For the 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities which he delivered on Monday evening at the Kennedy Center, Mr. Berry, American intellectual and agrarian-minded elder, described how and why affection, yes, affection!, ought be considered the cornerstone of a new economy. Berry tells us that affection does not spring up fully formed; it is gotten to by way of imagination. It’s a train of thought worth quoting at length: “For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world,” says Berry, “they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.” Affection, then, takes us beyond statistics and generalizations to the immediate and the particular. It focuses our attention on the beloved things right in front of us. This field,this child, this community.

Berry observes that we live in a time where affection is discounted. It’s true: rare is the public discussion where affection – or beauty, or hope, or joy – is brought forward as a good and weighty reason to do anything. But Berry believes that affection is deeply motivating. “Affection involves us entirely,” he writes. If he is right, love itself could be what moves us, finally, to care for the Earth.

You can read Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture, or watch a video of him delivering it.

via LocalHarvest News – March 30, 2012.

I loved this line: “affection does not spring up fully formed; it is gotten to by way of imagination.”  As I prepare to facilitate an agricultural planning meeting, this is so useful for me to have in my mind.

Where are you imagining and nurturing affection in your work? Your life? Who is imagining it for you?

Tree image from Flickr, License Some rights reserved by Frodrig

Here are the deets, via http://cpsquare.org/.

Launching our Ning Stackathon

By: John David Smith

Hackathons are the current equivalent of a barn-raising, where people get together and work really hard for a short period of time on a fun project that somehow contributes to the common good.  We’ve used barn-raising as examples of the kind of personal, skin-in-the-game generosity that’s involved in communities of practice.

We’re inventing a new portmanteau.  A Stackathon is working party that’s slower-paced than a hackathon and more reflective.  It gathers useful examples of something with a lot of sense-making built into the process.  Therefore a stackathon is not like the current craze for content curation.  Read on for details about CPsquare’s first Stackathon.

During this stackathon we’ll gather profiles and portraits of as many living Ning-based or Ning-supported communities as possible.  We’ve started developing a list of interesting examples.  As we stack these communities one on top of another, we expect to discover new hacks that could make any of them more effective, sustainable, and fun. (And those hacks are probably relevant to simpler or more elaborate platforms than Ning, too!)

We will try to be somewhat systematic in describing how Ning is configured for each community and how it fits in the community’s digital habitat. We’ll pay attention to the ongoing role of leadership, facilitation, and technology stewardship. That means understanding what the community is about, what kinds of activities are typical, and what other tools a community uses in each community. Understanding that would give us a better idea of how and when to recommend Ning. Our stack will also suggest many possible methods that one community could borrow from another (including the use of auxiliary tools, plug-ins, themes, membership restrictions, etc., etc.).

During the stackathon (which will run for a whole year, from March 2012 to April 2013) we’ll have discussions in CPsquare’s Web Crossing site (password required: it’s for CPsquare members and people registered for the Stackathon), we’ll collect ideas in various Google Docs, we may have teleconferences, and we will collect some of our insights on CPsquare’s Media Wiki site. It all depends on what people want to do and are willing to do.

You can participate in the stackathon by joining CPsquare or by registering for the Stackathon here (costs $10). Any Stackathon registrant who contributes a full community portrait gets their registration fee refunded and they receive a CPsquare membership during the last 6-months of the Ning Stackathon.

(Thanks to Amboo Who for the photo!)

