andrea saveri

Yesterday I had a great morning at the annual meeting of the International Forum of Visual Practitioners.  These are the amazing practitioners who support our collective thinking, workshop experiences and processes, and pattern recognition through graphic recording, facilitation, process design, hands-on modeling, and other forms of visual practice.

Visual practitioners help make the invisible stuff in our minds visible and sharable in dynamic settings.  As we move into a new sensory world of portable social media, smart objects, and location based information, a literacy of visualizing information, ideas, people and relationships will be increasingly important.

The Center for Graphic Facilitation made a nice summary of my talk and have it on video here.

It was really fun to spend the morning talking about the emerging strategic problem space of our clients and think about the role of visual practice.  I think we will see some interesting stuff emerge at the intersection of  visual practice, new digital publics, and large scale collaborations.

It is always gratifying to see ideas put into action and to witness experiments unfold and produce unexpected results.   The folks who produced Amplified Leicester just spent the past year in a community-based prototyping project that provided the city of Leicester with some great learning about using digital media to expand the sharing, collaboration, innovation capacities of its residents.

The project was born from the vision of Professor Sue Thomas at DeMontfort University and her work in transliteracy at DMU’s Institute of Creative Technologies and NLab.  Two years ago I spoke at NLab’s small business conference and discussed how digital media can amplify individual social and collaborative capacities and ultimately reshape and amplify groups at a larger scale like organizations and communities.  A year ago I addressed the Nlab group about how amplified organizations can begin to develop more flexible social and economic platforms that infuse resilience into community infrastructures.

This year, Amplified Leicester put it all into practice and engaged a group of Leicester residents in a process of learning how to become amplified through digital media and then use that knowledge to innovate at a grassroots level and develop practical applications of collaborative media in Leicester.  The participants included artists, moms, local politicians, city service employees, non-profit directors, a librarian, and even a police inspector.

On April 15, 2010 Amplified Leicester welcomed the public to a showcase of all the projects that included various workshops and presentations by the participants and their team.  The archive (linked to above) includes my keynote presentation about community response to the resilience imperative, remarks by Project Director, Professor Sue Thomas and Thilo Boeck, Sr. Research Fellow at DMU’s Centre for Social Action, and descriptions of the participants’ projects.

The showcase, while marking a milestone for the project and celebrating a lot of hard work, was just the beginning. It kicked off an ongoing engagement with the broader community of Leicester about amplifying for innovation and resilience.  Every two weeks the Amplified Leicester community meets to discuss questions, ideas, and lessons about how digital media can help them sense their world, create shared resources, and act collaboratively.

The release of the PNAS study, “Cognitive control in media multitaskers”, sparked the latest round of debate about whether we are losing ground in a landscape of distractions or entering into a renaissance of attention.  The study by Stanford researchers Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony Wagner, reports that in various standard psychological tests for cognitive control (attention and working memory) light media multitaskers performed better than heavy media multitaskers.  Note that this study measured performance in a controlled lab context and not in the real world.  (Read the article here for the full description of conditions and results)  Nevertheless, this kicked off another round in what Stowe Boyd calls “the war on flow.”

The discussion seems to go something like this. On one side are the proponents of attentional poverty.  They argue that the emerging digital media landscape of Twitter, Facebook, email, iPhones and Blackberries and the meteoric growth of information are increasing the distractions in our environment, depleting our attention, and driving us toward a surface understanding –gaining information but losing wisdom.   The benefits of mutlitasking are a myth. (Christine Rosen ).

On the other side are the proponents of creative abundance.  This argument describes a new landscape of connection and creativity.  It argues for the benefits of distraction and overstimulation (Sam Anderson “In defense of Distraction” ).  The new media world is indeed a world of distractions.  It is nonlinear, less “efficiency” oriented and it offers possibilities for greater creativity, serendipity, and novelty.  Could Einstein have come up with his theory of relativity as a patent clerk if he maintained total focus on the job and his mind didn’t wander? Or if his job interrupted him so much he couldn’t focus on relativity? This position argues for the opportunities from “flow” and new approaches for greater understanding and knowledge creation (Stowe Boyd).

Stowe Boyd offers this perspective on his experience with digital media flow:

Perhaps what we are doing has nothing to do with efficiency. I don’t operate the way I do with the principal goal of speeding things up. My motivations are much more complex and diffused. I don’t perceive what I am doing as multitasking, really. I am not trying to speed up how quickly I shift from one thing to another. Instead, I am involved in a stream of activities, in which other people figure prominently, either synchronously through direct discussion (a la Twitter or IM) or indirectly, through their writings and my responses.

