This post is about how the year book came about, and some of the rationale behind it.

What's a FabLab?
A FabLab is a workshop that contains industrial quality equipment that is controlled by widely available software like Google Sketchup, Inkscape or Coreldraw. It puts the power to produce basically anything into your hands as an individual. It does for production what social media does for publishing and sharing. You hit print on your computer, and end up with a physical product. There are four of these FabLabs in the Netherlands, and a couple of dozen worldwide. In the past 2 years I've seen things being 'printed' as diverse as furniture, food, fashion, car and motor parts, jewelry, lamps, and toys. As prototype or as personal unique product. It's amazing and hugely empowering. Remember how amazing it was when you first started blogging: the relationships suddenly forming, the value of conversations? This is the same all over, but now you're turning bits into atoms and change your physical environment.

FabYearBook 2010
The idea for the FabYearBook came from two things. First, when visiting the then still very empty space that now is becoming the FabLab Groningen, I saw how Bart Kempinga had put together a reader with print-outs from different FabLab websites from around the world. He had placed that reader on a table in the middle of that big white empty room. Visitors and potential partners leafed through it, and it helped them paint with their imagination a vision of what the FabLab Groningen could be on the bare walls around them.

Bart Kempinga with his 'scrapbook' in a still empty FabLab Groningen

Second, I worked with a group of students at the local university in my home town in the spring of 2009. I gave a few guest lectures on knowledge management and community building. As part of their assignment I asked them to generate ideas on how to stimulate community building in the FabLab network, as well as knowledge sharing. In a bigger list of ideas, the students also came up with the FabYearBook. Marloes Wilmink, Anne Heesink, Eva Rennen and Karlein Sanders were the students that planted the year book idea firmly with me.

Presentation slide by my students

We put forward the idea for a year book at the global Fab5 Conference in India last August, and sent out calls for contributions in November. Actual contributions started coming in around January 15th, with the latest arriving this week Monday. Now, Wednesday we've printed the first FabYearBook 2010. More than 50 pages, from mostly 'close by' sources, but already with interesting variety and diversity.

Making the year book was not just about making a book, it is an intervention in the global network and community as well. There's two components to that: visibility and rhythm.

Networks, nodes, visibility
In a network all nodes are distributed. That makes it often hard to see the breadth, depth and potential of a network from your perspective as a single node in it. For you and me to perceive the network from our individual position in it, we need to be visible to others and the others need to be visible to us. You probably know a sizable number of the contacts of your own direct contacts, but after that visibility of people/nodes brakes down quickly. To look further, over that '2 degrees out'-horizon from your own position, we need tools. Network visualizations are helpful. Sharing stories from the network in the network is helpful too. All this is true for the global FabLab Network as well. Some nodes are highly visible and see a lot, others are mostly dark nodes in the overall network fabric. The FabYearBook 2010 is a first attempt to share stories in a more persistent way, a beacon as it were in the FabLab landscape. So that visibility can improve, and new connections can be made.

Community, rhythm, predictability
Functioning communities show a number of characteristics that can be also purposefully used to create circumstances for community to grow and blossom. Community creates these characteristics, but the characteristics also help create community.

Rhythm is such a characteristic of community. Our society has rhythms on larger and smaller scales. They help us to feel as part of a whole, and give us predictability where there actually is none. Christmas is such a macro-rhythm in the western world. Even if you haven't seen your family for a full year, you'll be welcomed at Christmas. Weekends are a rhythm like that too. Morning coffees as well. For the Dutch FabLab community we've set a rhythm through FabTables, regular meet-ups at 6 weeks intervals with a fixed date and time. Anyone is welcome, and they always take place no matter what. I've done the same with Elmine to get our local GeekLounges going, at a 2 month interval. Even if you have to miss out on one or two, you know you'll be welcome at the next get-together, and when it takes place. An existing macro-rhythm for the FabLab community is the yearly Fab Conference. It's FabLab's Christmas so to speak. You have to travel for it, and meet up with the extended family as it were. The year book hopefully will serve as a new macro-rhythm, about half way (January) between two Fab conferences (August), and it comes to you.