• Lisa Lane’s which I blogged about, but continues to have a great conversation thread.
• Willem van Valkenburg gathers a few links himself.
• Learning from Failure  from Kate in Australia.
• Bonk / Bb MOOC week 1: Motivation & Encouragement (?) and Questions About Network Learning (prompted by #bonkopen) from Jim Julius. (Jim, I owe you a comment!)
• Inside Higher ed on 4 Reasons Why the Bonk MOOC is So Interesting
• Ed Tech Dev What’s the “problem” with MOOCs?
• James Moore’s first week review of BonkOpen along with his related G+ stream
• Laura Gibbs has quite a few comments in her G+ stream as have  George Station, Phil Hill
• The Coursite’s team — platform sponsor of this MOOC – have been blogging about their experiences.
• Mass Education and Motivation on the Telic Blog.
• Haas Learning, Thoughts on the Curtis Bonk MOOC and Learning Management Systems

Here are some more general MOOC-y blog posts:

• The Massive Open Online Professor (and I have to say, the term professor now feels odd to me!) from  Stephen Carson and Jan Philipp Schmidt
• Bonnie Stewart, the problem with EdX: a MOOC by any other name?
• Ignatia - Selecting meaningful #socialmedia tools for a #MOOC or #PLN (which goes to an ongoing conversation sprinkled here and there about how to steward technology in MOOCs, matching tools to activities, etc. ) 
• Jonathan Rees - What’s the difference between a MOOC and the University of Phoenix? (this idea strikes fear into my heart…)
• #Change11 “One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind” – Is that the MOOC movement? from Sui Fai John Mak

Any other ones I should be reading and linking to?

Edit: May 7 – here are some more!

• Gerry McKiernan maintains a blog titled _Alt-Ed_ that is “devoted to documenting significant initiatives relating to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), digital badges, and similar alternative educational projects.” http://alternative-educate.blogspot.com/
• Scott Leslie tweeted this interesting First Monday article on “The internet, selective learning and the rise of issues specialists,” noting the MOOC implications

I’ve been in meetings like this. How about you? What are your own personal participant destressors in these meetings?

Well, radical may be an overstatement, but it is worth saying that we have solutions for many things in front of us, but we have old glasses on when we need new ones.  We love to protect the proverbial “elephant in the room” because after all, it is the elephant we know. But we consistently need to consider new perspectives. An “AND” perspective, not just an “OR.” This challenges status quo, power dynamics and is sometimes just hard to wrap our head around, particularly when we feel we have some “expertise” and “skin in the game” in a situation.

Last week I heard (and visually captured) CIAT’s Andy Jarvis give a great talk about the role of livestock in both feeding the world, and in green house gases.  On one hand, livestock is a critical food and economic staple for the very poor, especially those who own  a single cow or a few chickens. At the same time, livestock is implicated in large greenhouse gas contributions. So we have competing interests.

Or do we? There is real potential that this is not simply an “OR” proposition if we look with those new lenses. For example, Andy shared some initial data about the blending of growing trees and cows (silvo-pastoral systems) which have been growing in importance in Central and South America. New lenses. Here is a snippet:

Jarvis challenged those present at April’s meeting to look at the livestock ‘hoofprint’ as an opportunity as much as a call to immediate action. “Developing countries are where it’s at! They have the biggest potential for mitigation and major system transformations. There are systems which are far more efficient than others, and developing nations have the ability to put the rest of the world to shame.” Intensive silvo-pastoral systems, for example, were highlighted as having catalyzed a mini-revolution in Colombia and Central America due to their high CO2 capture potential and low implementation costs.  According to Jarvis they are the rare climate change win-win, converting degraded pasture land into profitable, productive systems with high carbon stock, biodiversity, and resilience.

via The elephant in the room – or is it a cow? | DAPA. See also a reframe on ILRI’s blog.

Is it that simple? Certainly not. But the point is, we can’t look at greenhouse gases or food security as separate issues. They are connected. And that requires us to stretch the way we think and act. It requires a lot more “ANDs!”

This theme of AND rather than OR is popping up in my work literally every day and with every piece of work. The process challenge it offers me is to really push how I design and facilitate for, and to, AND. Yeah, that’s a messy mouthful.

This involves a) the ability to examine ideas and challenges from multiple perspectives, not just “critically from one approved perspective,” b) the ability to deal more productively with power dynamics that sit behind the influence of expertise and funding, mostly through increased transparency, and c) building our tolerance for ambiguity along the path towards action decisions. The latter is greatly enhanced by understanding when to do small “safe fail” (a la Dave Snowden) experiments, when to do larger shifts where there is a bit more certainty, and where to scale the things we really know work across different settings. I think we confuse these all the time (at least in international development, it is a challenge!)

