At the Base of the Wall, You’ll Find the Spall: On Breaking Off a Piece

I have always loved the word “spalling,” ever since I first heard it in my youth. It’s the word for the process by which a large chunk of stone, concrete, ice, or some other solid material breaks down, shedding smaller fragments along fault lines and fissures, at impact points and between shearing layers. If you’ve ever seen documentary footage of icebergs breaking from the Antarctic pack, you’ve seen spalling in action. If you own a house, look around on the exterior. When the force acting on the material is stronger than the force holding it together, spalling is what you get.

Spalling is what happens when certain types of warheads strike armored fighting vehicles, too. Either the shock wave of the strike on the exterior is so great that the wall of the crew compartment breaks down suddenly and kinetically, flinging fragments throughout and wounding its crew or disabling its mechanisms, or the warhead pierces the armor in order to penetrate and itself produce the same effect.

But spalling is also what enables you to take a single mass and turn it into smaller parts. Been on a surface that’s designed for adequate drainage? Dig down some inches and the top layer of pea-sized stones will give way to larger ones the size of marbles. Once upon a time, all of those different sizes were broken from the same large rocks, which would have been of little use in building the gravel surface.

The same holds true with ideas. Analysts of any stripe are taught to find the ways to break a thing that’s given into smaller parts. It’s an application of mental, intellectual, or technical force. And as in these other examples, there’s a kind of violence to breaking the smaller pieces away from their original.

Now you know the name of it.

Forgetting is Learning’s Friend

Image by Dominyka Grucyté

Were you to ask, I think a lot of learning and education professionals would tell you that they’re at war with entropy. They’d probably call it “forgetting,” or “failed knowledge transfer,” or the like, but the word would indicate the same thing: the general tendency for things to achieve an equilibrium, usually below whatever energy level they currently have. Cups of coffee cool off, banana peels turn to compost, and so on. It’s a tendency toward less and less differentiation as time goes on.

For example, any “just-in-time” approach is all about combatting entropy. A successful intervention not only keeps the process or situation usefully differentiated, but also has the same effect on the learner.

Of course, every learning professional might well give thanks that the problem exists and creates such rich opportunities for us. If people remembered everything, there would be no need. Differentiation taken to that extreme is as debilitating as pure entropy. Those who know Jorge Luis Borges’s “Funes el memorioso” (commonly translated as “Funes, the memorious”) will know what I mean. As the Wikipedia summary drily puts it, “Funes is the fictional story of Ireneo Funes, who, after falling off his horse and receiving a bad head injury, acquired the amazing talent — or curse — of remembering absolutely everything.” If you remember everything, then you have likely lost your ability to prioritize: remembering everything, keeping everything in its place, can only make it harder to put anything in first place.

We end up stuck in the middle, of course. And there don’t seem to be that many options. There’s acceptance (You’ll never get over it, so you might as well try to get right with it). There’s optimization (By working at smaller and more responsive scales, you can find ways to get little wins that add up over time). There’s giving up (Que sera sera, whatever will be learned will be learned).

But while everyone would likely agree that neither perfect forgetfulness nor perfect memory is friendly to learning, and that making some kind of peace with the human condition is probably the way to go, it would probably sound crazy to say  that we could actually find ways to make forgetfulness as central an element of learning as we assume memory already must be.

To be clear, I mean something different than making compassionate allowances for forgetfulness after the fact, or attempting to forestall it in the learning process itself. Our experiences are differentiated and then lose that differentiation all the time. It’s a fundamental process. Can we enlist it somehow?

Here’s one suggestion: make forgetting social and interpersonal. Everyone knows the simple typical end-of-session summary exercise where people write down the takeaways, for themselves. What if they wrote down five things that somebody else (their partner, their group, the entire participant pool) could just forget. Call it a Permission Slip for Forgetting. We have to forget some things about the session in order to differentiate enough to make it possible to remember. There could also be an accountability mechanism — the slip would give permission for the recipient to forget but the author of the slip would have the responsibility of retaining and remembering.

