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Finding colleagues to talk to: Research for ALARA's web presence
Wow, last blog post in 2008! I take this to be symptomatic of the way being coordinator of this site absorbs time for maintenance, amd steal time away from my creative work. And yes, supporting the community with these facilities is creative work, but look at how much people use it! http://www.alara.net.au/blogindex Last entry June, then March 2011, and bugger all response to those posts. I'm depressed. I feel hopeless. What does this community want? I see little evidence of site members wanting to talk to others using these media.
So I'm going to approach my role in a different way. Rather than guess at what our membership wants, I'm going to research what I myself want with this community, and from the virtual world, and build from those understandings. Other ALARA members and site members are welcome to join me. John Saward (our behind-the-scenes Drupal guy) is with me. Welcome all. Call this Probe#1 into the virtual world.
A simple starting point: How do I find the people with whom I want to talk? Assumption: for other experienced AR practitioners, a significant need is not to get more information on AR (conferences and journals suffice) but to find people to talk to who have depth of experience. Those people are hard to find. They are usually spread out across organisations, countries.
My context: Turning 60 next year. Finished PhD this year. Landcare, the movement with which I've been working for six years, is in an hiatus. I'm looking out at what is next for me, balancing letting that come to me, and inquiring after it, dreaming it up, repositioning the place of will in my working and paying more attention to what is present. Outside, it's a beautiful morning (see the pic below, taken around 7.30 this morning). I see a slice of it past my desk. I have the front door open and the bird calls temper the virtual. Summer is here, after a long winter. Things are sweet.
Who do I want to talk to, about the bleeding edge of my work? I'm after colleagues.
How will I find them?
Does the web presence of those I might want to talk to:
a) give an overview of what they are on about?
b) give me a sense of how they live and work?
c) let me join in, easily?
This then is the start of a chronicle. My findings will guide my recommendations to ALARA, as to what facilities it should provide for action researchers seeking conversation.If you join me, and link your plog posts to mine, we'll weave understandings together.
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connecting
Hi Ross, I will be in Melbourne in about 2 weeks - for just over 2 weeks - may be catch up some time over that period.
warm wishes deb
Sorry I missed replying
Deb, around about the middle of December, things got wildly out of control in my world, so missed seeing your note here, and getting in touch. Send me a text when you next in the vicinity.
it also didn't get an automatic notification of your comment from the website which should have happened. I will go and check my settings.
Ross Colliver, TTDG, 0411 226519
Connecting
It's difficult to do in this environment Ross, 'cos you are asking people to start all over, to write posts in a place they might rarely visit. Rather it might be wise to go where people are, start conversations and draw them back with links into the resources you have here, as you did with me, after I sent you a connection easily. That way social connections can exist, alongside, concurrent with, professional discussions.
I sometimes converse with Diane, as others do in www.Facebook.com, but www.Linkedin.com can be better for groups with a professional common interest.
Now that social media is so common a way to connect and both these sites are mobile enabled, you are really pushing uphill to have people come here without a hook.
So go out there and start fishing! :o)
facebook
I agree. A true and prominent and juicy Facebook presence for ALARA would be well worth investigating.
As an experiment I just entered ALARA into the Facebook search box and got no results relevant to this organisation.
I habitate facebook in real-time almost every day. Facebook is always on, as I work.
I go to linkedin sometimes.
I think many people choose a platform for engagement and cannot cope with switching too much to other platforms.
Facebook is the engagement platform of choice for many people.
There are ways of integrating a Facebook presence with a site presence. But I don't recommend trying to achieve that in the version of the site we currently run.
John
ALARA Webmaster.
Fishing
Thanks Jo, for the push to get out there and start fishing. I've been spending more time on Facebook, having set up my own page, and one for the Riddells Creek Studio, an enterprise with my partner Alice Cummins. So I it felt familiar to me to create a Facebook page for ALARA. I can keep an eye on it alongside my other sites, and throw things up as I think about them.
