Dave’s Whiteboard

He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
— P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

When it comes to Twitter (and I still don’t come to Twitter that often), I’m finding, if not nuggets, at least flakes of gold.  A little while ago, Harold Jarche sent this quotation: “”Information overload does not exist. Failing information strategies do exist. ”

Harold included this link to an interview with Ton Zijlstra, who describes himself as “a networked individual in a networked world.”

So, the disgruntled part first: on reading that quotation, and bits of the interview, my first thought was, “Yeah, yeah, hyperlinked, overcaffeinated.” Especially when I read, “My networking activities are a continuous thing, never really switching off.”

Let me tell you: I switch off.

But that’s not the real point.  It’s easy to stay inside a comfort zone.  Democrats tend not to read columns written by Republicans (except maybe to yell at them); people with school-age children find their lives centering on kids, school, sports.

So lately, when I feel far from gruntled, I’ve been trying to step back (or, if I’m getting paid, metacogitate) and explore why I feel that way.  I’ve learned (more than once) that feelings are indicators of internal states, not external realities.

Zijlstra says in the interview,

My strategy to avoid overload is to embrace social media entirely. I do not watch television, don’t read any newspapers or magazines anymore, nor do I read books related to my profession; I hear it all through my networks. The authors are in my network, and I usually hear things much quicker and more nuanced. I trust my networks to give me the feedback to detect those patterns.

Well, I see newspapers, and the magazines that come here, as one more channel — more concentrated in some ways, not really a network.  I don’t yet have all that much confidence that my networks include all the authors or authorities I need.

But — Zijlstra is making sense.  First, he’s not telling me to be like him; he’s just sharing how he works.  I took the implicit invitation and visited his blog, Interdependent Thoughts. And from there he took me to this presentation.

Slide 27 in that set is “The Tools I Use.” I like how he presents them:

• Jaiku, what I do
• Twitter, what I say I do
• Plazes, where I am
• Dopplr, where I will be
• Blogs, what I think
• …and so on.

The half-dozen or so slides after that are worth reading — an explanation of why he thinks as he thinks. One highlight (my rework of slide 36):

• More connections –> Active personal role
• More speed –> Other information skills
• More information –> Different tools and work forms

I’m still skeptical about multitasking — evolution doesn’t happen in one generation, or in five — but Zijlstra helps convince me that we can get better at task management and task switching. I know that I need to do both: control the flow (the way you’d turn off the TV or click away from breaking news) and develop the cognitive muscle to switch flexibly when I need to.

So, disgruntlement — a frown, a roll of the eyes when coming across an idea I’m quick to pass unfavorable judgment on — is becoming for me a cue to explore further. There are limits — I have no interest at all in hearing why the earth is only 6,000 years old, I lack both skill and interest for fantasy sports teams. When it comes to work and learning, though, I’m prodding myself to work at learning.

Gold-panning photo by anglerp1.

I’ve been [ thinking | grumbling | puzzling ] lately about the notion of “friend” on social sites like Facebook.  In turn, that leads to musing about “friends” in general.  To the surprise of some, people had friends even in the long-ago days before MySpace (or AOL, or usenet).  And “friend” is ofter a generalization that conceals a discrimination between groups like these:

• People with whom you have a close, unguarded personal connection
• Coworkers with whom you’ve build up increased openness
• Colleagues (people outside of your immediate work) you have good relationships with
• “Acquaintances with optimism” — people you know in some limited context and are not opposed to knowing better

The commonality seems to be that in each group, the two parties both have a sense of benefiting from the connection.  (One definition of friend, as in the first bullet above, is someone who, when you make a fool of yourself, understands it’s not a permanent condition.)

The difference is in the context of the connection.  With coworkers and colleagues, you have some more-or-less limited realm in which most of your connection takes place: the project, the work group, the profession, the area of interest.  I’ve only spoke to Harold Jarche once, I think, but think of him as a valued colleague because of interests we share, and because I benefit from things he talks about in forums i visit (e.g., his blog, sites that he and I both visit).

I’ve just joined the Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals group, and found myself oddly hesitant to build yet another circle of network friends.  I don’t think I’m all that unfriendly; I think my own tendency is to begin with one-to-one contact (email, comments on a blog, that sort of thing) and only after some undefined period maek the status official.