So the next time you feel a complaint rising about how everything would be so much easier or better or more efficient if people remembered what they learned, you’d best not forget that the failure of memory is not the opposite of learning. It may in fact be something that protects the learner from failing to be there in the first place.

This post originally appeared on Medium.

Interpretation: The Most Transferable Skill

One time I was traveling for business, and I decided to list the separate data streams that the company that I currently work for could use for our operations and strategy. Final count was about fifteen, everything from what the servers show to third-party data sets about the universities and colleges that we serve, to information gained by communicating with clients. Great! But the challenge since then has been to turn that list into something useful.

Pull back the focus on that situation and you can describe almost any professional environment. The world is constantly telling us things, and modern data systems (digital or otherwise, but especially digital) are increasing the scale and velocity at which we might be told. It’s with that in mind that I’ll argue that effective interpretation of what’s given (you could call it data) is the most transferable skill. It’s also the one most likely to give you a foundation to move into something new.

In the first case, I’d say that the digital doesn’t even necessarily enter into it. The human mode of being is caught up with the world as an environment of problems in need of solutions. I mean this very expansively: “the coffee cup is over there while I am over here” for me counts as much as quantum electrodynamics or global warming as a problem. We never look so closely at something as we do at the moment that it resists us. Interpretation is a name for everything that follows as we try to put it back in its place despite that resistance, whether it’s what Douglas Harper has called the “intellectual and practical maze of mechanical repair” or the most abstract virtual challenge.

In my last post, there was a riff about seeing your website as a space probe, constantly sending back data that needs interpretation. “This is why so many people have turned themselves into digital marketing savants and social media experts over the last decade: it’s nothing but data in need of interpretation. And interpretive needs always always enable the rise of a class of interpreters.” My writing partner Craig Wiggins pointed out that this more or less rehabilitates an often-despised class of professionals, those savants and experts. They’re trying to figure it out, hopefully in not too grandiose or sweeping ways. The right response is to take them as another source of input.

Of course, that’s just one piece of the much larger landscape of digital data – you’d be hard-pressed to find an outlet for forecasting what’s coming in education, business, technology that hasn’t been pushing the idea that the ability to draw insight from the wash of digital data that’s been enabled by the web, broadband, and all kinds of digital devices.

This is specific form of interpretive skill is not likely to fade away, so it presents an opportunity. Just as digitization proved to be a universal solvent for media like music, books, and games, decomposing them into strings of zeroes and ones, I think it has also had a similar effect on the world of work. There is a digital substrate to everything done now (at least potentially so). And because every major technological advance has seen a subsequent need for interpreters — both those who have to figure out what’s going on at or near the thing itself, and those who have to figure out how to explain all of that to people at a distance from it — I think interpretative ability becomes the complement to the digitization of the world. It’s not merely quantitative.

At smaller and smaller intervals, we’re being hit with the need for cogent perspective. And insofar as humans are the only ones who have the capacity to say something intelligent, we ought to make sure we do!

Your Career is in Danger of Becoming a Very Famous Poem

Maybe you’ll be surprised to hear it, but one can end up in the same position with both a poem and a career: simultaneously overwhelmed and unmoved. I’ve seen university students stymied by John Keats and Ode on a Grecian Urn. I’ve seen adult learners — professionals of great experience and expertise — equally stymied by their work history.

What’s the problem? It’s a fundamental mistake about the scope and scale of work. Not “the scope of work” (a job description term), but the fact that it takes effort of some kind to get anything done. It’s a combination of the work that’s expended in the course of the task or the project and all the work that’s been done leading up to it that enables it and contextualizes it.

But work and effort are always falling into the background, away from the things we do and the things we encounter. Take Keats, for example. Go ahead, I’ll wait for you right here.

