Taking Stock and Making Choices: Working from home and other such stuff

I have come back to blogging after a hiatus of almost 5 months. Mostly, business as usual at work and crisis situations at home took my time and attention. My father’s heart attack and the subsequent rush to Kolkata taught me a few things—about myself and my priorities. It forced me to take a long hard look at myself and what I’ve been focusing my energy on over the last few years. Because I love what I do (and I am hugely fortunate in that sense), it’s very easy to let my work consume me and my time. 

Much has been written about priorities and work life balance—especially for women. And it is increasingly becoming evident to me how difficult it is for a woman to pursue a career (that is do everything it takes to grow and keep up) and also be the mother and wife and daughter she wants to be. I didn’t realise how deeply this constant tussle and tug of war have been affecting me at a sub-conscious level till I had to sit down and weigh some of the choices.

To be connected to colleagues and co-workers, be in office as much as possible. Skype and Hangout are second best. Face to face is different, and it matters as Simon Sinek points out in Restoring the Human in Humanity. Bonds don’t form over a Skype call but over coffee and lunch when conversations veer to the personal and discussions revolve around interests. Luis Suarez summarizes the key point in the para here:

… we need handshake leadership; we need to have handshake conversations, handshake friends, handshake dialogues, handshake meetings. You name it. We just need to bring back the human spirit into all of the interactions we keep getting involved with. It’s eventually what makes us all more humans…

But I have a problem. To be in office, I have to be in a different city altogether and this means I can only be a weekend wife and mom.  I did that too for a very long time…close to about 4 years till I decided not to.  

To strike a work-life balance, work from home as much as possible (most of the time). This taught me a few things about work, technology and myself. Technology—is great for exchange of information, updates and other transactional stuff. But not so great for building bonds and trust. Work—complex knowledge work requires solitude as well as collaboration. Working from home offers me plenty of solitude but not the intellectual stimulation and those over-the-shoulder conversations so crucial to serendipity, ambient awareness, and informal learning.  Activity streams and collaboration platforms can enhance and support such awareness but not replace it. Myself—I am a true blue introvert and while I had kind of known this all my life, Susan Cain’s Quiet. The book revealed me to myself, clarifying why I made some of the choices I did.  How does working from home affect me as an introvert? Immensely! For someone who cringes at the thought of social small talk and just picking up the phone to have a chat, being an introvert coupled with working from home puts me even more on the periphery of things than ever. I realize that I run the risk of just hovering on the edge—an onlooker but not quite a participant. 

To let people know about my work, socialize it as much as possible. In today’s non-hierarchical, networked organizations with fluid job roles, conversations over coffee are often how people find out about skills and common passions. In the absence of such conversations, I have to consciously make an effort to write about and communicate what I do within the organization. Now, if you are as old as I am (that is 41), you will remember growing up on the adage “your work should speak for itself”. This makes socializing (publicising?) what I do (when I do it) out of character and especially hard. It’s definitely a skill much needed in today’s extrovert oriented, non-hierarchical workplaces. 

To grow myself, go that extra mile—always. Ever since I started working primarily from home, I realized (even more so than before) the importance of online communities—within my organization and without. As a practitioner in the adult learning and development space with specific interests in social business and community management, knowledge management, capability building and organizational development, I have started tapping into different online communities where I can “meet” practitioners. While I have always been an advocate of informal learning (immensely grateful to Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Jay Cross and the ITA for showing the way) and communities of practice, I am now becoming an evangelist of both. Without the support of various online communities, I doubt if I would have had the fortitude or the skills required to do my work effectively.    

To add value, do the work that puts me in flow--always. Now this seems like an obvious statement. But this is especially significant when one works most often in solitude which requires a great deal of internal motivation. It would have been impossible for me to keep going if the work itself didn’t drive me. If anyone reading this is a knowledge worker and is thinking about working from home, read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow.  While it may seem idealistic to say “I will only work where my passion lies,” it is also intrinsically honest. If I am passionate, I will strive to deliver my best—not because of external reward and recognition but because of my internal drive. And as Daniel Pink has pointed out in his now legendary book, Drive, internal motivation is one of the driving forces of creative knowledge work.  