Maybe that’s because I resist a tendency to think of “e-networks” as different in kind from other networks.  (And that’s leaving aside my cranky wish that people would stop putting “e-” in front of — and “2.0″ after — everything.  I expect to see Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese 2.0 at the store very soon.)

At the center of my networks is… me.  It’s like being six once again, only with a driver’s license and a mortgage.  More seriously, my networks combine face-to-face connections, distance connections like with my cousin Frank, whom I’ve seen in person twice in 30 years), people I connect to via phone or email as the mood strikes me, and people I deal with mainly in a single venue.

One benefit of multiple channels for networking is that each has the possibility of informing the other.  I can look at my tendency not to offer friendship (in the Facebook sense) and at least think about whether someone else wants to be invited, rather than to invite.  And I can’t worry about electronic non-response any more than I do elsewhere.

One cycle that I’m seeing repeated in various online venues gets labeled “bankruptcy.”  Someone declares email bankruptcy and erases everything in his in-box.  Another person realizes she can’t really track 550 blogs in NetVibes.  A third person decides that if there were only twelve apostles, perhaps tracking 1,200 folks via Twitter is becoming a twitch.

So, you pays your money (or you downloads your open-source) and you takes your choice.  I’m not always as dogmatic as I sound, and I can seem more shy than necessary.

On that last point, though, I treasure Garrison Keillor’s observation.  He said that folks are always telling shy people to get over it.  He’s not convinced shyness is something that needs getting over, and has seen many people who would benefit from having a lot more shyness than they do.

Doorbell photo by Darwin Bell.

A recent Jay Cross post led me to Laleh Shahidi’s post on virtual distance.  In that three-links-out way, she’s discussing a book by Karen Sobel Lojesk, Uniting the Virtual Workforce.

I don’t know Lojesk or her book, but her definition of virtual distance, according to Shahidi, is “the perceived distance between two or more individuals, groups, or organizations that is brought on by the use of electronic versus face-to-face communications.”

This is a useful concept, though I don’t think the “perceived distance” is necessarily brought on by the use of technology.  I don’t think I’ve spent eight hours altogether with my friend and colleague Patti Shank in the ten or twelve years that I’ve known her. Electronic commucations helped reduce the distance between us — but only because we had shared directions to travel.

in other words, distance is as distance does.  “Distant” itself has roots in distare, a Latin verb meaning “to stand part.” From my own experience, you can feel pretty distant from the accounts-receivable folks at the other end of the hall, or those manic sales guys on the third floor.  At the same time, you can feel as though you’re a part of the field staff in Portland.

What kinds of things make for distance?

• Apparent lack of common interests, needs, or goals.  In organizations, this is the silo mentality.
• Apparent lack of contact.  If you tend to hang around only with people who have blogs (or only with people who go to happy hour, or only with people who share your political views), then you’re not learning how to hang around with other folks.
• Physical separation.  Technology or no, if you’ve never worked with someone in another time zone (or in another country, or on another continent), at first it feels… distant.
• Plain old strangeness.  If the other person (or group) doesn’t do things the way you usually do, doesn’t use the same terms, doesn’t follow the same process — the differences get in the way.

Clearly, technological tools can help reduce the distance, which is what Shahidi and Lojesk are talking about.  Early adopters and techno-bandwagon types  might try restraining their impulses at times — you don’t necessarily want to try linking the training, manufacturing, and sales people through a brand-new wiki embedded in Ning as you launch the product in Germany, Korea, and Canada during the same month.  In that kind of situation, yes, the technology in the short run will increase the virtual distance.

I’m thinking about ways to reduce virtual distance — things like taking your time, listening at least as much as you talk, confirming in non-confrontational ways.  Humor can work, though as a tool it requires more skill than you’d think. Tragedy’s easy; comedy’s hard.

I don’t think most Americans saw the wildly popular I Am Canadian beer commercial, and I’m pretty sure (as a Canadian who grew up in the States) that they’d miss at least some of the subtext.  But, in the spirit of dealing with virtual distance, see what you think:

Some time ago, I came across Boxes and Arrows, a journal concerned with design: graphic design, interaction design, information architecture and so on.

In the September 2008 issue, Jens Jacobsen talks about information architecture for audio.  As he points out, audio is linear. “You can only consume it in a linear fashion and you have to listen to it at a given speed.”