While it is to some extent true that “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’” (remember, he’s throwing his voice into the urn in this quote), it’s also probably more nice than true. A near relative of the idea of the Romantic Poet (who just lets the poems spill onto the page so the first draft becomes the final draft) is the KISS idea: keep it simple. They’re related because they’re both abstract distillations of work that hide everything that has to happen in order for there to be something.

So when my students admitted that they like the poem but didn’t really know how to talk about it because, well, there it was? And what was there to talk about something that just is? — what they were really doing was conceding the whole field of human creative endeavor to the poet. And he was already probably kind of lonely, given that he was apostrophizing an urn. (Would Twitter call this #kettlesplaining?)

If you want to talk about something, the toughest thing in the world is to actually talk about the thing itself or the act itself. Things and acts are resistant – that’s why we have to think them and do them, because they’re not going to just manifest themselves on their own.

Job seekers can have this same species of problem, but instead of an urn, it’s worse: the urn is their work history. As experienced as these folks that I worked with had become (and I’m talking people who were responsible for business outcomes up to and including stuff with six or seven zeroes on it), a lot of them couldn’t answer a very necessary question: Name three professional successes. That’s fine, right up until it isn’t.

See, work is not only resistant, it’s shy. It slips away when we’re not looking directly at it. It’s a problem because in too many settings the only way you get meaning out of a thing, an act, or the work that led to and inheres in both is if you find a way to give it scope and give it scale.

This is why narrating your work, being mindful about work, and generally disciplining yourself to notice that you’re doing something (not “notice when you’re doing something” — that’s too luxurious for the beginner here) is the only way to authentically do a thing.

Narrating Your Work is the Opposite of Asking For Too Much

If you have an audience–especially a client-audience or a customer-audience–you have to talk to them. Unless you’re in the business of taking advantage of your audience, you need to find a way to open lines of communication with them that allow for reality checks and feedback along the way. Most clients or customers will feel better about the interaction if they come away understanding what just happened, so it’s up to you to be very attentive to the information crossing between you and them.

So what kind of information needs to cross from professional to client in a service situation in order for everyone to feel like they’re in a good situation? Consider two examples.

The first could be seen as a riff on a theme emerging from the world of workplace performance and support: narrating your work. (Two of the best-known exponents of this idea are Jane Bozarth and Harold Jarche, for those of you who like a bit of bibliography.) The second example illustrates the inherently double-edged nature of a communication channel — perhaps what happens when the narration is unreliable, perhaps completely so.

1.

My eye doctor is incredibly efficient. I’ve seen him a few times now, and entry to exit lasts about 20 minutes. He keeps to his schedule.

I think he manages to do so because he’s very efficient in the way he attends to a patient, especially to a pretty normal case like myself. His moves remind me of the kind of efficiency you see in any practitioner who has performed the set of discrete tasks over and over. For this guy, everything is a fundamental. It’s like he took the work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and made it into his professional routine. But like a drummer (or somebody’s fantasy of a production line worker), there’s a real rhythm and cadence to what he does.

By itself, his efficiency is surprising enough – especially if you contrast it, as I do, with other experiences in larger medical establishments with very different relationships to the temporality of the patient. But efficiency is not the most striking characteristic here: it’s the constant stream of commentary that goes with it, and even supports it.

It goes like this. It’s not small talk, but very crisp requests, directions, and announcements, especially as he conducts the exam. He knows what he should see in a normal set of eyes of a man my age, and he verbally checks them off as he sees them. “No redness on the inside of your lower lid. Corneas are nice and clear. Optic nerve is good and fulsome.” I know what he’s seeing when he’s looking into my eye.

This contrasts with many other medical professionals, who carry on their examinations in near-silence, asking only if you feel some sensation or another. They don’t narrate while they examine. He’s also the only person in his practice: no administrative or medical assistant is there to capture everything he’s doing.

I always leave his office feeling like I had a good experience.

While I’ve not studied/preached narration of work as much as Harold or Jane, most of the examples that I’ve seen have been about recording work in some way for review or exploration later. (This may just be the limits of my knowledge of the universe of examples for the narration of work, I admit.)

