What goes around comes around

Today Portugal feels like spring, and I have felt springy as well: full of energy, full of promise, optimistic, ready for a growth jump…. and at times also tense and short tempered like a spring.

I can, still far ahead, begin to see how fractals come together, start forming patterns. How contacts, interesting people, little bits of information, little tiny learning experiences, feeds i follow, start to make sense. I have listened long enough to web2.0 to see its potential and listened to others again to see its limitations. I now want to go open doors and windows to the echo chamber of web2.0 to other spheres where it may help make a difference. I have some idea now about how we can let in the personal without loosing focus. How we can accomodate for little sweet voices. How I can have a voice without adding to the noise. I will keep knitting, weaving, tying to connect conversations to make a difference.

Sometimes i can see the patterns and can see my own little spot in the pattern. Just sometimes. But it will come.

Boek; Belcanto door Anne Patchett

In het nederlands gelezen. Een internationale groep wordt gegijzeld in een zuidamerikaans land. Onder de gijzelaars zijn een beroemde operazangeres en een japanse CEO, zij worden verliefd, net als de tolk van de CEO en een terroriste. De groep als geheel krijgt langzaam een routine, zelfs een soort genegenheid voor elkaar. Dat proces, de verschillende culturen en de muziek zijn mooi beschreven. Geen hogere literatuur.

InMacgration (3)

This is what I have downloaded on my new laptop so far:

Firefox - browser. Including my entire profile with bookmarks, passwords, plug-ins and preferences which made the switch very smooth.

Thunderbird - email. I use Thunderbird (by Mozilla) to download and integrate email from my yahoo and gmail accounts. I like that it is offline, the possibilities for sorting, the ease of making filters and folders. Not only incoming mail, but also replies, are saved online on my gmail account as well, so if my machine would break down I can still get it.

Skype - phone, chat. I enjoy the moodlines, as well. I do not use any other IM and wondered if I should. 

Vienna - for rss reading. Great, open source, works fine, looks good. I am trying to lead and feed everything to here: news, blogs, but also bookmarks for sites with no rss, tag-feeds, photo feeds. Still figuring out the best way to organize folders.

NeoOffice - office package with text, numbers and presentations tools. I tried Open Office first but installing was troublesome (although Leopard has the x11, a little component that is required). I tried NeoOffice instead and it worked fine, so I settled for that. The text tool is off course different from Word, and I think I will only know how much when I start working with it a lot. And when I do, I think I would want to get Word, just to be sure not to loose time trying to master the little differences and not to run the risk of loosing lay-out etc when exchanging with others.

Skitch - grab and past for images. I want to use it for quickly grabbing visuals and past them in blogs or online. It looks like that is what it will do, but have not started real work with it.
Google desktop - I use it (only) for finding things quickly on my machine.

Google earth - love it, although now Google Maps have got better do not use it as much.

Quicksilver - for launching and quick tasking. Incredibly quick to find programs, bookmarks or the like, and QS then can perform many “standard actions” without having to switch to the program. Supposedly great, but I can’t be bothered to really explore and get into habit of using.

iGTD - for Getting Things Done. Looked promising and integrates with Quicksilver but I discovered I can’t be bothered. It is still sitting there, for the day when “i get really organized” but there is more on my list for that day! For personal effectiveness I only need the right mindset and a good task list.

and this is what I use online:

Netvibes - for startpages. It is not good as a feedreader, but to present feeds “portal” style. I am slowly discovering that it is to collect links and resources about a theme you might be interested in -and share that as a startpage. I like the image search where you can see visual tagfeeds from photo or images in one view.

and Flickr (photos), G-docs (joint writing), G-calendar (I let it feed to my iCal; so I share what I like), WordPress (publishing), Del.icio.us (public bookmarking), Ning (for hosting communities), Twitter (sharing little signs of presence). I am on Facebook but use it minimally: my latest twitter feeds into the Facebook status and my friends´statuses go to my feedreader.

On my wishlist to check out are a few tools for project management or GTD: Basecamp, Remember the milk, Nozbe.

What I noticed in my software and tool use:

The downloadable and online applications are so much more important than before! I have hardly used the Office-type applications, but couldn’t do without the browser and email and feedreader. This used to be the other way around. Now the question arises what this says about my work. It is the same with reading. From reading books I have shifted to reading blogs and skimming articles and texts online.

I am not very inclined to pay for software. I really like the open source principle, the Freedom of Code, Creative commons etc, but I have to be honest, the free part of it is ever so handy.

