Dave's Whiteboard

I’m trying to remember the last time I looked something up in the phone book.  Honestly, I have no idea.  I do remember the last time I tried to remember.  It was a year ago, when the 2009 phone books arrived at my house.

Which means the 2010 books arrived today.

A year ago, I took the new books up to my office, where I kept them.  As I took the old books out, I realized I hadn’t touched them since I’d put them away a year ago.  I simply don’t use the phone book.

Things were different this year — the books go in the built-in desk in the remodeled kitchen.  Looking at new and old editions of the Yellow Pages,  I realized that I’m not the only one who doesn’t use the phone book  (2010 book is on the right):

Nothing remarkable (other than proof that marketing has completely trumped esthetics).  Notice the thickness, though:

First Class Plumbing LLC has stayed true to Verizon, though I have to admit it’s the first time I’ve noticed there was an ad on the bottom edge of the phone book.  For those who prefer hard numbers:

The new Yellow Pages (lower part of the picture) has a page count 13% lower than the old one for stuff that matters–the actual listings, as opposed to filler like seating plans for stadiums.

No real surprise here, just mild bemusement as I observe the Changing of the Phone Book ritual.  I realize that many people still do rely on the phone book–not everyone’s running around with a smartphone.  Many more, though, turn online for their first-choice source of information.  Inertia may keep the books coming for a long time yet, but friction’s going to keep whittling down their size.

One strand in the sleave of lrnchat topics a few weeks ago was the lurker, who hangs around a discussion but doesn’t take part.

I’ve engaged in online discussions since 1984. “Lurker” as a term often has a negative connotation; highly active participants seem to regard lurkers as unreasonably shy, terminally silent, or possibly parasitic.

Geeze.  Lighten up.

I’ve done more than my share of lurking, although as I said in the #lrnchat discussion, “I don’t lurk so much as lollygag.”

The real topic on #lrnchat was how internal social networks affect the performance of an organization, and what people can do to further that impact. A lot of the conversation centered microblogging, wikis, and other tools that can foster collaboration and cooperation.

Harold Jarche makes a useful distinction between those two terms: you collaborate with others via plans and structures; you cooperate via freely-chosen connections. Especially for people who work in (or with) organizations, both have their role.

Lurking’s actually not a bad way to get to know a new group. Outward-focused chatty early adopters might disagree, but some of us like (or have learned) to look around first. We’re seeing how the locals do things. We’re working out some of the modes of engagement.

(And, yes, we just may be noticing who talks too much about too little–you longtimers have that nailed; we’re just coming up to speed.)

As the #lrnchat discussion flowed, more than one person cited the value of someone showing you what he or she gets out of social networks. If you know a person who seems reasonably sane yet uses Twitter, you’re probably more open to hearing why, and to asking about the benefits that person sees.

Someone prone to lurking could read the #lrnchat transcript, maybe find a few voices of reason, and start following those people–on Twitter, or through whatever link they have in their Twitter profile (LinkedIn, Facebook, a blog, a website).

If you’re prone to encourage active participation by lurkers, good for you–just don’t turn that encouragement into nagging.  If on the other hand you’re prone to lengthy lurking, I think there’s genuine value to Hellmanism, a philosophy of interpersonal behavior found on jars of mayonnaise:

Keep cool but don’t freeze.

CC-licensed images:
Circuit board by quapan.
Mayo jars adapted from a photo by clango.

As a tangent to my recent post about social learning, a chart I saw recently keeps nudging itself onto the front burner.  The source, apparently, is Janice Szabos, in a 1989 issue of Challenge Magazine.  She was comparing characteristics of bright children versus gifted children.

I couldn’t find the actual source, nor much about Szabos’s background–though the list in various forms is all over gifted-child, home-schooling, and other child-learning sites.

I see the descriptors as similar to those for broad categories like “song” or  “chair”–not every item applies to any one instance.  They could, of course, be a kind of mirror–who wouldn’t want to be seen as a good guesser, keenly observant, or thriving on complexity?

I take issue with some: The gifted child “already knows?” The bright child “is a technician (rather than an inventor)?”  But that’s not why I’ve put the list here.

The descriptors could also be a way that trainers and facilitators might describe participants in structured learning (my preferred term for “formal learning”).  I’ve spent a lot of time with trainers in large organizations, and not a few of these people might lean toward the “bright” participant.  The descriptors to me are much more immediate in nature: the people are working with the content, staying on task, paying attention.