In fact, this is not radical rethinking, folks. It is understanding how to agilely get out of our own thinking ruts, individually, organizationally and collectively. This has deep implications for our organizational structures and certainly for how we wield our power. I find it challenging (in a good way.) How about you? How are you working towards staying out of unproductive ruts?

This is a particularly fruitful time for  reflection because I’m working on three projects with aspirations to build capacity for facilitation of (mostly) online learning in some quite diverse contexts. Most of them have larger ambitious of scaling and becoming as much “network like” as much as smaller, bounded “community-like.”

Add to that the fact that there is such a streak of conversation, creative tension and interest as #Bonkopen (as us Twitterphiles know it) launches into its first full week, you know there is learning happening. For some, it is the eye-opening possibilities of scale, even if not fully realized (BonkOpen will see participation rates declined. I’m pretty sure of it.)  There is and will be gobs more of learning, even  if it is not the INTENDED learning.  More about that later! First, the quote from Stephen’s OLDaily. (Emphasis  mine.)

Intro video for Curt Bonk’s ‘Blackboard MOOC’ (I wonder how much Blackboard itself is putting into this project). The level of support from his home institution makes me envious: “IU has been highly supportive. Last week, there is a university press release as well as an article in the student newspaper. And my instructional systems technology (IST) department had a short online news story as well.” Not everybody is enthused, though. A comment to the Inside Higher Ed article points to “a long list of serious problems with Blackboard Course Sites that render it unusable for a MOOC” – there’s no blog subscription options, no profile pages for participants, and no blog comment notifications. As Nancy White says, “the design issue here is designing for a networked experience, not a group experience (which is foundational in a lot of Dr. Bonk’s work with a focus on community, etc.) Bb is not network centric.” See also Sail’s Pedagogy, “blogging within an LMS is just wrong.” And Lisa Lane writes, in “Leaving an open online class,” that “it’s the same old Blackboard, with more white space, nicer fonts and some cool icons.”

Let’s pick apart some layers here. We certainly have a technological aspect which I’m going to studiously ignore because not only is it ginormous, but I want to focus on the process of design and facilitation in this post. So we’ll leave the tech elephant in the room for a later post. I’m sure I can take a technology stewardship lens to it!

Curt Bonk has been an amazing practitioner and scholar of facilitating learning, particularly online learning. He has been a source of inspiration to me and many others. What I really REALLY want to learn from his MOOC is how to apply his ideas and theories to a networked learning experience vs a group learning experience. I want to learn and practice these skills not just because MOOCs are all the rage. (Don’t know what a MOOC is? A massively open online course — see more here.) My motivation is because much of the work I’m doing with distributed teams, communities of practices and networks find their ability to AMPLIFY what they learn and produce requires access to, and from,the  larger networks that contain their groups.

The sort-of-obnoxious part of me wants to poke at this particular MOOC which is about using tools for online learning success, branding itself as a MOOC, trying to use this network-intentioned form to learn about practices that have essentially built on the bounded small group form learning  – the thing we often call “courses.”  Does anyone else see the irony?

Laura Gibbs, who I thankfully “met” in the introduction threads of BonkOpen (by posting with a provocative subject line instead of a traditional “intro” one – which would be pretty obnoxious in the old model, and effective in a networked context) wrote in the comments of Lisa’s blog:

If Blackboard can make this massive class and call it a MOOC, very M and very C, while not having much O or O (is Blackboard really open? no; is Blackboard really online if it is so disconnected from the Internet itself?), then maybe even the term MOOC is in trouble.