But everything I’ve learned from their narration of their own work suggests that it can only be beneficial to bring the technique directly into the moment of work itself. After all, what is more invisible than work as it’s being done?

2.

Contrast that example with the experience of a friend with a nonprofit dog rescue. She has one dog, and wants another. On this nonprofit’s website, she saw one who looked promising and pursued him.

The shortest possible version of the story is that before they ever even let her meet the dog, they put her through an intense series of hoops. Not only did they demand that she fill out a very long and personal questionnaire, they also asked for several references–and then checked them.

When I heard about this, I thought: well, they must love dogs, and they’re probably very dependent on the work of volunteers who may be taking things a little too seriously on the basis of that love. (I’ve worked with all-volunteer nonprofits, and the flip side of the way that personal initiative is often driven “by the mission” is that the volunteers may not have the most strategic vision of the mission.)

But when she finally met the dog and then took him home for a few days on a trial run, a lot more emerged. The nonprofit had played down the dog’s serious medical problems while also rather creatively embellishing his many fine points. Even my friend’s iron-clad dogwalker found him a lot to handle. Doggo’s explosions of anxiety even stressed out the other dog in the household, an adult hound of great canine savvy.

After a week or so of this, my friend got back in touch with the nonprofit and asked to bring the trial period to a close. There was just not a good fit there, given everything that she’d learned.

The response: “Well, we’re sorry it’s not working out. Of course, you’ll keep him until we can line up another foster for him, right?”

When she told me this, my reaction quickly changed from concern about the amateurishness of this group to a clearer recognition of what they were really about: finding a person that they could manipulate into taking what must have been one of their most borderline dogs.

They were, in fact, acting much like the Nigerian email scam artists described in one of my favorite research papers of the last few years: Cormac Herley’s “Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?” published by Microsoft Research in 2012. (PDF here.)

Herley asks, quite rightly, if it’s true in these advanced digital days that so many people have heard about (and hopefully not fallen victim to) the typical “Dear Friend, I write with news of a great opportunity if only you will help me on one favor” style, why do the scammers continue to use these tactics? Put simply, what appears to many as a laughably obvious ploy need only succeed with that small subset of people who are both just credulous enough to say, “Well, what if it is real?” and over time prove themselves unable to resist the goad of sunk costs spent advancing the Friend some money in pursuit of a promised larger sum.

Or, as Herley puts it:

Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.

By clotting the channel of communication between yourself and your audience with demanding (this nonprofit) or ridiculous (Friend) discourse, you are creating a selection process that winnows those who will not believe you, and puts you in touch with those who will. A terribly ill and unsuitable dog goes one way; a steady stream of cash goes another.

Now, one always wants to learn more about an audience, customer, or client in the course of an interaction. But that knowledge needs to be collected transparently, under the guiding principle of finding the best outcome for both parties.

Whether you’re narrating your work, asking a series of preliminary diagnostic questions, or even at the final point of sale, what you communicate to your audience is as important as anything else involved. As both of these examples show, every interaction of this kind is really a selection process: you’re giving your audience a chance to select to stay or to go. Make sure they do it of their own free will.

It’s [a] Privilege, Sir.

A few weeks ago, Adam Kotsko hypothesized a connection between privilege and austerity that relies on the grounding idea that a privilege is a possession rather than a feature – “something extra” that can be lost or taken away. By that definition, he questions whether a privilege is in fact more like a right: something “that’s been denied to a great many people.” As he states at the post’s very outset, all of this takes place within a highly individualized society, in which it’s extremely difficult to get anyone to really absorb the idea that larger structures might play a role in the disposition of people’s lives.

For me, the leap from “privilege” to “a privilege” skips some things, especially as it lands squarely in the the rhetoric of austerity. If a privilege is something that can be taken away, then almost inevitably there will be conditions under which somebody calls for it to be taken away. Thus privilege feeds into the anti-democratic crabs-in-a-barrel scrum through which austerity usually functions.