Which isn’t all bad.  More and more I see structured training in an organization as a focused way to encourage learning around a particular set of skills.  Those skills in general tend to be basic, procedural,  and what I’ll call inductive.  By mastering them, you’re better able to expand into more advanced, situational skills where there isn’t a single correct answer to a problem.

That doesn’t mean you have to master those basic, procedural things first.  You could learn to solve customer complaints, for example, without first learning to use the order-tracking system–but not knowing how to use that system will soon feel like not knowing how to drive: you can’t get where you want to, easily.

…And of course you might look at how you manage your own learning and see which terms fit better.  In essence, I see the “bright” side as remaining within a given context, and the “gifted” side as going beyond it.  Going beyond can be troublesome (even to yourself).

Most likely, the two columns are an à la carte menu, rather that prix fixe.

CC-licensed photo by erin MC hammer.

I just read Personal Kaizen: 15 Tips for your continuous improvement at Garr Reynolds’s Presentation Zen blog.  “Kaizen,” which in American business terms tends to mean “continuous improvement,” was all the rage for a while, one of those fads like canary-yellow neckties–some years back, walking down K Street in Washington DC, you could go blind on a sunny day.

I don’t mean there’s no such thing as continuous improvement.  I do recall companies frantically trying to “change the culture.” Often that’s boss-speak for telling people, “Stop doing that; do this instead.”

Reynolds makes the point explicit: continuous improvement is daily, continuous, steady, and takes a long-term view.  Which connects well with other ideas I’ve been mulling over, including the nature of habits, efforts to improve my own performance, and a tendency to beat myself up when I fall short of a goal.

Reynolds’s post has a list of 15 ideas for your own continuous improvement.  Right in the middle, one sparked off the screen for me:

Learn to take better photos. Since you’ll be taking so many snaps to learn from and to share [in another tip, he suggests keeping a digital scrapbook of images that you find interesting], why not get much better at the art of photography?… You don’t have to become as good as the pros, but you can get much, much better. Learn what separates the great photos from the ordinary. The lessons from photography will help in your general guest to become a better visual thinker.

I put the spark-sentence in bold because it triggered the kind of reflection that leaves me still.  I’m very prone to say that I don’t have much graphic sense.  In the past, that’s meant I’ve been pretty lean with graphics I’ve created or selected (for example, to illustrate a presentation or an online lesson).

And I’m probably not going to become a professional photographer–partly because I haven’t had any interest in becoming one.  What I hear, though, isn’t just about a mindset toward imagery, but an encouragement to be not only mindful but active.

That last idea reappears in another of his points: teach others what you learn. In a recent #lrnchat discussion, Aaron Silvers, in search of a motto, asked what the Latin would be for “Everybody teaches. Everybody learns.”

I haven’t thought this through well, but I have in mind two aspects to what we think of as learning: storage and retrieval.  You can’t get stuff out (either individual facts, procedural skills, or tacit knowledge) if you haven’t gotten it in.  And that retrieval, I think, is almost always a case of application: we’re recalling for some reason.

Moreover, each time we try to recall–when we try to act on what we’ve been learning–we’re doing more than pulling a fact out of some neurological file folder.  We’re reprocessing the information. We’re connecting it with what we already know, and with what we’re just now finding out.

In a very real sense, the learning never stops, because  that activation over time leads to physical changes in our brain.

This is a follow-up to my previous post about one of the keynotes at the Higher Ed Web Association’s conference this past week.  I wanted to do a couple of things: provide some context, dig deeper into what the #heweb09 tweet stream contained, and think out loud about what I’ve learned about a situation I was not at all involved in.

Some context

I’ve talked at least a bit with four people who attended the keynote.  Michael Fienen’s already discussed it on his own blog, and gives some background suggesting that the choice of speaker was unfortunate.  The speaker’s background may have stirred up some resistance, but so too did his apparent inability to connect with a technically sophisticated audience.  (HEWEB members design, develop, manage, and create the future of college and university web sites.)

A similar viewpoint appears near the end of this post from Nick DeNardis on the Wayne State University web communications blog.

Plunging into the stream

I downloaded all the tweets for #heweb09 that day, extracted those from 11:59 am to 12:59pm (my arbitrary boundaries for the keynote tweets), and took them on a ride in Excel to see what I could learn.

Who was talking?

