piece of the work, so in thinking more about how to teach this I thought about what a Web 2.0 based exam room would look like.

What if we tested kids on collaboration instead of individual achievement?   What if a class of 30 kids was given an exam one day but instead of every student getting a test paper there would only be six papers in the whole room.   The class would need to divide into groups of five and complete the exam together.   The Pass mark would be 95% and they would be allowed to talk to each other, steal ideas, look in books, phone a friend, whatever.   Each team of five would be responsible for the overall quality of their own answers, so they would also have to make quality decisions.   If there were several long form questions, essays and the like, they could divide the work up, or have a couple of kids draw up an outline and bring it to the group for polishing.

In most school settings, this would be called “cheating.”   In the real world this is how it works.

It’s not just about critical reading or accurate writing…it’s about providing real opportunities to practice collaborating and noticing that when you work together, you get a better result than if you work on your own.

Anyone know any teachers out there that have tried something like this?

On the road

February 5, 2009 By Uncategorized

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Off to Kalamazoo, Michigan to attend a retreat with the Fetzer Institute on Indigenous leadership.   We’ll gather together 24 or so folks from around the US who are working with leadership in Indigenous communities, organizations and governments and ask some interesting questions about the kinds of worldviews that drive our current practice of leadership, moving us away from traditional collective leadership capacities and towards individual leadership and scientific management models.

The photo above is the scene I just watched, the sun rising over Mount Baker.   My friend Dustin Rivers says that the [e Sḵwxwú7mesh word for this time of day is kwakweya, the moment when the sun peeks up over the mountains.

New day dawning.

Why invitation matters

February 4, 2009 By Invitation One Comment

From George Nemeth some a link to this post, which I repeat in full:

Today, about 35 local and regional organizations, foundations, companies and banks came together to support and actively engage the City of East Cleveland in its strategy for revitalization and transformation. No, not three, but 35. It began with an extremely simple concept, but often hard to do. We asked. We invited individuals to attend. We asked for engagement and questions. We asked for people to envision new partnerships, not based on previous relationships, but new ones. We invited individuals in a personal way to participate in a discussion.

I am not implying that “asking” by itself, is a remedy or endpoint. I think it is a constant and often gets over shadowed by the need to get the results, and not as a primary method of authentic networks, and allowing potential partners to respond in a manner that allows for dialogue, shared points of view, and connection/collaboration.

Also, I am not arguing that asking can itself turnaround our nation’s cities, but far too often, government operates without asking, without invitations, and just does. Whether in a cloak room or boardroom, under the glare of lights or behind closed doors, creating new visions for our region, demand asking, questions, challenging points of view, and ensuring that, as we create new democratic networks, that the people participate and lead. There is just no other way.

Qualities of noticing: building a personal self

February 4, 2009 By Facilitation, Practice 2 Comments

Following a great talk from Gil Fronsdel on how self is constructed, I had a nice insight yesterday about personal identity.

Fronsdel says that when something happens, there are three things going on:

  1. There is the reality
  2. There is what we think about the reality
  3. There is the “I” that is thinking.

These are conditional, that is, they depend on and arise from each other.   When I see something, I think something about it and my self in strengthened.   For example:

  1. It’s raining today
  2. I hate rainy days.
  3. I’m not suited to living in a rainforest!

In Buddhism, we get locked into suffering when we think ABOUT something and then believe that thought.   Who we are, our core identity, is in fact a set of stories we believe about our preferences about reality.

As a facilitator, this simple construction is a very important tool to use to reach clarity before working with a group.   Imagine this construction:

  1. People are yelling at each other.
  2. They are in conflict and I hate conflict.
  3. I am a peacemaker.

So yes, but in the moment, you are going to suffer some when the meeting you are running counters your experience of yourself.     You will think that you are failing if you are “a peacemaker” and yet your participants ar eyelling at each other.   As a facilitator, when I get caught in that kind of thinking, I notice that I immediately become quite useless to the group.   Why?   Because I have left reality and I am spinning around in my thinking about reality, suffering and self-involved as my identity and ego get challenged.