And further on he adds:

If you judge a juggler by how many times the balls hit the floor and contrast that with someone throwing and catching one ball at a time, the juggler will always lose. But the juggler is doing something different. You could argue that doing it that way makes no sense, that throwing one ball at a time is more efficient, leads to less sleepless nights, and doesn’t confuse the mind. But it isn’t juggling.

I was happy to read Boyd’s post because he brought the discussion back to the big issues that the Stanford study raises – there are distinct modes of cognition and we need to learn more about how they are developed, inhibited, and what they mean for us in terms of learning, work, relationships, and our environments.   Perhaps these distinct cognitive modes realize different kinds of cognitive gains in different contexts.  Achieving low efficiencies in single task completion may be offset by high efficiencies in other kinds of tasks.  There may be multiple kinds of cognitive goals and realizing them may require a combination of information processing modes or a selection of modes based on goals and context.

So what are our principal goals?  To what ends do we want to direct our attention, as individuals and as a society?   Maggie Jackson orients her discussion of distraction and attention in this bigger context.   She is a healthy skeptic who acknowledges the power of our technology and stresses the importance of deep reflection on who and what we are becoming when we use it.

In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age,  published in 2008, she exposes the centrality of attention to our humanity – our sense of the past and our collective ability to reflect deeply and imagine the future.  She pushes the reader to reflect on how digital media may be affecting us and what kinds of values, and choices, they reflect. While the title may suggest that this book fits squarely in the “war on flow” camp, it really doesn’t.  She argues that we risk eroding our capacity for deep reflection, intimacy, and the potential to sculpt our future if we do not critically examine the impacts of our technologically enabled lives on attention.  She fears that we may be over valuing surface understanding and speed for depth and reflection.

I’m not angling for a return to some sort of pastoral, un-mechanized Eden in order to halt the erosion of attention.  We cannot blame technology on society’s ills.  Nor can we fall in to the opposite and increasingly commonplace trap of blindly trusting that our new tools will automatically usher us into a glorious new age.  The tools we are wholeheartedly embracing today are inherently powerful, and we ignore that truth at our peril. You can use a stick for digging potatoes or stabbing your neighbor, so how you use a stick is important, but equally important is the fact that a stick is not a wheel.  … This is the messy soup that makes up our relation to technology, and explains why technology plays a starring but ultimately subordinate role if this book.  Technology is a key to understanding our world, but it is not the full story.  Instead we must ask: how do we want to define progress?  We are adapting to a new world, but in doing so are we redefining “smart” to mostly mean twitch speed, multitasking, and bullet points?  Are we similarly redefining intimacy and trust?

However she also suggests that we may be on the edge of an attentional renaissance, fueled by our growing understanding about the science of attention (citing research by Michael Posner, David Meyer, and others).

As humans, we are formed to pay attention.  Without it, we simply would not survive.  Just as our circulatory or respiratory systems are made up of multiple parts, so attention encompasses three “networks” related to different aspects of awareness, focus, and planning.  In a nutshell, “alerting” makes us sensitive to incoming stimuli, while the “orienting” network helps us select information from among the millions of sensations we receive from the world, voluntarily or in reaction to our surroundings. A baby’s first job is to hone these skills, which are akin to “awareness” and “focus”, respectively.  In a class of its own, however, is the executive network, the system of attention responsible for complex cognition and emotional operations and especially for resolving conflicts between areas of the brain.  All three networks are crucial and often work together, and without strong skills of attention, we are buffeted by the world and hindered in our capacity to grow and even to enjoy life.

Her book takes us through each of these attentional capacities and discusses how they respond to and are affected by our current world of high mobility, fragmented time and virtual spaces. Her narrative demonstrates the broad extent of the attentional network and its impact on our wellbeing (stress, joy, happiness), its role in conditions such as autism, ADHD, and its significance to human experience.  From a new understanding of the mechanisms of attention, we may develop a language and culture of attention that can become a platform for nurturing it more broadly in our easily distractable lives.

People who focus well report feeling less fear, frustration, and sadness day to day, partly because they can literally deploy their attention away from the negatives in life.  In contrast, attentional problems are one of the main impediments to attaining “flow”, the deep sense of contentment that people find when they are stretching themselves to meet a challenge.