The finished year book

Looking forward to when next year January sees the next FabYearBook coming out!

Working in different groups.

Of course I know from personal experience the size of groups I am comfortable with in different settings. I like working on concrete tasks with 1 or 2 others, I like teams of 5, I like doing interactive sessions with 8 to 16 people, with an optimum of 12, I enjoyed working for a company where the communication habits didn't scale beyond 16, I like to do open conversational sessions with 20 to 25 people, and I like to present to larger audiences.

But what are the 'transition points' in group size? How much people do you need to have enough variety in a group to increase the learning in that group during learning activities? When does communication overhead become too big to stay with 1 on 1 connections and additional group roles or tools to facilitate communication are needed?
I can imagine all kinds of variables coming into play: variety of skills in the group, group inertia (though the work of Olson seems proven to be false), organizational overhead needed, cognitive overhead, communication needs, in-/outgroup aspects, peer pressure, etc.
All these factors are probably depending on what needs to be done: group learning, a concrete task, problem solving, collective action etc.

Is there any academic source you are aware of, or empirical studies you've seen that cover this, or at least aspects of it? Any pointers are welcome. I will of course blog what I find / receive.

Working in different groups.

For those of you unfamiliar with Yammer. Yammer basically offers the same functionality as Twitter, but only those people and messages are visible that share the same e-mail domain with you. So everybody at company.com can see eachother, but nobody else. Added to that is group functionality and drawing organisational relationships between people. In short it is an internal Twitter, but lives outside you firewall.

Last week we received the graphs you see on the left from the Yammer team. It depicts nicely how the adoption of Yammer within Rotterdam University evolved. Starting in November 2008, the number of registered accounts rose to just under 200 in a year. The plateau in July/August in all three graphs is the summer holiday (but there was still some activity), and activity rises as soon as the new school year started, especially the number of accounts.

Of those 200 people that created accounts, some 130 posted one or more messages. The total number of messages is around 5500, or on average 42 postings per active user. In comparison the learning community, with 12 people active, wrote some 7000 messages over the course of a year in their platform. This gives you some perspective on the different layers of involvement you always see in groups, from active core to non-posting lurkers. (though the learning community and the yammer group aren't connected per se, the members of the former were generally also part of the latter)

Yammer.com sent us these graphs as a means to sell paid for services. However I think this type of information (and more detailed than this) is increasingly important if you want to understand the group dynamics of the communities you're involved in. In networked environments where social connections are the means of navigation and information filtering you need pattern information to spot opportunities and threats to the health of the community.

(to the left, graphs for total number of posters, number of users, and number of messages)

"Ecofont The articles on pages 14-19 are printed with Ecofont Spranq Eco Sans, a letter with holes in it, thereby using up to 20% less ink during printing. You don't see the holes in normal pt-size, but they are there. At bigger font sizes do notice, as the holes get bigger."

A clever idea I think. Unless of course you now start mindlessly printing e-mail again.
The font is developed by a Dutch company, is freely downloadable but also available in a paid version which lets you turn any font (incuding your own corporate font) into an ecofont by 'punching holes' in your letters. Adding installing this font to use in my invoices and proposals (the only stuff I ever print) to my to-do list.

Holes do show at larger font sizes, but otherwise your eyes don't notice at all.

Pics from the GeekLounge by Elmine

We decided to make it a repeating event. The next one will be at the end of January, Saturday 23rd.
Other dates, all Saturdays: March 20th, May 22nd, (July 24th), September 25th, November 20th. Starting at 16:00 hrs, until 21:00 hrs or so. Check the GeekLounge page for info/updates.

Each lamp installed will save about 90% of energy use, or 45kg of CO2 output from burning fossil fuels per year, compared to regular incandescents. On top of that a LED lamp has a longer lifespan than both regular incandescents (up to 50 times) and CFLs (up to 8 times). And that times 2.5 million if everybody who gets a light bulb this fall installs it. With almost 20% of energy usage for ligthing this can have significant impact. With the European Union wide ban on regular light bulbs being implemented in several steps since September 2009, it also means a lot of people will already know if and how using LED technology feels different, and lower the threshold for them to replace more bulbs with LEDs over time.