Are you a knowledge worker working from home? I would love to learn from the challenges you’ve faced and overcome…

In Delhi: EDGEX2012

I am siting aboard a Jet Airways flight on my way to attend and present at the EDGEX2012 conference in Delhi. It's officially starting from tomorrow. But we--the speakers and the organizers--are meeting today. I am sure Viplav Baxi has already started his day and the folks are already meeting at the Habitat Center, the location of the conference.

Am I excited? I guess that would be an understatement. I am looking forward to 3 days of insights, learning and most importantly, getting to meet others similarly passionate about education. Viplav calls it the Disruptive Educational Conference. I must say I agree. Vehemently!

Yesterday, as I added a few final touches to my presentation, some random thoughts fleeted across my mind.  I jotted these down as they occurred to me and have copied them here. Without edits.

1. I wouldn't be attending this conference if it weren't for social media.
2. I was introduced to the work, ideas and blogs of most of the speakers via Twitter.
3. What I have learned in the last 3 years have been completely via social media. Social, informal learning.
4. I am a part of a huge global network of educators and learned, a virtual community of practice.
5. Knowledge in this community is constantly being reconstructed through dialogue, conversation, and debate.
6. There is no knowledge repository. It is a construct of the network, a constantly flowing and shifting set of paradigms and practices.
7. There is no one place where this knowledge is stored. It resides in the network.
8. The network itself is constantly shifting. The edge becoming he center and vice versa.
9. If we cease to converse, we will cease to create. Conversation is the key to continuous learning which is our key to survival today.
10. We are, in a way, going back to our roots when our forefathers gathered around the fire to exchange stories.
11. These stories were not merely means of amusement but keys to survival. By sharing experiences, the elders of the tribe passed on their knowledge about an unknown, unpredictable, dangerous world full of chaos and novel challenges (think of the Cynefin Framework).
12. This is where we need to go back to. Albeit in a different manner. However, the situation is not very different. The business world is changing, becoming unpredictable and chaotic.
13. There is no time for an individual to learn from his or her own experiences. We have to go back to the story swapping days, capture tribal knowledge and build on it.

Today's linear, structured, syllabus-and exam-driven model of education is uniquely unsuited to meet the needs of this volatile, changing, chameleon like world. Linearity needs to be replaced by holistic focus on pattern matching, exploration and creative thinking. Think of how the divers learns in the example JSB cites in the power of pull.

I think we can all feel the coming of a huge change. It is already beginning in pockets with parents choosing to homeschool their children, open courseware gaining popularity, adults opting for meaningful work over just jobs. These are tiny facets of a much bigger wave sweeping across different sectors and it's presence is being felt.

I am looking at this conference to highlight some of these changes, to think about what we as educators can do.

Wheels down, Delhi! Time to get off. 

EDGEX 2012: About Disruptive Education

This sentence from Stephen Downes post A World to Change best exemplifies one of the key drivers behind a conference like EDGEX2012: We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves.

With EDGEX2012 coming up just round the corner, I must say that I am super excited. It’s getting a bit difficult to focus on my daily work, the BAU stuff and not wander off in my head to the conference. Thanks to Viplav Baxi, we finally have speakers and thought leaders like Stephen Downes, Jay Cross, Clark Quinn, Dave Cormier, et al. coming together in a conference in India.

But I am jumping ahead as usual. I wanted this to be a blog post on what the conference is and why I think all educators—teachers, CLOs, L&D consultants, policy makers and policy breakers, and anyone who has anything to do with enabling others to build capability—should attend. If you believe that the current education system is failing us, is no longer sustainable, is neither fair nor equitable, then this is the conference for you. If you have ever been inspired by the writings of Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Pedagogy of Hope), then this conference is for you. It is about disruptive education. About freeing education from the shackles of a building (call it school, college, what you will) and democratizing it. It’s about handing power back to the learners and creating the environment for learning to happen. And it will. We have experiments like the Hole in the Wall by Sugata Mitra to prove us right. 