What I appreciate about Distracted is the shift toward thinking about the ways we can value and enable attention given the realities of the modern technological world.  Rather than advocating a complete elimination of technology and sources of distraction and fragmentation, the book concludes with a chapter entitled “The Gift of Attention – A Renaissance at Hand.”   In this chapter, Jackson shares her visit to the Shambala Mountain Center in Colorado where she observed a study in progress on the impacts of meditation on attentional skills and on social and emotional health, led by UC Davis neuroscientist Clifford Saron.  Building off of new understandings of neuroplasticity, the study hopes to shed light on the possibilities for training the brain and reshaping the mind.  She discusses other breakthrough experiments, such as the work of neuroscientist Amishi Jha,  that shows the positive impacts of mindful breathing on spatial orienting, providing what Jha calls a “cognitive rocket booster.”

The merging of our understandings of art, neuroscience, and meditation is revealing that we have greater capacities than we thought to relate to the world deeply and intensely. Perhaps we can rediscover, or reinvent, flow in this new land of distraction.  Taking sides for or against technology won’t help.  Engaging in purposeful reflection on who we are becoming with our digital media and in deep examination of our motivations and goals as a society will help us hone those capacities.

All the discussions about health care reform have reminded me of a workshop I did with high schools students last summer as part of a youth forecasting project with the KnoweldgeWorks Foundation.  I developed a curriculum for teens about key trends in technology, community, health, economy, and demographics and worked with the Center for Digital Storytelling to conduct 3 workshops in which high school students imagined their lives ten years in the future.

The stories were personal, about distinct moments in their future lives, and they revealed issues that mattered to them.  One theme that came through in several stories was their recognition that they would be caregivers – not only to their aging parents – but to their chronically ill peers and to their friends and family members who had become ill as a result of toxic environments and food.  Part of their vision of themselves as caregivers involved developing personal relationships with digital para-professionals (robots), with human medical professionals thorugh social netwokring, and through online markets for medical services.

Here are two of my favorite stories.

ZaidaCervantesDV

MarissaBeckettDV

My big take away from these workshops is how capable and insightful the teens were at imagining plausible futures and teasing out the implications that mattered for them.  It was also rewarding to see how excited they got about the present when faced with a set of possible futures. I need to do more of this work!

“What sense does it make to try to reform urban schools while the communities around them stagnate or collapse?”

Mark Warren, Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University, asks this fundamental question that is largely unaddressed in the current debates over school reform and the race to the top in education.

He wrote this in 2005, and it is even more insightful and on target today given the increases in job loss, housing foreclosures, education cuts, and the harsh realities of community life for many Americans. How can schools get to the top if their communities remain at the bottom? How can the race to the top increase the wellbeing of both schools and communities?

His paper, Communities and Schools: A New View of Urban Education Reform, makes the case that the fates of urban schools and communities are inextricably linked yet education reformers and community developers often work in silos. Following the outlines of the reform agenda of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, it seems that school transformation is positioned largely out of the community context—out of the set of institutions and relationships that fully shape the learning experiences and well-being of the K-12 population and their families.

Communities and Schools is particularly important to keep in mind today as the stimulus package is providing historic levels of funding for school improvement, as charter school networks and other third party school management organizations are expanding in districts, and as “disruptive” innovations (online learning and virtual schools are the recent popular examples) are gaining attention. There is an opportunity to open up the scope of reform and do things differently. If school improvement remains constrained in the education reform box, gains in school and community well-being may only go so far.

Why Community Matters

Warren offers a compelling case for why we need to link education reform and community revitalization and he provides a framework for thinking about strategies to implement collaborative school-community transformation.

1.) Kids can’t learn if they lack adequate housing, nutrition, safe, and secure environments.

2.) Schools can’t teach children well if they don’t understand their students (their lives and culture) and they lack meaningful relationships with their families.

3.) When school and community are isolated from each other a culture of power in schools can exacerbate “deficit” views of low-income parents, fueling tensions and undermining efforts at collaboration, and overlooking potential social and cultural resources.

4.) Structural inequalities of low income urban schools, such as their lack of resources compared to suburban schools, requires broader political engagement to sustainably address.

By joining school reform and community revitalization, Warren says that reform strategies “ emerge in a dialectic between experts and an engaged community of stakeholders in and around schools.” Authentic participation enhances commitment and success. Reform efforts take root in the values, concerns, and conditions of local communities. It seems that any effort to scale school “turnarounds”, “restarts”, and “transformations” would need to involve some kind of school-community collaboration in order to be relevant and avoid a “cookie cutter” approach.