I can't show how it looks on the outside, because it fell to the floor while unpacking it, and the light bulb shattered as all glass bulbs do. This being LED technology though, even with the glass bulb removed it of course still works. So after I took a picture and removed the remaining glass shards I installed it anyway, and it works perfectly.

The lamp is created by a Dutch company and comes in two types a 4 Watt (40 Watt replacement) and the 6 Watt (60 Watt replacement). The last one is dimmable.

An issue with LED technology currently is of course the price tag. The retail price of these bulbs is around 25 Euro. It still means that you earn the price difference back within a year or two (both by saving energy and saving on buying regular replacements).

As you can see in this close up the lamp contains 4 LEDs

With all my talk about how infrastructures are having societal impacts outside the realm of technology, I am pleased to see this infrastructure reach my door.

Some photos I took

Several talks were about the experiences made with the introduction or development of tools. How Wiki is used at Océ for instance, as presented by Samuel Driessen, and the Knowledge Café of Winkwaves (blog, Dutch) presented by René Jansen. The latter talked about how social media is used to bring 'the smell of humans' to companies and KM. I love that kind of language.

Slides:

Samuel Driessen has written along with several presentations in his own blog (I'm no good at live blogging, so I simply lazily refer to his postings from during the event):

1 The APOSDLE project (advanced process oriented self directed learning environment)
2 Winkwaves Knowledge Cafe
3 Christaan Stam on ageing workforce and KM
4 Rienke Schutte on Wikipolicy

A very interesting presentation was one of the last ones of the day (number 3 in the list above). Christiaan Stam talked about seeing the ageing population challenges organisations face through a knowledge management lens, and presented findings from his ongoing research. Certainly useful input to reflect on with one of my clients, where I support a community of practice dealing with precisely these issues. I will go into Christiaans presentation in more detail in a seperate posting (I received a copy of the slides yesterday).

I was one of the speakers the first time in 2007 (then I talked about seven years of data gathering for a knowledge management benchmark), and also gave a presentation this time.
I described how we went about setting up and doing the project at Rotterdam University for Applied Sciences where we used a self-steering learning community as an instrument for professional development. I talked about balancing issues of steering/control and freedom to explore, experiment and fail, and the way that worked during the 12-14 months the project ran.
See my posting at the start of the project and some thoughts on the results and community forming afterwards, as well as some specifics about the resulting changes in the teaching of the teachers involved.

My slides are in Dutch, but I embed them here nonetheless to give you an impression of what I talked about.

Definitely looking forward to attending the third edition of KM in Holland in 2011!

I am here in Malmo for the 5th EU ministerial conference on eGovernment. Elmine and I are staying in Copenhagen, and I hopped across the bridge into Malmo/Sweden to attend the conference.

The conference venue, and European flags in front of the main entrance

The conference was opened by the Swedish Minister for Local Government and Financial Markets, Mats Odell. The Swedes are it seems very much aligned with the principles of transparency, participation and empowerment, that I have come here to promote. It was the first time I heard a government minister call upon the audience to publish as much as you can and use the hashtag egov2009 to make it findable. The conference website incorporated a live Twitter feed, and the plenary sessions were streamed live on the web. I thought, highly sceptical as I am of these large scale EU gatherings, that was an encouraging sign. Minister Odell does not use Twitter or Facebook himself but his general secretary does (here he clearly explains why).