The less obnoxious part of me holds a great deal of compassion for the team, because this is really a huge, transformational leap and many of us are trying to make it. And personally, I’ve stumbled. A lot! The term MOOC IS challenging. The concept asks us to design and facilitate in ways that are different for most of us. When you are really good at doing it one way, going another is a huge shift. Not seeing that this is a new way, or worse, pretending that it is but acting on old models, is problematic.

MOOCs have really forced me to stretch my mind and conceptions about what learning with and from each other  can and does mean. Even the word “course” is not big enough to hold these possibilities. While most of my practices is outside of academia, there is perhaps more alignment on the design and practice challenges with non-academic learning than ever before. Because life outside of academia is rarely about the course. It is about the learning we want and need. This resonates with the concept of MOOCs.

I don’t think I’m the only one struggling to recoceptualize teaching, learning and facilitating in more open networked contexts. But we all sense something important here. Thus the huge interest.

Bonnie Stewart wrote about this recently, when she noted the recent EdX announcement from MIT and Harvard universities in the US. Can “massive and open” acheive the scale and the flipping of the teaching and learning paradigm AND disperse the control that our traditional teaching institutions (and platform builders, etc. etc) have exerted on the process?

The problem with EdX is that, scale and cost aside, it IS essentially a traditional learning model revamped for a new business era. It puts decision-making power, agency, and the right to determine what counts as knowledge pretty much straight back into the hands of gatekeeping institutions.

MOOCs are about finding that cliff between structure and the unknown forward trajectory of each of us as learners. It is about sufficient constraints that create conditions not for necessarily uniform learning destinations for every learner, but for a learner to learn into his or her own learning possibilities around the subject at hand. This includes who they learn with and from, the range of supporting tools they choose to adopt (tech, content) , and the density of engagement with the material and other learners.

If my hunch is right, this then asks us to seriously reconceptualize our facilitation and teaching frameworks. For me, as a facilitator, this has meant letting go of my deeply held belief that things START with socialization and relationship building. A simple example is “introduction threads” and “icebreakers” which we have used very successfully for building strong learning cohorts online — I’ve been doing it since 1997. These approaches are predicated on individual–>group–> wider network trajectories.

Steve Covello points out our past successful online learning experiences start with a profoundly human socialization and orientation which he is missing in BonkOpen (Again, from Lisa’s blog).

…this environment is unintuitive to fundamental human experience. It is mediated through an interface. The interface offers **nothing analogous** to the social environment which it symbolizes. I cannot be more emphatic about how important a framework of social orientation is to online learners. It is as if the greater importance in the development of an LMS is the *information*, not the human.

Yes, and…. MOOCs start at the network. Human intersections happen, but differently, mostly over dialog in synchronous and asynchronous contexts (chat room during a presentation, blog comments), facilitated by daily newsletters that scrape for a tag. Introductions in a cohort of 3000 is — well, ridiculous and we are crazy to ignore the fact. Creating subgroups is a strategy, but one that repeats the small group classroom model and that is what MOOCs are NOT. (At least this is my belief.)

Relationships happen when we encounter another and try and understand their point of view, share ours, swap content, even crack a side joke and develop an affinity. Then, amongst all the waves of people and content, we start surfing the same breaks. We run into other sets of surfers that have emerged, and plenty of soloistas. Relationships then create nodes and bridges across the network. And that glue of bits of information with the shared tag facilitates.

It is much less often that the “teacher” facilitates. And that, my friends, is a pretty dramatic reconceptualization.

Again, Lisa Lane, from the comments of her post wrote (emphasis mine):

The force of networked individualism is coming up against the bounded group(s) dictated (is that too strong a word?) by the Bb forums. One of the questions is what size group works? We have a small one here for an intense discussion, so we could argue “class sized” groups are better for focus. But networking is better for exploring. I just can’t figure out where Bb threaded discussions could fit into any of this? They worked in only a limited way in Moodle for the big MOOCs, and even there it was because the whole group didn’t participate. So is this an issue of size, or of a technology that simply cannot support a networked experience?