When beginning an audio-related project, ask yourself whether audio is the right medium for your message. In some cases, text is a better choice and in other cases it’s video. Don’t use audio just because you can. If you are certain audio is the best choice, there are several fields to help inform how you implement it.

Jacobsen offers several guidelines from different fields. It’s worth reading the entire post; these are simply highlights from different field — like information architecture:

• State the length. Let people know how long the audio’s going to be.
• Introduce the topic. “In printed text…[this] might seem hackneyed, but with audio… it’s best not to jump right into the topic.”
• Provide orientation from time to time. Let the listener know where he as and what’s coming next. In a long piece, consider giving an option to skip sections via the interface.

From journalism:

• Keep it short. (My opinion: because it’s one way, five minutes of audio feels a lot longer than five minutes of conversation.)
• Repeat often. Jakobsen means a summary at the end, but also repeat the main subjects or themes.  Don’t refer to them by pronouns or synonyms.  You know what you’re talking about, but your listener has nothing to go on but short-term memory.
• Take advantage of the possibilities. Change the style of speech, the tone, the speed.

I especially like the suggestion, “Don’t overuse the thesaurus.” If you’re calling people learners, don’t change them into users, then stakeholders, then students, then knowledge partners.
Suggestions from usability engineering:

• Design for the target audience. “Convince your design team to produce content for the users, not its creators.”
• Create personas. Represent your target audience in the audio.
• Create scenarios. You’ve got those personas sitting around waiting for osmething to do.
• Test with users.

On that last point: in my experience, there isn’t a lot of testing of audio for things like online learning. It’s as if having a professional voice (or [shudder] your boss’s boss’s voice) will overcome any shortcomings in the text. That’s the audio equivalent of believing that if you choose the right font, your text will be more understandable — as opposed to easier to read.

Although interface guru Jakob Nielson recommends usability testing with “only five users,” you can see from the chart in his article that it’s possible to benefit from tryouts with just two or three people.

There’s all kinds of audio in learning: voiceovers, audio as part of video, and plain vanilla podcasts. If you’re going through the trouble to deliver information via audio, it makes sense to think about ways to make the optimum delivery.  Boxes and Arrows is all about delivery.

1931: noted on-air personality Pope Pius XI, with (at right) founder of the Vatican radio system, Guglielmo Marconi.

Hutch Carpenter reports on some research looking at whether a better ideas emerge from people in group sessions, or from people working independently.  His conclusion: “[R]esearch says that companies would be better off if employees had a way of coming up with ideas on their own, not in group meetings.”

Hutch points out that it’s not clear-cut. The MIT Sloan Management Review, for example, says:

Strictly speaking, the traditional brainstorming groups consistently came up with the very best idea — and the very worst one, too. In other words, the quality of their results varied much more than those that came out of the hybrid groups that combined individual and group idea generation. However, the hybrid groups produced more ideas that were, on average, of higher quality. Nonetheless “for the very best idea, you need to have a pure brainstorming group,” notes Girotra. “Random interactions are likely to produce better-quality ideas.”

(You can read the article or download the INSEAD research paper here.)

At the same time, traditional brainstorming is susceptible to groupthink, which my dictionary cheerfully describes as a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.

Thank God, there’s none of that in the blogosphere. No “what he said,” no echo chamber.

Hutch presents a model for “enterprise 2.0″ (Click the image for a larger version.)

While I wish we’d find a way to talk about this stuff without sticking a “2.0″ after everything, Hutch does show the potential in harnessing technology to generate lots of ideas, and — especially interesting — using technology to help filter those ideas.

I’m not completely convinced that tags, favorites, voting will necessarily mean that “the most useful stuff floats to the top,” but I certainly don’t see those as a hindrance.

“The key to getting the best of both worlds,” Hutch says, ” - more ideas of better quality, identification of the top ideas - is to create a culture where ideas are rapidly created and evaluated, while also letting advocates gestate their ideas to fix areas of weakness.”

That makes a lot of sense.  For one thing, I’m pretty iterative; my ideas get better when I have the chance to revisit them, to reexamine them after letting them incubate a bit. All along, I thought I was second-guessing myself, but really, I was gestating.

In two weeks I’ll be part of a group session grappling with the start of a large training project.  I’m hoping to find opportunities to increase the group’s effectiveness with tools other than Word and PowerPoint.