In contrast the EU Ministerial Declaration on eGov (PDF) was rather disappointing to me, with vague language and without clear targets. I think it clearly lacks leadership where leadership is much needed. Especially if you compare it to earlier draft versions where phrases like 'publishing in machine readable formats' were in the text. All of that apparently disappeared on Wednesday when the final text was drafted. What's left is a declaration that hardly contains anything new, and basically only reaffirms what was already in the EU Directive on Public Service Information from 2003. Its intentions are great but the Visby Agenda, adopted last week, which covers the entire ICT policy of the EU has more meat to it, I think. (Also see this review of the Ministerial Declaration)

Minister Mats Odell presenting Ministerial Declaration, EC VP Siim Kallas accepting it

Throughout the conference, as noted by an official of the EC I talked to, there was a lot of talk about social networks and web 2.0 (next to electronic identity), for the first time on an event like this he said. I later talked to a Swedish guy from the IT industry who thought that there was way too much talk about social networking and web 2.0, which he regarded as a turn for the worse.
Indeed it was the Industry Declaration, read after the EU Declaration, that I thought was the most awful contribution to the conference. Instead of pointing to a clear way forward, DigitalEurope (no website it seems, odd) demonstrated the industry, or at least the part of IT it says it represents, lacks vision. The very clear key message was 'thanks for all the funding you provided in years past, please keep on giving us more'. At least it was transparent, I have to give them that. It was a major piece of sucking up to the European Commission, and I was relieved when the moderator cut the speaker short as soon as time was up. 'I've only got two more slides'. Whatever.

While the Vice President of the European Commission stated in his opening words he was pleased to see that not only industry but also citizens had drafted an accompanying declaration to the EU one, it was the Industry Declaration that was part of the opening plenary session, while the Open Declaration was part of the last parallel session on the last day of the conference. Nevertheless I think it was already a great step that a citizen declaration was part of the proceedings.
To my ears the word citizens on this eGov conference was too often replaced with the word 'users' and 'consumers', betraying technological focus and approaches where people are just the means, not the goal. DigitalEurope seems to believe they are the conduit between government and citizens and vice versa, but I rather speak to my government directly. It was good to hear Minister Mats Odell say in his closing statement that the EU needs to take up the challenge issued by the Open Declaration.

David Osimo and Paul Johnston presenting, video of citizens reading the Open Declaration out loud

EU citizens reading the Open Declaration. The video drew applause from the audience

In parallel to the conference William Heath and Donagh organized 'Malmö '09' a barcamp style meet-up of EU citizens around eGov. Meeting up at Thursday evening they brought together pertinent works of art. Donagh provided input in the form of personal opinions of EU citizens around different questions concerning the EU, identity, and eGov. We also started to compare the language in all three declarations, the Visby Agenda, and the White House memorandum on transparency as published by the US administration. That's something for a later posting. On Friday morning the group worked this into a set of statements and suggestions for EU eGov policy. To the credit of the Swedish government, Minister Mats Odell attended this session by EU citizens and gave a presentation there in pecha-kucha style (PDF slides, PDF transcript).

Annotating the Ministerial Declaration, Opinions from EU Citizens

During the conference the finalists for the EU eParticipation awards presented themselves. I visited some of them and came away with several inspiring examples, technological, but more importantly also on a human level. That too, is something for a different posting.

What became apparent to me on this conference, and what popped up in different conversations with people here from both government, industry and citizenry, is that we need the EU equivalent of a Sunlight Foundation. To consistently lobby for transparency, participation and empowerment of citizens on the EU level. Building blocks for that are already apparent in the Netherlands, Germany, UK, Denmark, and elsewhere. I think we need to start combining those building blocks and turn it into a European effort.

Internet and mobile communications: we carry the end-point with us

Human networks for navigating information and our need for visualization
Using human relationships as a navigational structure is something we've been doing since the dawn of mankind. Grooming, gossip, storytelling, literature, anthropology, markets, politics, all revolve around how we humans relate to each other and place information in that relational context. For most of our time these human relationship networks were only usable to navigate a small segment of the world. Our village, our neighbourhood, our guild, our voting district, our extended family, our tribe, our band of brothers. Basically we took geographic boundaries and definitions of our immediate scope of the world as given. We relied on taxonomies, categorization, hierarchies, libraries, party programs and representatives for all the things outside of that scope. The internet/mobile have blown apart that geographic barrier, and made our potential scope in terms of human relationships global. Our basic cognitive abilities to deal with human relationship networks are not enough to deal with that suddenly global scope (Dunbars theory). So we need new tools to help us out, new ways of constructing insights we cannot construct on our own. With language and writing we've been neatly able to cope with the increasing complexity of our societies until now. To deal with seeing entire humanity as a network for navigation we need additional tools however. Visualization tools that can convey the complexity, diversity and richness while at the same time helping us making sense.