No argument about the reality of these mechanisms, but Kotsko doesn’t make it to every place where privilege lives. Not every privilege is “a privilege,” I would say, because not every privilege is something you can point to and say “Take it away, that’s not deserved.” There’s a whole class of layers of things that one doesn’t have to think about because of who one is within the larger systems of value and structures of power. At some point, everyone is a fish who never knew about the water.

That said, the visible and mutable privileges that can be taken away and the largely invisible privileges that cannot be taken away (only kept in mind) sit together on a spectrum. When I had occasion to try explaining this to folks, I kept the word but varied it with one of two adjectives. “Positive” privilege refers to those things that are bestowed and can be taken: like an allowance, or the ability to run a tab at your favorite bar. “Negative” privilege, by contrast, is those things that one doesn’t perforce need to think of or recognize, because they never come up until something breaks down. They’re institutional, they’re systemic, they’re most of all structural. They’re often expressed in the expectations and assumptions that we forget we even have.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with negative privilege. It’s an epistemological, cognitive, and ontological fact, but also something that one will have difficulty “seeing” and may therefore often deny exists. We’ve been upvoting value-laden hierarchies of difference and worth for millennia. And so I stand in many of the same places where Kotsko touches down over the course of this post, the comments on it, and a strong follow-up: our individualism makes it really tough to get with the idea that there are things unseen – like gravity, like structural inequality.

Yet and still, I’m not ready to call privilege a “rhetoric of zero-sum despair.” Privilege is a language that we’re not supposed to learn how to speak. One of the things I’ve long thought that African American intellectual and vernacular traditions have in common with European philosophical traditions is never ceasing to draw our attention to aspects of existence to which we can’t really attend. I used to have a whole riff about how ex-slave narratives in the antebellum United States were Heideggerian decades ahead of the man himself, insofar as they were demonstrations of what happens when Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit become subject positions in a hierarchy. But if that’s true, there’s also a bluesy mutuality to the relationship I wonder if Heidegger was in a position to get, even as a reader of Hegel, unless he somehow did make it to Lenox and West 125th.

Audience is a Way to Think

It’s a well-established truth that the easiest way to get attention is to get in the way. Crashing the seamless background against which our lives play out will do it. If you’re lucky, you get incorporated into the foreground for a little while. Otherwise, you’re a problem; you’ll get fixed  and the reaffixed.

Now, writing is a great vehicle for getting in the way. We have more ways now for anyone to send text in the direction of hypothetical eyeballs than at perhaps any other time since people first thought to exchange marks on media. But you have to understand “audience” before you can understand any one audience. When you want to move people, having a sense of their ideas, background assumptions, and expectations is oftentimes better than anything you could learn from, say, demographics.

Demographics can get you started, to be sure, but the way people group themselves is always based on ideas and expectations anyway. Better off starting there in the first place.

Hear me if you’ve stopped this before.

Buffer: Save It for Later, Don’t Run Away and Let Me Down

(Being my second post in response to Jane Hart’s 10 Tools Challenge 2013)

For business, the Internet means that a potential customer could receive your message almost anywhere. But although it’s getting better at it, the Internet can’t tell you exactly how to make your message intersect with its audience at the right time, place, and condition of readiness. It’s not quite the case that f(map) = territory, but it’s close enough that one quickly finds that there needs to be a triangulation layer over it: a set of tools that, taken together, increase your potential reach and return.

This is a big issue when your business more or less lives on the Internet like Versatile PhD. We provide a variety of resources to subscribing universities that help graduate students in many disciplines explore, identify, and prepare for careers outside of the typical academic faculty path. Great stuff. But a university campus is awash in information. We’re competing with an untold number of demands on the attention of our potential users. So we’re building a triangulation layer, using two tools that were familiar to me to feed into a brand-new one. Familiar: Twitter and Google Reader. New: Buffer.