There were 536 tweets with the #heweb09 hashtag, sent by 119 different Twitter accounts.  In terms of low volume:

• 49 individuals tweeted only once (9.1% of total tweets)
• 17 tweeted only twice (6.3%)
• 9 tweeted only three times (5.0%)

So on the low end, 75 individuals (63% of the total) sent 110 tweets (20.5% of the total).  Meanwhile:

• 1 person tweeted 28 times (5.2%)
• 1 tweeted 27 (5.0%)
• 1 tweeted 23 (4.3%)
• 1 tweeted 20 (3.7%)
• 3 each tweeted 17 (51, or 9.5%)

These 7 high-volume  individuals (5.9%) accounted for 27.8% of all the tweets.

I think this is a reasonably wide spectrum.  33 individuals account for 70% of the tweets.  All but two of them were present at the keynote, and among those 31 present, everyone sent at least 6 tweets (one every 12 minutes).  The average was 11.4 tweets.

Where were they?

I tried to see who among the group was actually present.  If I couldn’t tell, I assumed the person was there.

Under that criterion, 23 people (19% of the total tweeters) were not present at the keynote but chiming in from elsewhere.  These NPs tweeted 61 times in all (11.4% of total).  NPs with 4 or fewer tweets: 19 people, 36 tweets (59% of the NP total).

So, more than 80% of the tweets were from people actually present.

What were they saying?

“RT” (retweet, a repeating of someone else’s tweet) occurs 170 times in the 536 tweets, though some tweets have more than one (e.g., “RT @alex RT @betty” — I’m sharing what Alex said Betty said).  If each RT were unique, that’d be 31.7% of the volume; I’m guessing the actual number is closer to 27% or so.

Not to discount that–if you’re sitting next to me in a presentation and whisper something insightful or clever to me, I might just whisper it to the person on the other side: a non-digital retweet.

Not all the tweets in the stream related to the keynote–remember, this is a hashtag stream.  In the first 100 tweets (the inital 23 minutes), about 20 were clearly unrelated.  For example, a vendor was having a drawing for a prize, and three or four tweets in that group of 100 dealt with that.

I didn’t analyze the entire stream, but even if that 20% factor held up, more than 400 tweets still dealt directly with the keynote.

First impressions

At 11:59, the start of my stream time, someone said “hella drop shadow” — a criticism of the PowerPoint format.  Within ten minutes, people were asking, “how old IS this presentation?”  And by 12:15, this:

watching people try to figure out how they can get out, starting to see the OMG I AM TRAPPED looks on faces.

What I’m seeing

I wondered about some kind of groupthink–a kind of techno-mob getting carried away.  I see that as a real possibility, especially if there’s a gulf between a relatively small number of Twitter users and most other attendees.

• One attendee estimated as many as 400 at the keynote.  If that’s the case, then close to 20% of them were on Twitter, not to mention texting or Facebook or some other means for making real-time comments electronically.
• And, other than one or two expressions of sympathy or pity, no one in the stream came to the defense of this presentation.

I’m thinking about a speaker who doesn’t have access to a backchannel (whether on Twitter or some other vehicle).  I know that I wouldn’t feel competent to present and to monitor a stream even periodically.

• But I could try to have a partner whose main job would be to do that–act as a combination link jockey (tossing additional information into the stream), scribe, and ally who could lean over and say, “Hey, Dave — people already know about having a blog.  They’re asking about managing wikis.”

I’m wondering what I would have done as part of this audience.  25 minutes into the hour, tweets began to emerge hoping for an interruption.  At another HEWEB09 session, there was a mock “Kanye moment,” with someone breaking into the talk to promote a competing one.  Tweets at the keynote wondered about that, first in jest.  Then someone, seeming to react to the speaker’s works, wondered, “Would he like the immediate feedback of us all walking out?”

• Nobody interrupted the speaker to suggest he wasn’t connecting.  In her blog post, presentation specialist Denise Graveline talks about the special position of a speaker–the implied authority and the general reluctance to disrupt.

The whole keynote concept needs rethinking.  Look at a Ustream video of this keynote.  Ignore the sound quality (being picked up by a PC to the back of the room) and just notice the setting: big ol’ ballroom, round banquet tables, chandeliers, two display screens, and a vast expanse that the speaker is patrolling.

• Why are the screens on all the time?  Presentation 101 says turn the damned things off when there’s nothing to pay attention to.
• Could the participants explain why this speaker is the keynote?  I’m not talking about Galper, unless you’re a HEWEB member.  I’m talking about how well the organization’s choice aligns with the interests of the people who’ll participate.

The final thought for me, perhaps the biggest change — I’m not going to talk about audience any more.  An audience is what you have at a performance, like a concert or a play or a taping of Wheel of Fortune.

When it comes to a professional presentation, what you have are participants–people who want to take part, who plan to take part, in what’s going on.