Trying to find meaningful visualizations for making sense of networks

NodeXL
Several of those tools are popping up and becoming available to us individually, so we can reflect on our own networks and how they help us navigate the information abundance around us.
One of those tools is NodeXL.

Marc Smith, whom I have the pleasure of knowing for some years now, is a sociologist who used to be with Microsoft Research. There he, amongst other things, helped data mine use-net for behavioral patterns ('answer-persons', 'hobby horse riders', 'trolls', 'noobs' etc), and helped develop things such as an e-mail triage tool based on how important the sender seems to be to you considering your past e-mailing behavior.

Working independently now at Connected Action he brings us NodeXL, which he is pushing into the direction of providing free and open tools that support the analysis of social media usage. In other words to help us analyze the global networks we weave and see how we use them to navigate the world. Part of that analysis is seeing who is in your network (not everybody might be visible to you, we see most of our network relations as 'spokes' in a wheel with us as center, and only for a limited part do we see the connections of our connections), and another is helping us see how your connections are connected between eachother.

The Twitter-users that mention the word 'digg'
As an example of what NodeXL can do see the pic below, visualizing the people and their connections who used the word 'digg' over a certain time frame on Twitter. Can you see yourself doing that for a topic you care about (#opendata e.g.)? Or for your brand (who is talking about it, and how are they clustered)? Well with a bit of effort you can do that by yourself now. See the video below for instructions on how to do that (and read this posting by Marc).

Digg mentions in Twitter network

2009 - November - NodeXL - Demo - Mapping Twitter Social Networks "Digg" from Marc Smith on Vimeo.

Who is talking about open data?
Marc asked me what topic I would be interested in and helped me to construct a network map of Twitter users for that topic.
So I suggested the topic 'open data' and below is a first picture of that network. Marc gave me the data set so I will be exploring that myself in the coming days, and blog about my findings.

The network of people on Twitter talking about Open Data

Authenticity
Authenticity in this project meant creating authentic learning experiences, making it as real as possible for the students involved. By using real time information, by solving actual existing problems, by doing exercises that reflect the actual level of complexity involved, by doing things as they are done in the professional fields you are training the students for. And by providing the books and other resources 'merely' as information objects while doing all that.

Co-creation
Co-creation in this project meant giving not only the teacher, but also her colleagues, as well as the students and possibly people working in the field they train for, active roles in creating the learning experience.
Think of having students 'roleplay', work in project teams together, having them explain things to other students, have professionals available for interviews/conversations, etc.

Authenticity and Co-creation are symbiotic
From all the different things the teachers in this project did in changing their teaching modules, one thing to me is clear as a pattern: you can't have authenticity without co-creation, and you can't do co-creation without increasing authenticity.

Our 'rebel' logo during the project

Let's describe a few examples from the Rotterdam project to explain what I mean, even though this is going to make this posting the longest I've written ;)

Databases course
Rimmert teaches a module on databases in the informatics department. Most of the students he taught (40-50 in total) already work as coders in IT next to their education. Instead of taking a book as the basis of his module, he decided to let the students create the course (co-creation) because he hoped it would then be closer to the problems they actually encounter in their work as well as address actual knowledge gaps they have (authenticity). Co-creation to get a more authentic learning experience.
So students created a list of topics they wanted to address in the course, and then divvied up those topics amongst themselves. In sub groups relevant info, knowledge, and example problems was gathered and then presented in class to the others. In a wiki all the used material was collected and bundled (for the participants of the next course to build on). Because there was no information or actual content to test the students knowledge reproduction on as exam, the exam consisted of doing an actual case in which all the material discussed needed to be applied. By choosing a co-creation approach Rimmert increased the authenticity of his course.