The Connectivism and Connective Knowledge MOOC (massive open online course) that Downes, Siemens and Cormier started in 2008 exemplifies networked learning, and the transformative impact of technology on learning. Most importantly, it does not have a “fixed body of knowledge” that learners need to go through. “Rather, the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for each person.” And this is the fundamental, quintessential personalized learning taking place on a massive scale year after year. I had joined the MOOC in 2010 for the first time. Since then, I have been a sporadic visitor to the MOOC and have always found nuggets of learning that suited my need at the moment. It empowers you—the learner—to architect your own learning. 

Closely aligned to this, we have Jay Cross—the proponent of Informal Learning. At a time when organizations were investing in formal, top down training programs, a vestige of the Industrial Era and Taylorist ideas of productivity improvement, Cross, Marcia Conner and a few others were busy advocating informal learning, workscaping, the power of social tools and the importance of building one’s personal learning network. I find this coming together of the different strands that constitute how we learn and perceive and make sense of the world today in a single conference quite remarkable. 

The conference also has speakers like Grainne Conole, Martin Weller, Les Foltos, Douglas Lynch and others. And the overarching themes are:

1. Informal Learning, Communities of Practice, Connectivism
2. Personal Learning Environments, Open Distributed
3. Learning, Net Pedagogy, Learning “Design” in a 2.0 world
4. Learning Analytics, Ubiquitous learning
5. MOOCs, OER University, Stanford AI
6. Role of teachers and coaching in an open distributed learning environment
7. New forms of assessments

There are resources here for those keen to know more about connectivism, learnscapes, communities of practices, open design, social network analysis and more.

Managing Information Flow on Enterprise Platforms

Are multiple activity streams the way forward for enterprise platforms...?


As an enterprise community manager, I am often faced with varied user questions and needs. One that has been surfacing on and off recently is around the ability for more granular filtering to find relevant content.

Before I move on let me briefly explain how Jive--which powers our social platform--works. Jive offers users the ability to customize their two activity streams--one stream reflects everything the user is Following on the platform and this includes people, places and content. The other reflects what the user is Tracking--and Jive makes a subtle distinction between "follow" and "track". Tracked content, people or places are deemed to be of greater relevance to the user and all activities and communication in these get captured in a separate stream called What Matters: Communication along with @ mentions and direct messages to the user.

 Nevertheless, in spite of this level of segregation and filtering, I have had users requesting for further granularity, more specific filtering options, and ability to follow tags and such. Some deep diving and conversations exposed that users were missing or feared missing out on information. As is wont to happen with activity streams, content quickly moves below the fold and runs the risk of getting overlooked. A heavy user of TweetDeck and Hootsuite, I could identify with the need for further granularity. Both these applications make my Twitter use a breeze by allowing me to set my filters and create multiple streams.

Moreover, from an enterprise context, finding relevant content at the point of need is of paramount importance. While I was surfing the net to see what other organizations/users are doing, I stumbled across an interesting posts by Alan Lepofsky that seemed to mirror what I was thinking: Making Activity Stream More Manageable. I have quoted from it here: If we are going to continue down the path of taking dozens of different pieces of information and cramming them into one place, then a single stream is not the way to go.

In a different post, he writes: … I am concerned that having status updates, file sharing, Q&A, news links, CRM updates, social media feeds, workflow approvals, ERP orders, support tickets, polls/surveys and a dozen other sources of information all piped into the same stream can make social software almost unusable.

The more I think about it, I am beginning to feel that multiple activity streams is the way to go. Moving from a locked down inbox to an activity stream is a paradigm shift, and one that is well on its way to taking place. And reflects how far we have come. Nonetheless, enhancing user experience by giving them more control to filter in what they need or filter out as the case maybe will lead to greater adoption of social business platforms. Enterprise platforms will also need to give users greater flexibility and the ability to create personalized lists, follow tags, and so on. I am sure those days are not too far away and social business platforms like Jive and SocialText are improving by leaps and bounds.

Will greater granularity kill serendipity?

I don't think so. With content being created, shared and commented upon every second of every day even in the enterprise, it is essential that users be able to effectively filter and curate for themselves in an intuitive manner. Some of it will get taken care of by smart, automated filtering options like Jive's Recommendation engine, which suggest content based on the user's prior activity on the platform. But this may soon not be enough.