We’re a small company with a far-flung client base. We have great partners on our client campuses (career centers, graduate schools, and provosts’ offices), but we don’t have access to their communication channels. And, like us, they have to prioritize a wide range of demands and efforts, so anything we can do that calls out to their campuses will help us both.

The facts cry out for a social media solution, really. It gets at the great number of unanswered questions present at the start. How do we interact with potential users? How do we draw and then keep their attention? How do we get them to participate with us in a shared space, or even take ideas from us and propagate them in new directions? And how to do this when there’s limited time?

VPhD’s first entry into social media preceded my arrival by less than a year. My boss, the founder and CEO, went with Twitter, not Facebook. She wanted a platform for participating in conversations about the state of the PhD rather than for marketing. We’ll get to Facebook at some point in the near future – we have our hands full with the discussions and forums on the site, and don’t need another content and curation demand just now. What we did need was a vehicle to start to give the business a voice.

At first, it was the voice of my boss. Her interactions were with friends, allies, and fellow-travelers in higher education circles, primarily, with occasional forays into the career space more broadly. But when I took up the assignment, I decided that I wanted to turn that voice more overtly toward our potential users: graduate students and PhDs.

But what to tweet? There’s no shortage of articles, blog posts, and other content about the state of the PhD and higher education. All kinds of social and economic trends are relevant to the labor market in higher education.

The niche, broadly speaking is good news about PhDs and the PhD itself. Or, in hashtag form: #goodphdnews. The idea came to me in mid-December, when I’d begun exploring ways to find Tweet-able things related to PhDs or the degree itself. Important milestones in the academic calendar happen then, so it wasn’t long before I started seeing good things:

From there, it was a short mental leap to something that people in my part of DC had been doing earlier in the year – #goodWard5news – which gave me a model for the new hashtag.

It seemed like a good way to engage with potential users of our resources who might not otherwise know about us, and turn @VersatilePhD into something a little more lively than a platform from which to post relevant articles and other material. Direct connection leads to attention and communication, so we hear. So borrowing a bit of the #FollowFriday spirit, at the end of every work week, @VersatilePhD tweets out the #goodphdnews all day long. So now we have something we didn’t before: a type of story to highlight, of good things happening to or created by people with PhDs or working on them.

Over the next month or so, I started putting a few more tools in place to streamline the process. From beginning to end, it entailed a lot of work: finding the best keywords and hashtags, coding good search queries, reviewing the search results, recrafting the best ones as #goodphdnews RTs or MTs, and then finally tweeting them. After a few rounds of doing everything almost manually (and discovering that PhD tweets are a regular target of tweet-plagiarizing fake accounts), I found a way to aggregate the tweets so that I could rapidly find those with potential, and picked an automation tool for the final act of tweeting itself: Buffer.

Buffer is browser-based and straightforward. The tabbed dashboard shows the three main functions: the stack of tweets you’ve set up to go out; analytics to track clicks and engagement with those tweets once you loose them on the world; and the scheduling function, which is the heart of it all.

It runs through the browser as an extension that adds a Buffer option to any tweet viewed at twitter.com (visible in the Twitter screenshots above, which I took recently) and other places. Click that link, and you get an editing window on the screen with the text of the tweet ready for quoting or editing. Share it right then, or “buffer” it for later.

Buffered tweets appear in the stack, and you can then drag and drop within the stack if you prefer a different order than the one in which you entered them. Links get rewritten with the buff.ly shortener, but otherwise it works more or less transparently. Rather than assigning each buffered piece of content a time, you set up a schedule and then arrange the content over it. That seemed a little curious at first, but I’ve grown accustomed to it.

With the delivery mechanism in place, it wasn’t long before I also found a good aggregating mechanism: my dear and now soon-to-be-departed friend Google Reader. Once you realize that RSS will work on anything that can be expressed as a URL (` tweets), it’s a quick step to writing up a variety a queries that deliver an entire universe of tweets all at once.

(The sharp-eyed will notice that Buffer integrates with Reader, too.)