Then I went to the Action Research and Learning in Organisations group in LinkedIn, and joined that. I've also decided to move my own blogging outside the walls of the ALARA website.
Finally, I am working my way through "Digital Habitats", concentrating my attention on the diagnostic questions that should guide me as a tech steward.
Warm regards
Ross Colliver, TTDG, 0411 226519
Biting
Yes, I am still around, and still watching email lists, and ALARA incoming items, and active at Facebook on occasions, at a Ning site on other occasions, and with Tapped In ... [waves to Jo and Ross]
The enthusiasm, and high expectations, seen in the 'prospective research' of, what? 9years ago?, has, for me, proven just that: high and unrealistic expectations and beat ups.
My most recent effort has been with trying to be a node in the 'pulling' process of PLNs, etc, and has not convinced me that these platforms will naturally become an effective part of enough people from a small community of practice to sustain community and engagement.
One of the difficulties I see is the 'cutting edge' of ongoing technological innovation and diversity. The lack of stability, of those drawn to that, spills over, at this stage, to what might happen here.
Enough people, enough depth
Di
So have you seen any digital space that generates the kind of engagement that might satisfy an action researcher? Other practitioners seem to make use of, and find their paractice deepened by, virtual interaction. I'm thinking here of case studies in Wenger's "Cultivating Communities of Practice" and more recently in "Digital Habitats".
Are we dealing with a species, the action researcher/learner, dependent on face-to-face interaction, with a crowded email in-box seen as a necessary evil?
Ross Colliver, TTDG, 0411 226519
Connecting online
Hi all, and hang on in there Ross!
For me, as for a previous respondent, unless something 'pops up' in my email to alert me to conversations being had, I don't make time to go into websites. I have contributed fairly regularly to the BERA practitioner researcher online discussion, but only because it pops up in my email. Sometimes (although not recently) the volume becomes overwhelming, and I just go delete, delete.
The online community is energetically co-ordinated by Jack Whitehead, who is the person who works VERY hard to keep it going, to link new work by some authors up with what's already there, encourages us to talk with each other etc.
I am sure there is a way for ALARA conversations that occur on this list to pop up in my mailbox, but I don't think they do at present, and unlike Diane and some others, I am not a regular user of Facebook, Ning or other social networking opportunities. This is partly lack of confidence in how those work, but more likely having my fingers in too many pies already. So it's partly self-protection.
Don't know if this will help you at all Ross, but thought I'd contribute so you know the stone that you threw into the pond has at least released some ripples! Now going back to find a paper on storying that I read in the latest e-journal, which is why I came into the site in the first place (grin!)
Pip Bruce Ferguson Teaching Developer University of Waikato Hamilton, New Zealand
Voices appear like mushrooms after warm rain
Pip, how lovely to read your experience! In fact, just when I'm about to turn on my heel and walk out of the room in disappointment, I find the conversation alive. Troubling that I haven't been getting automatic email notiification of the posts here. John (if you are reading this) does this have a quick fix, or do we add it to the list of deisireables for the next website?
Pip, you can set you profile to be sent email notifications. look in "using the site' http://www.alara.net.au/node/1046
Bob Dick has had great success with list servers, where everyone in the group is emailed every post. The Australian Faciliators Network uses one, and I have colleagues of varying digital engagment who find it a useful way to be part of a community of practice. These work because you get an email, and everyone looks at their inbox.
Not everyone over 35 has their Facebook page open all the time (like John), but a lot of people under 35 do. I just had my youngest daugher over for a week, cooking with me for a residential workshop my partner was running. Elizabeth, 22, maintained conversations via text, Facebook and email through our working day (very little phone - she can't afford it). She would drop out of our interaction into these others, at appropriate pause points in the flow of our work, then come back again. I found this disconcerting, but got the feel of it after several days.
Jo's observation here that it's easier to find conversations where people are already conversing has pulled me up short. Hence the shift out to Facebook, and LinkedIn, and my new blog outside the ALARA site. The inquiry continues.
Ross Colliver, TTDG, 0411 226519