In the pub, and in discussion

Programming course
Rimmert also teaches programming. One of his issues is that most of his programming examples and test questions are contrived and over-simplified because otherwise there is no quick way of judging how well the students are doing. His teaching lacked authenticity, and he wanted to address that. Together with his colleagues he created a programming infrastructure/platform that completely resembles the way code is developed and committed in real software development, with the added possibility of being able as a teacher to see what steps individual people working in the platform had taken, and how code was eventually created. It allowed him to give the students real complex coding problems to work on (authenticity), while creating insight for himself into the whole coding process of his students without difficulty (the main reason for using simplified problems before). For the students this meant working in teams which added a layer to the learning experience (authenticity): the different roles of team members, team processes (ticketing for instance, or committing code), and the different snags teams run into during code development. In this way students were instrumental in creating the learning experience for their team members, as well as for themselves (co-creation), and each needed to play his part for real. There was no way around this, because grading was done on not just the results of the work, but predominantly of the process of the work being done.  By aiming for authenticity Rimmert 'caused' a co-created learning experience.

City walks and Interviewing professionals
Jet teaches social pedagogy and orthopedagogy. Professionals in the field operate in disadvantaged neighbourhoods with lots of social problems. She found her first year students often had very unclear or unrealistic views of their chosen field of profession and wanted to address that by increasing the authenticity of the learning experience. Since years Jet organized city walks, where she would visit a neighborhood with her class, to point out the type of situations and contexts her students would be working in, and helping them to 'read' the social signs in these neighborhoods. She would take each of 7 classes on one such walk, usually picking one neighborhood. This time she asked her students to go out on their own in small groups with digital camera's to take photos of things they thought relevant. The students would annotate these photos ('why are they relevant?') and share them on-line. By sending different groups out to different neighborhoods, Jet was now able to have the students cover most of the city of Rotterdam, broadening their scope of the city. Students not only shared photos with their class mates, but also with the 6 other classes. In parallel she had her students visit organizations they would typically end up working for and also video interview professionals there. This brought students into contact with their possible working environment, and have them ask questions to professionals in the field. The resulting videos were again shared with all students, resulting in a complete overview of possible working environments and professions for these students. Submerging the students into city neighborhoods and relevant organizations made the experience more authentic. Sharing the wealth of impressions between all students to reflect upon meant co-creating the experience. Another co-creation aspect was Jet asking the students beforehand what topics they would like to see addressed, what questions they had about their chosen field of profession. This to guide the students into looking at neighborhoods and organizations. Feedback of students was very good, to give one example: "When I started this year I had no clear picture of what this study was about. In a short time I now know so much more. Unbelievable really what we learned in just a few weeks."

Working with Ernst on spotting emergent results

Covering Valuta Risks
Ron teaches a module on valuta options to cover the risks posed by having transactions in different currencies while the exchange rates between those currencies are dynamic (e.g. buying resources in Euro, selling part of your products in Dollar. What happens if the Dollar drops or rises between the time you set product price and you actually sell the product and get paid?).
Usually he spent most of his contact time with students explaining the data he based the exercises on and how students should go about doing those exercises. Ron aimed to intensify the learning experience and the quality of face to face time he had with the students. He created a series of short screencasts to explain all the 'technical details' of the course and put them on-line, so students could watch and repeat as much as they liked. He then added a few additional things he now had time for: he coupled the data he used to the actual exchange rates between Euro, Dollar and Pound, for the duration of the course, so all of a sudden real news events influencing the exchange rates became important for the students to track and hatch their bets. He worked with students from two different parts of financial management studies: one group to fill the role of financial officer at a company needing to cover valuta risks (and let them determine what % of risk they wanted or didn't want to cover), and another group to play the role of the banks accepting and executing those valuta options of their 'customers'. Following actual exchange rates, and having the roles of both banks and companies filled made for a much more authentic experience. At the same time the role playing part (and working in teams) meant co-creation as well. Another layer of co-creation was added by Ron explaining to the students the form of the course was an experiment to him as well, and asking for explicit feedback to help increase the quality. And finally Ron had much more time to discuss the material in depth with his students face to face.