Approaches for School-Community Collaboration

Warren’s framework for understanding the possibilities for school-community collaborations hinge on two important concepts: social capital and relational power. He defines social capital as “the set of resources that inhere in relationships of trust and cooperation.” Schools with high social capital are able to make the most of the assets they do have and can mobilize their social capital for greater resources. These are the intersecting relationships that bring people and resources together toward shared goals. This web of trust and cooperation also provides what Warren calls, “social closure” for children, a shared context among children and adults in which there are unifies sets of expectations and behaviors and coordinated actions to achieve their development holistically. The Harlem Children’s Zone comes to mind here, in which the institutions in the “zone” bring sets of relationships, resources, and a common vision together to improve the lives of its resident school age population.

Social capital does not necessarily imply power, particularly in the case of the urban communities where poverty and racism exist. Warren contrasts relational power (the power to get things done) with unilateral power (power over others). Relational power is developed through collaborative, problem solving approaches. It is necessary for working through community tensions and confronting tough challenges collectively. Relational power helps build the capacity of the school to actively co-create solutions with community organizations rather than be a passive recipient of their services.

Warren describes several case studies of school-community collaborations in which social capital and relational power were developed to make school-community improvements. They represent three distinct models for school-community collaboration.

1.) The service model: schools develop as a full service site for a range of programs for children and their families. These neighborhood hubs are often open beyond normal school hours and can provide health services, afterschool ESL, adult education and other programs for community residents. In this model, the community extends into the school to wrap services around the needs of the school population.

2.) The development model: includes the community sponsorship of a new school such as a charter school, and are typically oriented around a set of shared values and perhaps a pedagogical approach, such as many of the recent charters that are organized around technology and project based inquiry methods in the classroom.

3.) The organizing model: community organizations, like neighborhood associations, collaborate with schools to develop leadership skills, relationship building, and public action among community residents and within the school to improve the school-community. School sites become hubs of political organizing and parent leaders emerge as key links between school and community issues.

While these models differ in their approaches for developing relational power and social capital, they all work toward creating public schools as “institutional anchors for low income, urban communities.” This is a significant difference from the reform efforts we hear today. Besides Obama’s public (and financial) support of the Harlem Children’s Zone, school improvement remains disconnected from its social, economic, and political context—the broader community that surrounds it. Schools may succeed in bringing down their dropout rates, and may gain a few points in standardized test, but the communities they inhabit, and that their students eat, sleep, socialize, live and learn in, will still languish.

(next, part 2, A Resilience Model for School-Community Collaboration)

Daniel Goleman spoke at the beautiful new David Brower Center in Berkeley on August 13th (as part of a seminar hosted by the Center for EcoLiteracy) about his new book Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. Two big ideas that stuck with me were (1) the emergence of new tools and techniques for achieving radical transparency of products—a deep accounting of a products biological and ecological risks across its life cycle and across its supply chain, communicated in easy to understand rating systems and indices like the GoodGuide; and (2) the need for introducing ecological intelligence into the K-12 school curriculum to develop a generation of globally and ecologically empathic individuals. Radical transparency combined with ecological intelligence provides the data and the collective human capacity to turn empathy for the planet into meaningful action.

Goleman explained that ecological intelligence is the capacity to live well in our ecosystem. It is an extension of our emotional and social intelligence to a planetary level in which our collective empathy is put into action globally. With emotional intelligence we learn how to identify, assess, and manage our own emotions. With social intelligence we learn how to manage relationships and develop empathy. According to Goleman, ecological intelligence “lets us apply what we learn about how human activity impinges on ecosystems so as to do less harm and once again live sustainably in our niche—these days the entire planet.” Many native groups do this well, like the tiny Sher village in Tibet that has sustained itself on a steep mountainside for over a thousand years. We don’t. Our modern routines and industrial systems have disconnected us from our adverse impacts on the world. We need to change this if we are to create significant and lasting positive impacts on the health of the planet and preserve the human species.

Goleman proposes that with ecological intelligence and radical transparency we will relate more empathically to information about human risks (like exposure to harmful pesticides) and ecological damage (like destruction of coral reefs from chemicals in sunscreen) and make different consumer decisions. As companies respond to new market choices and demands driven by ecological intelligence and radical transparency (and potential cost savings) they will innovate business and industrial practices that are less destructive to human and ecological wellbeing. Goleman sees the supply chain as the point of leverage and points to WalMart’s new sustainability index as a way for their suppliers to compete for shelf space. With 200 million customers and 60,000 suppliers, the impact is huge.

Developing ecological intelligence in the school age population is necessary for nurturing an ecologically empathic future generation of leaders, consumers, voters, innovators, and community members. And Goleman is hopeful because there seems to be an emerging track record here. He stated that a new study is about to be released, a meta analysis, (he didn’t cite it in his talk so I have no reference unfortunately! I’m trying to track it down.) that reviews research on classrooms that implemented social-emotional learning (SEL) in the school curriculum. Those classes that were exposed to SEL reported lower rates of antisocial behavior (e.g. bullying), high rates of pro-social behaviors (e.g. cooperation), and higher levels of academic outcomes. Introducing ecological intelligence into K-12 curriculum could extend those positive results to our behaviors regarding human-natural ecosystems and raise student achievement at the same time. That is exciting.