At this point, the #goodphdnews process is set, having just a few steps. Sign into Reader, Twitter, and Buffer. Scan the Reader stack, which shows just enough of a tweet for me to see whether it might be a good candidate. When I click through Reader into a tweet, if I want to recast it as #goodphdnews, Buffer lets me write it up instantly. It takes about an hour to scan a thousand tweets (finding the whole-cloth text of a tweet I’ve seen before indicates another fake account bot – they appear over and over again). Once I’m done, I add or subtract scheduled times for the buffered tweets to be shared. We only do this on Fridays, so the delivery happens more or less between 9am and 6pm Eastern.

Through this experience, I’ve found a number of themes and topics worth reflecting on as I continue. Social media is not a large part of my job, so finding ways to fit tools to the process makes it happen within the amount of time I can allot it. One is truly fortunate if one’s work is of a kind that presents interesting problems, and perhaps doubly so if the search for solutions actually results in something that works better and faster. Of course, it’s also true that any good problem or challenge tends to unfold into smaller problems or challenges as you work through it. In the worst case, this can lead to a sort of problem/solution cascade, where you never manage to get a good equilibrium. Wanting to connect with others in the same intellectual or business space is that kind of problem.

A complex problem will most often require multiple tools that add up to a satisfactory process or solution. Yet it also seems true that the urgency of business demands often mean that you never have the time to research a comprehensive solution, which means you’re going to end up using the tools that are closest to hand. Hopefully they’re also close enough to the desired result that they can help you triangulate toward a solution.

More to come as I continue through the 10 Tools Challenge over the rest of 2013.

–

Don’t Forget that You Will Forget: On Public Engagement and Your Blind Spots

I’m going to make a suggestion, especially to anyone whose vocation, avocation, or general tendencies get them walking around out in public. If you have to assume something, assume this: It’s better to expect that everyone is everywhere, rather than expecting that there are those who are everywhere and those who are only somewhere.

Forget designed by Andrew Forrester from The Noun Project

It’s no secret that people sort themselves in space. One clique sits at this table; another at a second table, and so on. A cohesive and distinct  group in the modern age almost always includes a claim to space or place as part of what they are. The connection between identity and location goes back as far as the written record itself, as does the use of one as a shorthand for the other. But these claims never match reality exactly. Or worse: maybe they never match at all.

We could try to know as much as we can about a space. (We’d have to set aside how you know where one space ends and another one begins, but that’s fine. One thing at a time.) Maybe if we could sort back through all the possible claims and how they relate to all that preceded them, maybe we could finally say: OK, here’s who belongs and who doesn’t.

Of course, that’s fantasy, too.

A lot of this comes out of my experience working in museums, and has been recently brought to the point of expression by one Nina Simon’s recent postings on Museum 2.0 (On White Privilege and Museums). Her work there touched on topics I’ve been thinking and writing about privately: building training and opportunities that support museum volunteers and docents. But it’s also been popping in and out of the background since I joined the workforce. Most of what I’ve done has been pretty close to the intersection of learning and public engagement. And in that experience, I’ll tell you: there are always more somebodies and kinds of somebodies around than you’ll recognize. And when they come onto your radar? Well, if you react in surprise, you’ve told them a lot about the way you see the world.

There will be a time to reflect more here about my museum work. The most important moment for my current purposes in this post is something that a docent asked me once in a training session. To paraphrase:

“I lead group tours at a major science and technology museum. I try to take people as they come. But one day, I showed up for my shift and discovered that my first tour group of the day was made up of a group of Amish families. I didn’t know what to do. What would you do?”

If one breaks this moment down into component parts, the one part that underlay it all was this: The docent would certainly never have consciously thought or said that Amish visitors shouldn’t come to a science and technology museum. The docent would not have agreed if it had been put to them that Amish visitors couldn’t come to a science and technology museum. But was there anything at the museum that the docent would have imagined that Amish visitors would find interesting enough to come in the first place? No.