Negotiating in different cultural settings
Maria teaches negotiation skills for cross-cultural situations. Students that complete the course continue their education in SE Asia for half a year, immediately after finishing the course. Therefore application of those skills is an important part of the course. Maria wanted to spend less time on the accompanying book, and more time on practicing and role playing. To do this she stopped lecturing based on the book. Instead she treated the book as information source for students and asked them in groups to present parts of the material to their fellow students, both using the book and using information sources from elsewhere. Presenting to their fellow students could take any shape: role playing games, acting scenes, showing relevant video footage found on-line with reflective discussion, etc. The exam for this course had been a problem in the past, as students were set to leave the country immediately after and the module being compulsory, failing the exam was a real logistical problem to all involved. In its new form the exam relied much heavier on an assessment during sessions in which the students needed to deal with actual negotiation cases in a role playing setting, as well as assessing what the student did during the course: continuous monitoring in place of having one point of measurement.
Maria changed the module working very closely together with two of her colleagues in parallel classes, and relied heavily on a much higher involvement of her students. Students outside of the class helped her create/collect alternative material as well as a website to put it in. A real co-creation effort, aimed at increasing the practical value of the module by making the contents more authentic. Both she and her students loved it (getting rid of the book as central element, and bringing the contents into the course themselves), even though she was sorry she couldn't lecture as much anymore which she loves doing. 'I started loving my students so much more'

Owning your learning path
In all 6 of these cases co-creation and authenticity worked together in lock-step. The starting point or aim might have been only one of them, but the other was always an important ingredient. The other projects the participants worked on were essentially no different. For me this is an important point: when you want to have a more authentic learning experience it means actively involving the learners in creating that learning experience. If you're the learner it means actively owning your learning path, if you're the teacher it means helping the learners own their learning paths, and see your work as a permanent learning path as well. There's no way around it, I think.

Rotterdam University in the evening

English version:

Dutch version:

They can be downloaded as PDF (Dutch, English) to print and put up on the wall. They have a Creative Commons BY NC SA license. Also if you want to create your own language version, get in touch with James Burke, as he can provide access to the original design files for you to work with.

Making flow charts like these can help dispel urban myths, reduce complexity, take away concerns and fears, and shed a bit more light on grey areas. Creating these for instance for Germany was part of the discussions at Reboot_D and is something the people of the newly founded Open Data Network in Germany can pick up on.

The general plan
Having a one-day conference in Enschede, Netherlands, on Friday, May 14th 2010.
Having a big bbq garden party at our home on Saturday, May 15th.

Elmine's birthday conference 2008 (photo left by Elmine)

Our questions, or, where you can influence the plan
Do you think this is a good idea in general?
What would be good themes to address, themes that are worthwile to look at with a diverse and networked crowd in a 1 day time frame?
Who would you like to see speak? Would you like to see people speak?
Would you be willing to attend? And mark your calendars with this 'early warning' post?

Ever done actual work on a birthday party? ;)

You can leave your remarks, answers and/or suggestions either here in the comments or on the BirthdayConference wiki-page (login possible, not needed).

It would be great if we could welcome a lot of you again to our home town next spring!

All age groups welcome for some serious bbq-ing! (both photos by Elmine)

I pointed to 2 developments I think are impacting the way we (can) deal with lineair ways of information distribution like text documents and books.

First of all the amount of available information that comes at us (due to increased connectivity and resulting dynamics), which makes pattern recognition over large bodies of info more important than actual reading all that info. Headline scanning on steroids. Already 4 years ago I described how that has changed my daily info-diet routine
(filtering, tools, input routine). It means that most of my outside-in information reading has moved beyond books and longer texts (I don't read books as primary source e.g. but follow the authors), and that only inside-out information consumption still contains a largish text focus. This because filtering information, validating it, etc now all completely falls to me as tasks (not to some editor e.g.), and I have to be very picky when it comes to giving attention to a larger body of text. Even though I still regard my self as a through and through text oriented person, and our home is filled with books.