What do you think? Have you encountered similar needs? I would love to hear from you.

Related articles

• Towards A More Participatory Culture: Enterprise Q&A (Part 2) (blogs.cisco.com)
• Communities and Collaboration " Activity Streams Meet the World of Manufacturing (steve-dale.net)
• Making Activity Streams More Manageable (alanlepofsky.net)
• Missing Pieces: The Activity Stream Aggregator (Collaborative Thinking) (mikeg.typepad.com)

The 21st Century Curator

If Web 1.0 was about online access and Web 2.0 is about social nets, Web 3.0 will be coring down to content that really matters. ~wrote Martin Smith in the post, Curation - The Next Web Revolution.

As mentioned by Harold Jarche in the slide share presentation, NetWork, the internet changed everything—in volume, velocity, virtualization and variability. And nowhere is this more evident than in the content being created every second of every day. Take a look at this infographic which captures what gets created on the Internet every 60 seconds very nicely: http://pinterest.com/pin/247698048225202468/.

Source: go-gulf.com via Sahana on Pinterest

Not surprisingly, curation has become the next buzzword after social business. With content coming at us with the force of a tsunami and the fury of a tornado, curators seem to have become our saviours—our sense making guide. One post out of five I have been reading in the past few months seem to be associated with curation or its close cousins—aggregation and filtering. Even as I read, I was tempted to apply some of the curation strategies and put together this post.  I like to build some context around the links because—who knows—in the Internet world, a working link today can be a dead link tomorrow.

Curation today takes on a new meaning in the context of technological affordance, information abundance, diminishing attention, hunger for contextual and timely information, and constantly shifting, globally linked landscape. In this complex and chaotic world, making sense can only be a constant endeavour, pattern matching a crucial need. And this is what today’s curators do—aided and inspired by technology.

I will not delve into the root of curation as traditionally practiced by museum curators and librarians, which conferred on them the status of an expert. And those thus anointed went on to shape the taste and understanding of humans who arrived at their domain. For a deeper understanding of the rise of curation, I recommend that you read Steven Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation.

A little reflection reveals that curation is a way of life for all of us—we are all curators. How we put our curation skills to use is what makes us unique. We are curating when we pick the books that will adorn our shelves; we are curating when we choose our furniture; the store keeper is curating when s/he selects and arranges the display. We are also curating when we choose what to share with our Facebook friends. And in each type of curation, what comes across are unique perspectives, a sense of pattern and a representation the curator wants the world to see. But I digress.

I want to focus on curation and the need we feel for it today and some of the skills that make for a curator. I have also referenced some of the posts and articles that shaped my understanding and thoughts around curation.

In the September of 2009, Rohit Bhargave wrote a post called the Manifesto For The Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job Of The Future? . I stumbled across this quite recently. And one of the most telling sentences that leap out from the post is this: “…By some estimates in just a few years we will reach a point where all the information on the Internet will double every 72 hours.” While the magnitude escapes the capacity of our mind’s ability to comprehend, this does beg the question: should we focus on creation or curation? How do separate the wheat from the chaff? How do we make sense? Bhargava goes on to define a Content Curator thus: A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.  This then is an individual, who makes sense of the deluge and presents it in a manner that is coherent, easily understood and relevant.

He followed this up later with The 5 Models Of Content Curation. This post highlights the 5 potential models of curation as he calls them, which are forms or manifestations of a curated output. You may want to read the post for a detailed understanding, but here is the gist of what he mentions: 
1.       Aggregation: Aggregation is the act of curating the most relevant information about a particular topic into a single location. 
2.       Distillation: Distillation is the act of curating information into a more simplistic format where only the most important or relevant ideas are shared. 
3.       Elevation: Elevation refers to curation with a mission of identifying a larger trend or insight from smaller daily musings posted online. 
4.       Mashup:  Mashups are unique curated juxtapositions where merging existing content is used to create a new point of view. 
5.       Chronology: Chronology is a form of curation that brings together historical information organized based on time to show an evolving understanding of a particular topic.