Another docent’s response really cut to it, though: the Amish are not indifferent to all the technology created during and since the Industrial Revolution. Not at all. That they choose to remove themselves from the direct use of it, and as much as possible from any indirect use of it does not rule out a wide range of interest, curiosity, and even knowledge about it.

So when you’re surprised that the Amish want to hear about innovation, invention, discovery, and technology, you’re the one whose understanding of the world has been revealed as inadequate to that moment. You’re the one who would have said This place is open to all, but was also certain enough that only some people would be there in the first place.

Connecting location and identity is just one of the many shorthands, shortcuts, and work-arounds, by which we make the indigestible totality of existence into something we can actually move around in. These are our cognitive tools.

But quiet as it’s kept, when you come to use a tool so well that you forget it’s there, there will come a time when you’ll be startled to realize that you’ve been waving it around and that some of the folks on the receiving end don’t recognize your gesture in the way that you expect.

Ten Tools for 2013

Although I haven’t written about it before, I decided a few months ago to take up Jane Hart’s Ten Tools Challenge this year, after reading about it on David Kelly’s blog. This is a year when I’m learning new tools for a new job, having moved from being my own boss as a consultant and strategist to working for Versatile PhD. VPhD an internet-based business, and those prosper through one’s ability to use good tools effectively. It’s for these reasons that I’ve been thinking about this question lately: What is the nature of the connection between a tool, its purpose, and the audience for its use?

we must have a Chuck for fine work

This was a departure from graduate school, where I had more time to experiment. Integrating technology into the classroom and the learning experience proved more complicated when I had to balance them against the basic demands of designing and delivering classes. My search for permanent academic employment took a lot of time and energy, as did other things, and so there was usually not a lot left over for experimenting with new tools.

For quite a while after it happened, leaving academia felt like losing my audience. This was much more true of my teaching than it was of my research. (The erosion of my connection to that audience had begun rather earlier; it was largely complete by the time I moved on.) The luxury of my lack of originality with tools was tied to the audience as well: in higher education, they and I were in the same place at the same time and so we could always fall back on that. But once the process of getting to what came next had started in earnest, I came to see that one answer to a loss of audience was the adoption of new tools.

You can find some of the earliest traces of this process in social media, on Twitter. It was there that I first found a cohesive group of professionals that had decided to use the platform not just as a tool for finding each other, but as a platform for sharing and developing professionally: #lrnchat. It was through that route that I heard of Jane, and learned about her work as the principal figure at the Center for Learning and Performance Technologies, or as a member of the Internet Time Alliance. And her especially relevant yearly Top 100 Tools for Learning list. The Ten Tools Challenge formalizes what many have already done: use the list as a starting point for professional development.

So I’ll be thinking of new tools as means to find new audiences and communicate with them. I’m also taking advantage of a lucky alignment: personal professional development and the development of the business of which I am part go together. I also think that changes in the tools that work for one is a way to trace development: the tool is a breadcrumb, or a chapter, or a bookmark.

My Ten Tools for 2013:

WordPress (personal; professional) Blogging more often, about a wide range of subjects.

Google Analytics (professional) Enhancing our understanding of what users do on our site.

Mailchimp (professional) Communicating updates and reminders to our promoters and champions.

Buffer (professional) Very handy for efficiently expanding the social media footprint the enterprise.

SurveyMonkey (professional) What do our users think about our site and services, now and in comparison to past surveys?

R (personal; professional, someday) One needs to be fluent with data and statistics in business more now than ever.

CodeAcademy (personal) I have a friend who is an R autodidact: she suggested I try something less complicated before R, so I’m working on Ruby.

A new RSS reader to replace Google Reader (personal) A week ago, there was something else in this slot.

Asana (professional) A project workspace the extremely distributed VPhD team uses.

Tin Can API, aka The Experience API (professional) because I’m interested in what it could be used to do to track career development or accomplishment across a distributed set of locations.

it has cost us considerable in time and money to ascertain the best Vise at the lowest cost