This tension between the concepts of individual and group, of individual, group and collective (public) goods through learning is also tremendously juicy and challenging. Mama mia! This is not “peaches and sunshine” as it introduces potentially competing goals — certainly for institutions vis a vis their people formerly-known-as-students. Maybe we throw out the concept of group as we know it. And if you know me, this is a very radical thing for me to say. I hold small groups and communities as something sacred. AND, I am not suggesting they aren’t. But a MOOC perspective suggests we start at the individual and network intersection rather than small group. In my experience, we arrive back at the small groups, but in a way that is more firmly knitted back to the network — and that IS the value proposition. Hm, I buried that down here, didn’t I? So much for writing at 6am.

So if we believe this is the direction that MOOCs are exploring, of networked learning, we also have to throw out a good bit of our past and previously very functional wisdom and practices. We have to reconceptualize the affordances — and this points strongly to the technology. Blackboard, for example, is not a networked affordance. Introduction threads are not networked affordances. Connections, text mining, and perhaps hardest to pin down, but for me at the deepest core, is reimagining what it means to build relationships and trust without our previously comfortable walls. Now we, as learners, both tear down and build up the walls.

As if Jim Julius was reading my mind, he also posted in the comments on Lisa’s blog:

So I wonder … has someone created a taxonomy of learning tools identifying their affordances and how well suited they are for networked learning designs vs. group-based learning? That would be interesting to consider …

I’m interested, Jim!

All in all, this  is pretty darned radical. And sometimes stressful. It turns  my hard earned practices and knowledge on their head VERY often. In fact, my gut instinct is we need to remove the word “course” from all of this. Find something to help us escape our past experiences and assumptions.

Finally, as I work to curb my own snarkiness, I’m reminded of the importance of  cultivating sensitivity and compassion to productively learn from these opportunities. Again, from Steve in Lisa’s blog”

My oversensitivity here, I hope, will serve as the moral equivalent of what Temple Grandin provides for the livestock industry. Her research into the sensitivities of animals in captive environments has lead to improvements in stress reduction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin

And yes, these experiments and conversations are heady and exciting with potential. And I’M ALL IN!

Two harder to quantify indicators are love and a sense of humor. Today I’d like to observe a bit about the power of humor.

This morning as I was reading the daily email digest of the Seattle Farm Coop, humor was abundant. The warm kind, not the sharp point of a stick (funny to some…) Here are a few snippets:

One response to a classic Q&A (which yielded some great suggestions beyond the one I’m sharing):

Date: Mon Apr 30, 2012 11:32 am ((PDT))

Fellow urban farmers,

Bindweed is slowly overtaking my garden.  Has anyone successfully eliminated it their garden and how did you do it?

I’ve tried hand-weeding and (reluctantly) roundup, though neither with obsession, and my efforts did not even stop its spread.

Please send me your advice if you’ve been able to get rid of it!

The conversation evolved to include horsetail weed… My favorite response:

Date: Mon Apr 30, 2012 5:35 pm ((PDT))

I use psychological intimidation with my horsetail, and it’s worked! Every time I see a horsetail, I pick it, and I tell the plant that it has become a great delicacy and that every single one of its children will get picked and eaten. I make loud “nom”ing sounds. My garden, which used to be so rife with horsetail that I called the place Equisetum Acres, is almost horsetail free now.

Passing along information from other sources, in this cases the West Seattle Tool Library (network weaving!)

 *Power Tool Drag Races*

You really haven’t lived a full life until you’ve witnessed The Power Tool Drag
Races  that take place in Georgetown every year, hosted by The
Hazard Factory.  It’s even better when you participate!

This year’s races will take place on June 9th so we definitely need to get started “refurbishing” some of our otherwise inoperative tools in time for the competition.  If you’d like to help out and just stop to see the process, please either drop us a line (library@wstools.org) or stay tuned to the Tool Library Website or our Meetup Page for more details.

And…

 Date: Mon Apr 30, 2012 2:00 pm ((PDT))

Anyone lose a goat?