I am not a tool tiger, after this migration I am now tool-tired: I can’t be bothered. Whether Vienna or NetNewsWire is the slightly better rss reader, as to why I can’t get into really using Quicksilver and iGTD: I can’t be bothered; the alternatives to these are good enough. And good enough is fine. The 3 milliseconds I win when using these are not in the critical path of my projects; the limiting factor is my mind, my distractions, my procratinating strategies anyway.
And: what I am used to is important. The extra time it takes to keep up with the new tools, find and install them, import old date into them and learn how to use them, is hardly ever worth the trouble.

InMacgration (2): Apples and Moles

I like the feel of an empty agenda at the start of a new year.

I know I don’t need an agenda. I have G-cal online, which synchs with iCal for when I can’t get online, and a little paper notebook for notes for when I am not at the computer. Neither of those will synchronize with a paper agenda, so having one is a sure way for confusion and duplication.

I still went to select one. In a Staples hypermarket, november last year, between stacks and stacks of agendas, I found a shelf with very simple, pain, black agendas. I bought one.

I came to a bloggers dinner and was surprised to see a friend had one just like it. “oh, you mean my moleskine” she said, while pointing to someone else’ agenda across the table, same style. And it appeared ALL of us had this type of agendas, which I now know are moleskines. All of the moles are applers too. I might be affected worse than I thought.

InMacgration

I am an inMacgrant; i have recently switched from PCs to Mac, when i decided my new laptop would not be a Vista machine, but rather a Mac. I was struggling to make myself at home in this laptop where my clock and icons are in a different corner, there is no right mouse button, no delete button (only backspace) and ctrl-c and ctrl-v do not copy and paste. It made me feel like an immigrant in a new country. But after a while you get used to it, and really; the rest is pretty much the same. It works fine.
However, to people around me it is not the same, especially to the Apple-adepts. Apple has somehow managed to cultivate this “us” feeling in a very good way, and suddenly I am “one of us” which is very funny. Slowly I am discovering how We Mac-users are slightly superior to PC users, how our Macs always run smoother, our programs look better and how overall WE have an eye for design.

Multiple literacies

Talking and thinking more about “transliteracy” today. I read Bev´s page on literacies and a whole new world of previous work on literacies opened. Gosh. How interesting. How strange that none of this was quoted or referred to in Thomas’ article, as the main point, that of accepting “multiple literacies” is taken.

New Literacy Studies (NLS) denies the earlier notion of literacy as being a set of skills or competences that rest on culturally specific values about what is proper literacy. It challenges the way that literacy practices associated with people of different classes or different ethnic groups are presented as inadequate or unsuccessful attempts to achieve the proper literacy of the dominant culture. NLS uses language like “dominant literacies” and “literacy varieties” rather than, simply, “literaracy”.

Cope and Kalantzis outline the rationale for multiliteracies:

The Multiliteracies argument runs like this: our personal, public and working lives are changing in some dramatic ways, and these changes are transforming our cultures and the ways we communicate. This means that the way we have taught literacy, and what counts for literacy, will also have to change.

The term `Multiliteracies’ highlights two of the most important, and closely related changes. The first is the growing significance of cultural and linguistic diversity. The news on our television screens screams this message at us every day. And, in more constructive terms, we have to negotiate differences every day, in our local communities and in our increasingly globally interconnected working and community lives. (…)The globalisation of communications and labour markets makes language diversity an ever more critical local issue.

The second major shift encompassed in the concept of Multiliteracies is the influence of new communications technologies. Meaning is made in ways that are increasingly multimodal in which written-linguistic modes of meaning are part and parcel of visual, audio, and spatial patterns of meaning. Take for instance the multimodal ways in which meanings are made on the World Wide Web, or in video captioning, or in interactive multimedia, or in desktop publishing, or in the use of written texts in a shopping mall. To find our way around this emerging world of meaning requires a new, multimodal literacy.

http://www.alea.edu.au/multilit.htm

So speaking of mutilple literacies is important because, in my own words: Increasingly, we have to negotiate differences in language and culture, and -with ICT- we make meaning in multi-modal ways. These changes transform communication and culture.

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Transliteracy; crossing divides

Sue Thomas and the other authors of this article have described a concept which is both easy and hard to understand: transliteracy. Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media. In the article they define the term, and give examples.

Trans in transliteracy is “across” as well as “beyond”. The article does not view our expressions moving from print to digital to Internet as a linear historical progress, but as an ecology in which all forms of expression, of communication, co-exist and complement each other. They state that transliteracy is the most important skill for our time. But it is defenitely not new: the way the landscape or artefacts hold stories or how songs describe routes are older examples. Multimedia and multi modalities of online and offline worlds, require us to synthesize and shift gears all day. The concept “transliteracy” might help to understand human communication. We are moving into a more transliterate world again, after a period in which written communication has dominated.