Here’s a visual representation of the model above taken from Beth Kanter’s post: Best Practices for Content Curation for Nonprofits at Social Media for Nonprofits Conference.

Click on the image to see a larger version

Curating is also defined thus: … I mean curating in the sense of organizing, editing, displaying, highlighting, captioning, commenting on, and all of the activities you'd see associated with telling a specific story from your point of view…~ in the post, Curating Information as Content Strategy.

Aggregation is perhaps the most frequently seen manifestation of curation because it is easier to do than the rest. Aggregation can be automated by setting smart filters and alerts. But while useful, it is lower on the value chain. However, aggregation can be infused with greater depth as described in Is Content Curation the New Black …many of the world's top websites and blogs are largely curation-based. Lifehacker.com is a great example. There's a smattering of their own stuff, a more substantial article mixed in here and there. But it's largely about curating the need-to-know info in the world of, well, life and tech hacks.

Robert Scoble’s post, the 7 needs of real time curators, lists what affordances technology and tools should offer a curator for them to add true value—something beyond just aggregation. Excerpt below: 
1.       Real-time curators need to bundle.
2.       Real-time curators need to reorder things.
3.       Real-time curators need to distribute bundles.
4.       Real-time curators need to editorialize.
5.       Real-time curators need to update their bundles.
6.       Real-time curators need to add participation widgets.
7.       Real-time curators need to track their audience.

It is difficult to deny anymore that curation is the need of the hour. Whether we depend on others to provide us with curated content or we decide to become curators in our area(s) of expertise or interest, the need for curation as a sense making and PKM activity is undeniable. This of course means that we should at least be familiar with the basics of curation and the technological affordances.

The next natural question then is how does one begin to curate? And here I found Tim Kastelle’s post, Five Forms of Filtering useful. Filtering as explained in the post, takes place in two ways—the judgement-based or human and the mechanical. Judgement based filtering occurs at different levels—Naïve, Expert and the Network. Mechanical filtering is driven by Heuristics and Algorithms. Our interest and passion can take us from being a naïve filterer to being an expert.

An expert on a topic may use any or a combination of the curation forms mentioned above—aggregation, distillation, elevation, mashup and chronology—to present their readers with a certain perspective or overview. This is of course similar to the PKM model suggested by Harold Jarche.

For effective curated output, pattern recognition is essential. A good curator sees patterns before others, can connect the dots in seemingly disparate pieces of information, and can distinguish between an important trend as opposed to a passing fad. The one critical difference between PKM and deliberate curation—as I see it—is that he former is inward focused even while taking place in a networked world. The latter is deliberately outward focused with the intent of presenting a perspective or an insight or a trend to others. The steps involved are similar while the desired outcome may be different.

In conclusion:

How do the skills of a curator apply in an organizational context? More than ever before, as we know. In globally distributed and networked organizations engaged in doing complex work, where exception handling is likely to be the norm, it is crucial for information flow to be transparent and to have folks who can spot the patterns, connect the dots and provide that key insight which keep an organization on the cutting edge. They may or may not be officially conferred the title of curators. But the need is irrefutable.  Probably the biggest challenge facing organizations today is not the lack of data creation, but the lack of someone who can connect all the floating dots—inside and outside the organization—that lead to meaningful decisions. While some aspects can be automated—using analytics—it still requires a human curator to recognize patterns and present the output.

Who are likely to be playing the role of key curators in an organization? Most likely to be the community managers! With organizations going the social business route and investing in a social platform, community managers will soon become an essential role. And community managers are the best placed to play the role of curators as well. One insight I gleaned from this post by Bertrand Duperrin: Are curators the missing thing in enterprise 2.0 approaches? Curators are focused on information flows without thinking they’re leading or managing any community. From which I draw the inference that curators need not be community managers, but community managers should ideally have curation skills or work closely with curators to build a successful community.

As Clay Shirky said here: Curation comes up when search stops working…[and] when people realize that it isn't just about information seeking, it's also about synchronizing a community.

More on the specific skills we need to develop to be effective curators in my next post. 

Reference: Content Strategy and Curation: A stack on Delicious