News flash from the City of Seattle: On April 20, the Seattle Animal Shelter received a call about a goat that had wandered into a woman’s house when she left her door open in the warm weather.  She went into her house to find the goat lying on her bed.  Animal Control Officers picked up the stray goat and brought him to the Shelter. The Shelter held the goat as a stray but no owner showed up to claim it, so it will be adopted by a farm outside Seattle.

I have pics but they didn’t paste in–email me directly if you’d like to see.  The goat is white/gray with dark grey splotches and horns 6″ or longer.

While us Seattlites would like to say “only in Seattle,” what I observe are community indicators of a healthy community with both a thriving online and offline life. In this example, humor peppers the posts, and after a while, I can almost feel the smiles as I read. Now don’t mistake this for fluff. This community is very domain/content oriented. They are serious about raising food in an urban environment and taking care about how it is done. The humor is the warm part of this ‘electronic” communications.

Offline the community is also very rich. There is of course, the warehouse where people buy their urban farming supplies where we get our chicken feed. There are the potlucks (almost always with homegrown, really great music) and swapmeets. There are volunteer opportunities (I’m manning a Coop booth this Sunday at a local plant sale.)

What I sense is that  the “daily rhythm” of the community’s life is online on the email list. Lots of questions are answered — I have learned more about chicken health than I would ever have imagined! People are HELPFUL… ideas, borrowing tools, reusing materials that would have otherwise been thrown out but for that bit of electronic text communication.

Sometimes there are dustups — usually around political or contentious issues. But they pass.

What does it take? No mistake, there is an amazing volunteer leadership that carries the coop forward, because it is NOT a community that is all talk. There is a physical warehouse to be responsible for. There is stock. There are cash transactions. I bow down to that small but amazingly productive and passionate core — yes, another community indicator.  AND the vibrant voice of the wider community and periphery.

I love communities and I enjoy observing and participating in their indicators. What are some of the indicators you are enjoying in your communities?

Canada’s favorite blogging-cum-social media gathering, Northern Voice, is coming up the 15th and 16th of June in Vancouver, BC. I’m happy to say I’m going to get into trouble and co-instigate a session related to risk taking and improvisation the the irrepressible Alan Levine and Rob Cottingham. For a bit, I had lost the description we had submitted and I thought, “well, we’ll just improvise.!” But Alan reminded me our conversation was in Skype, so I grabbed the transcript. Here it is… maybe you have some ideas and suggestions?

The poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote:
Come to the edge, he said.
They said: We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came.
He pushed them… and they flew.

Perfection. Bah. Certainty? You’re crazy. Our participation in the (social) world cannot be predicated by “looking good” or having a perfect plan if we are to move our learning and our practices forward. The opportunity in the moment is a rich space. So prepare to be surprised. Plan and then go with the flow, even if that means abandoning your plans. Come play with Alan, Rob and Nancy (plus our richly surprising networks) as we explore the role of improvisation in our online lives. Heck, offline too. Why not? Come jump off the cliff.
Bios:
Nancy White
Alan Levine
Rob Cottingham
Three crazy people who love to leap and learn. And learn and leap. And have fun.

I also raised my hand to help co-organize the open space part of the event, fondly called “Moose Camp” with the equally irrepressible Brian Lamb. Can you spell F-U-N? Michelle Laurie, Giulia Forsythe and I will be hosting one session for visual practitioners (aka graphicos) at Moose Camp. I love the invitation to create what suggests itself in the moment. This seems consistent with our “formal” session offering. Kind of ironic, eh?

The day before (June 14th), my amazingly productive and generative colleague Sylvia Currie hosts the annual Online Community Enthusiast’s gathering where we will be thinking together about the practice of designing and facilitating online meetings — among other things. It is great that this is piggy-backing up against Northern Voice. Again, this is an event YOU can come to as well!

So if you are in the neighborhood, JOIN US! I promise it will be fun and rewarding. Honest! Bring your pens, chalk, ipads, cameras, but above all, bring your SELF!