Some examples that made sense to me:

“The philosopher Socrates, who eschewed learning to read and write in a
culture where such practices were unusual, believed that the fixed
nature of writing limits thought and enquiry.”

“a hypertext story, with its many diversions and elaborations, could be
eerily similar in form to the telling of family holiday memories.”

“Behaviors hitherto seen as dysfunctional, such as dyslexia, attention
deficit disorder, and even synaesthesia, may actually be useful
literacies in less textual environments like computer games (and,
indeed, real life) which privilege multimodality over fixed–type print.”

“Travel to other countries often introduces us to minor differences in
cultural practices which demand constant adjustment. Although this can
sometimes be stressful, it can also be enjoyable as the visitor
increases their level of transliteracy in the new environment.”

(I have always felt that travelling, being exposed to different cultures has helped me to learn; to be more transliterate, one could now say. Being illiterate, when visiting countries that use other scripts, also is quite interesting. I think my own interest in the Internet is to do with being between cultures. I have also wondered if many bloggers are travellers. Is the common factor the transliteracy?)

What I like about the view of the paper is how it both relativates the importance of technology (showing that telling campfire stories while drawing on the cave walls are not so different from mash-ups and chat forums; most new practices are not at all new) and acknowledges that it IS important, and it might actually influence our thinking or communicating: “I think the collective (Web 2.0) nature of communication is both a by–product and a cause of transliteracy.”

What I like also is the optimist view (”crossing divides” in the title!) from the paper. One quoted repondent says:

“The move to the digital era could be as democratizing as the birth of
the printing press was in the fifteenth century. It will bring the
ability to capture and share human experiences, learning and
entertainment in far more intuitive ways than the age of literacy
allowed.”

And this, is what I think is very true:

“With increasing specialization in business and academia in recent
years, this has led to an increasing need for organizations and
individuals to develop wider, more open networks, partnerships and
trusted communities to share ideas and to innovate. In particular, a
powerful source of innovation is to collaborate across traditional
boundaries, be they organizational, disciplinary or geographic.
Therefore, much of the discussion centered upon how can we communicate
effectively and build trust across these disparate communities.
Technology definitely has a major role to play in supporting these
boundary–disrupting collaborations, but perhaps there is a need to
further develop most peoples’ ‘transliteracy’ skills.”

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Learning Partners

(update: pic is from another day and was added later)

Last week I went to Bev´s place in Setúbal to pick up our routine of spending Wednesday mornings together. With the quiteness just after the holidays and the newness of a whole year ahead of us, we had some time to reflect.

Jointly we are working on a number of projects. Today we agreed to continue as “learning partners” and we filled in what that means to us:

• to continue spending the wednesdays / wednesday mornings together, f2f
• to discuss our projects or things we read, and give ourselves homework
• and TO WRITE A BLOGPOST within the same session with some, -any- result of that day’s session (bev’s blog is here)

We hope to accelerate and document our learning this way, and also increase our capacity to work together, as along the way we are streamlining and practicing our collaboration skills. This ranges from documents exchange, to tagging skills, to developing a joint repertoire, learning a shared language. It is also a way to discipline ourselves to schedule and set aside time for learning. It is so easy to postpone reading that article!
It is a community-of-practice way of continuing learning, and for me it is important for the three reasons of community, domain and practice.
The discovery today that what seemed like a crisp-fresh, virgin new year, has actually quite a lot of commitments in it already was a bit daunting… but it still feels exciting and challenging to be keeping track of it together with this and other partners in learning.
We are preparing for a learning event on marketing and outreach of communities of practice this week. Next week we will be talking about trans literacy (this article).

De tractor in de Oekraine

Een vertaling van “A short history of tractors in Ukrainian” door Marina Lewycka. Ietwat onbeholpen stijl, maar onderhoudend boekje. Leuke inkijkjes in immigrantenlevens, oostblokgeschiedenis, familie dynamiek, en de geschiedenis van de tractor. Grappig hoe die text -het levenswerk van de oude ukrainse vader- steeds verweven zit in het hoofdverhaal. Dat gaat over die oude vader, die op 84 jarige leeftijd een huwelijk aangaat met een sexy ukrainse, die zo een verblijfsvergunning voor UK verkrijgt. De dochters van de vader, die altijd al wat excentriek was en nu helemaal soms van het padje af lijkt te zijn, hadden een diep gewortelde vete. Doordat ze nu samen moeten strijden voor het lijfsbehoud van hun vader komen ze nader tot elkaar. Toch wel aardig, eigenlijk.