The second observation I shared was the notion that lineair texts are by definition very ill-suited to convey complex situations and problem descriptions, while the level of complexity in our societies is increasing (again due to increased connectivity and the resulting dynamics of that). I think it is that limitation what makes literature so great and fun, following all the complex storylines and interactions through the detailed description of the life of the protagonists. We intuit life's complexity more from that than it is actually spelled out, and we enjoy grasping at what we intuit between the lines. At the same time we now realize it makes for a crappy information carrier for complex situations. What is great and fun for literature, is a bug for other texts.
Also where book printing was first the start of a new era of abundance, it has now become a place of scarcity as our general level of connectedness has increased so much bringing new demands to the speed, availability and interdependence of information flows.

If books were invented now, excerpt from Dutch VPRO documentary De Toekomst - Game over & over' with Steven Johnson, january 2006.

Hence the increasing availability of tools like Tinderbox that help you first to map out complexity, and then turn portions of it into lineair texts for publishing. (Regular mind mapping tools don't suffice, as they still only allow you to build hierarchical structures from a single starting node.) Hence the interest in visualization techniques, which often yield new insights.
Hence the popularity of piling strategies (Gmail, everything in one folder) versus filing
strategies (Outlook folders). Video, audio are both ways to escape the lineair demands of texts as well. Audio has always been a medium of choice for complex pattern conveyance, which we usually call music. Try writing that down in prose. We've also been saying 'a picture is worth more than a thousand words' for ages. Cliches like that have a reason for existing. The number of tools that have lowered the threshold for us to create and share both video and audio material is large. See Videoboo or audioboo just for one example. This regardless of problems we have in retreiving/refinding/searching material like that, I am now talking about conveying complex messages.

Games are another segment where we've made great progress in escaping the linearity of texts. Whether it is the gaming environments the military use to train troops in adaptive responses to a complex area of deployment, or whether it is for us to learn the consequences of the laws of nature like with Phun. Things like that convey the subtle interactions and chains of causality much more clearly than my physics book ever could (though I must say the teacher compensated that with experiments)

A very nicely diverse group of about 25 people attended. This number of people worked well for me, reminiscent of the BlogWalk format, as it allowed for more deep-diving conversation.

Six themes were proposed beforehand :
informal self-organized learning, workplace learning, beyond the classroom, open course materials and open universities, beyond texts and books, hacking education out in the 'real' world

I was attending to both be 'host' to the theme of 'beyond text and books', as well as to share my experiences in working with Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences and 10 primary schools here in the region.

Edu-hackers at work

After a general intro plenary round, two rounds of 'speed-geeking' followed. In short bursts of 6 minutes everybody rotated in small groups through the six themes, that were introduced by the hosts by way of showing examples, applications or sharing a few anecdotes. This way everybody gets an overview quickly of all themes, before choosing a topic to explore more deeply in the group discussion  rounds. Fittingly a description of my speed geeking remarks about the theme 'beyond texts and books' is too long a text to fit in this blogposting so it is posted seperately.

During the discussion rounds in the afternoon, notes on each of the themes discussed were made in etherpad (in German).

More edu-hackers at work

The closing plenary session we used to formulate a few educational hacks. Here are some of those mentioned, from the top of my head (i.e. without diving into the extensive notes):
- ELSA, as practiced at a school in Berlin, where parents, teachers and pupils/learners together negotiate the way the learning experience is shaped.
- Hands on themed projects, in which learners get most of the responsibility (as example a bike tour to Germany's highest mountain top in the Alps was mentioned)
- Parent blogs, to counter the 'control freakishness' of teachers
- Micro labs

It was a very pleasant, and intensive day. I find in general these small scale get togethers give me a lot in terms of conversations, learning as well as contacts. More than large conferences do. It's not a new insight, of course, been doing these unconference things since early 2004 after all, but it is one worth repeating every now and then.

On top of that, I rather enjoy Berlin as a city, so that helps too!

Berlin had a festival of lights, illuminating different buildings, such as Brandenburg Gate