People who have no thoughts about conflict are incredibly resourceful when yelling arises.   They simply see yelling, they are able to listen and observe and notice what is happening.   But those of us that are still working on our comfort with conflict might shy away from it, shrink away in fear, try to paper over differences or deny the reality of the moment in favour of a temporary comfort.

This is why it’s always good to work with people, especially with people who are afraid of different things than you are.

Working on this stuff is a key personal practice for me.   I do it with meditation as well as working with Byron Katie’s method, called “The Work” to inquire into the thoughts and beliefs that are causing me suffering.   My partner Caitlin Frost uses The Work as a cornerstone to her coaching practice, and it’s a real gift to have that available in our little firm.   It lets me do much more than I ever could on my own.   I’m curious wht your experiences are and what your practices are to challenge the constructions of mind that limit your own work in certain situations.

Tomorrow, a post on what this process looks like at the collective level.

Simple conditions for real engagement

February 3, 2009 By Uncategorized 2 Comments

Thinking today about the challenge of engaging community for real change, and I am playing around with two simple on the surface, but difficult to execute ideas. I think though that if these ideas are executed, it creates the best possible conditions for sustained action and transformative change.

The ideas, expressed as patterns, are: operate from a clear centre, and embody your future now.

I was riding the ferry with my friend Patti DeSante who is at the moment in deep Zen training with Roshi Joan Halifax and exploring many aspects of embodied practice in the world. We were discussing what it takes to act fearlessly and enter into transformative work in the world. She shared a story with me that was simple but important. She told me about her days as an energy broker and how the sole reason her company existed was to make money. It was a simple and powerful centre around which the company organized itself. It provided an easy way to evaluate what kind of action was worth pursuing. It allowed the company, and the people in the company, to be out in the world fearlessly, knowing clearly why they are there.

In other words, the company had a centre. To me the idea of centre is more than a mission statement or a vision statement. It is instead an assailable reason for being. Something you can feel, that is core to who you are, out of which you act. As Brian Arthur has said, in martial arts, if you think, you are dead. So to with any fearless action: if you need to think about why you are doing it, you are not operating from your centre. When you drink water you are acting out of an unstated need, a powerful and compelling centre that makes drinking a natural act. In martial arts we train in acting from that place as well. Developing a centre means developing clarity. If you haven’t got it, you move in the world from a position of confusion, and that kind of moving creates lots of problems: unnecessary effort, poor choices, emotional stress.

Developing a shared centre is not something one does overnight, or in a weekend retreat. In involves much work and diligent attention to being in relationship with each other, discovering what is true and powerful for us and exploring the way that centre can unfold into the world. Otto Scharmer provides an excellent map for the work that is required to do this, and most of the facilitation and dialogue processes I use are designed explicitly to, with enough time, connect to that source and act from it.

The second pattern is the pattern of embodiment. This is also about operating with clarity and it requires a deep discernment process. Embodiment simply means to bring into practice the principles of the world you are seeking to create. For example in the work we did on Vancouver Island with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team, we chose “Children at the Centre” as our primary centre from which we operated. In practice this meant all kinds of things, including meeting whenever possible with children present, or placing their pictures in the centre when we met. It meant making a practice of thinking first about how children would live with the decisions we were making. It meant taking inspiration from children for the work we were doing. When planning our engagement process, we asked ourselves “How do children inspire us to engage with them?”

Embodying these beliefs and centres in the world is a kind of deep practice. It makes daily work a spiritual practice, and results in tremendous emotional power and momentum. Taken to the broadest level. It finds it’s practical expression in Gandhi’s quest to transform Indian society by implementing his beliefs in peace, non-violence and equality at every turn, even being sure to clean toilets as a mark of solidarity with the lower castes..

Creating a centre, and finding its creative expression in the world. Sounds easy!