Lately I’m more on the road than home. I’ve been incorporating visual methods into all my work (see here and here) but it will be fun to do some local graphico stuff. Tonight our local informal group of visual practitioners joins for conversation, snacks, and of course, drawing. Then in a week, I get to record Stephanie West Allen’s presentation at the NR Dispute Resolution conference. I’ve known Stephanie online for quite some time, and finally, face to face! (Thanks to neighbor Rina Goodman!) Here are the deets:

I spoke at this annual conference two years ago and found the people—organizers, presenters, and attendees— to be warm, curious, skillful, and farsighted. They are also a brainy gang, paying attention to neuroscience. For the second year in a row, Dr. John Medina is speaking!

I am very happy to be returning to Seattle, and look forward to seeing old faces and meeting new conflict resolution pros. Below is the description of my program. Click to see the full brochure and read the program and to register.

Exciting news: My program will be graphically recordedby Nancy White, an international leader among graphic recorders. (She’s in Zambia right now.)

My presentation:

Total-Brain Mediation: The Whole Brain and Nothing but the Truth

Presenter: Stephanie West Allen, Allen & Nichols Productions, Inc., Denver, CO
The field of conflict resolution is now filled with neuroscience myths, fiction and urban legends. We will look at what we REALLY know right now and how we can use that valid and accurate knowledge to move forward in the field. The best way to resolve conflict and to serve our clients is to make sure that we are using the complete brain, not just bits and pieces. Unfortunately much of mediation today is half-brained, at best. We neglect those parts of our brain that contain genuine, sustaining creativity and wisdom. This seminar will be mind-changing. Attendees will learn how to use the whole brain and nothing but the truth. Based on the latest in the neuroscience of learning, the seminar will be interactive, novel, fun … and maybe a bit messy.

via idealawg: Join us in Seattle May 4-5? 19th Northwest Dispute Resolution Conference.

So, once again, here are the details:

Michelle Laurie and I are excited to announce the 3rd annual graphic facilitation workshop (aka Rosviz!) in beautiful Rossland, BC, Canada, July 18-20th, 2012. We had so much fun at #1 and #2, we are going for #3! (See Sylvia’s great video from #2 here.)

Drawing on Walls at the 2011 Graphic Facilitation Workshop in Rossland, B.C.

You are invited to this experiential workshop which takes place almost entirely at the drawing surface!

We’ll start the evening of July18th by warming up our drawing muscles and silencing those pesky inner censors. The second day, we’ll build into the basic practices of graphic facilitation and recording. We will pay attention to preparation, the actual visual work, and follow up including digital capture of paper based images. Our third day will be devoted to participatory graphic approaches, practicing and giving peer feedback. You can expect to go away with icons, ideas and approaches which you can use immediately, as well as ideas about how to hone your practice.

When might we use this practice?

Sometimes our imaginations are sparked by a visual where words fail us. Think about when communities plan and imagine their futures, when teams consider the possible outcomes for their projects, when groups create maps to track their progress.  These are all opportunities to use visuals to engage and deepen community dialogue. You can use visual thinking to improve teamwork, communications, meetings, build engagement and to plan work. Step out of the PowerPoint rut!

Who should attend?
Facilitators, project managers, team leaders and members, town planners, teachers and anyone who would like to engage others beyond words.

Please Note: You do NOT need previous experience or have to consider yourself an artist. At some level, we can all draw and use visuals to enhance our communications and engage diverse audiences.

Quick details: Michelle will be hosting and we’ll both be co-facilitating. This 2.5 day workshop begins the evening of Wednesday, July 18th and ends mid-afternoon on Friday, July 20th.  Early bird pricing before April 30th is CA $690.00 and is CA $840.00 thereafter. (US Friends — it is about the same in dollars! If you have/want to pay in dollars, I can take those. NW)  Email Michelle to register: michelle.k.laurie(@)gmail.com.

via Workshop Alert – Rosviz is back! | Michelle Laurie rants and raves.