Goleman mentioned that there is discussion about having some form of ecological intelligence curriculum included as part of a revised No Child Left Behind bill. That is one way to diffuse ecological intelligence, but it might just be perceived as one more requirement added to teachers’ load and could become watered down and scripted curriculum by the time is reaches the classroom. Perhaps we should look at the supply chain in education to think about other ways to catalyze ecological intelligence in schools. WalMart acts as a de facto regulator and has huge impact on changing behaviors of manufacturing and industrial processes because of its size and leverage on supply chains.

Where in education is there that kind of catalyzing effect without going to the federal government? Another player in the education ecosystem with big leverage is higher education—colleges and universities. Imagine if they required applicants to demonstrate ecological intelligence. Just as suppliers are intent on getting their product on a WalMart shelf, families and schools are increasingly focused on getting their kids into college. Foundations have built initiatives on facilitating entry to college, K-8^th grade and high schools have oriented curriculum around college entrance, and a thriving market of commercial providers has targeted college acceptance to design an array products and services.

The University of California and California State University systems together serve over 670,000 students. Imagine if they required applicants to demonstrate proficiency or a certain number of course credits in ecological intelligence. What if their application included an essay question or description of a project that dealt with ecological intelligence? What are other levers in the education supply chain? There may be other creative ways to stimulate the states into finding ways of diffusing ecological intelligence into curriculum, service learning opportunities, and even internships with businesses. Focusing in the education supply chain may provide ideas for some useful strategies.

I attended the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City in late June and returned home excited about how  social media and web 2.0 tools can help to create a transparent, accountable, and innovative government and a more inclusive and dynamic civic sphere.  I also returned with a deeply nagging concern that we may not get there from here.  Not because of any technological barriers, lack of will, or lack of creativity, but because of our education system.

The personal democracy reflected by the speakers and discussions at PDF assumes an engaged, tolerant, and reflective citizenry.  It assumes a personal relationship with civic sphere and the capacity to think critically about complex topics, debate issues, cooperate, and solve problems.   Are the goals, strategies, and resources of the education system aligned to support personal democracy?  I’m sure there are examples of schools and districts that are, but is the whole system? What kind of citizenry is our education system creating?

Jeff Jarvis invited the audience into a discussion about the government as a platform, an API, a network that allows citizens to fully engage, create and innovate as a part of the civic process.  He exclaimed, “do what you do best and link to the rest, ” whether that is volunteering, campaigning, or any other activity in the public interest.

Vivek Kundra, the first CIO of the United States, thrilled the audience with the IT Dashboard, a site that makes all federal IT spending open and accessible to the public, and mashable.  In notes to the Press Kundra said,  “In making this data publicly available, we are providing unfettered access to investment performance to its true owners – the American people.”

David Weinberger described how a digitally-based personal democracy benefits from difference and seeks higher truths.  The “hyperlinked world of difference adds context and meaning” and “argument, conversations, debate, controversy give up wisdom not just facts”.  This new open platform will bring transparency to government enabling us to scale democracy and discover deeper insight, and presumably create a more just and equitable society.   “The linked world of difference gives us a greater sense of truth of what a topic is than the paper world”.

These statements are exciting, possible to realize, and could bring real transformation to governance. But then I think about danah boyd’s and Michael Wesch’s presentations.

danah posed the question: are we growing together or apart?  She suggested that we’re falling prey to the shallow argument of “anyone can participate if we just give them access”.   She continued to reveal how racism and classism manifest in social networks, suggesting that we are witnessing the equivalent of the “modern incarnation of white flight” among social networking sites.  The early signs of stratification online by race and class exist, and we risk creating a bourgeois public sphere rather than a truly broad and inclusive one.

Michael Wesch, giving a standing ovation presentation, asked if we can use the new media ecology to conquer narcissism and triviality he sees in the MTV generation.  Can we discover our authentic selves, he asked, a deeper sense of self-awareness in the new media ecology that provides tremendous connection without constraints?  Can we shift our society, specifically youth culture, from the indifferent “whatever” to the purposeful “whatever” it takes?

Both danah’s and Michael Wesch’s talks point to education transformation as a critical factor in creating a broad and inclusive personal democracy. Given this country’s dropout rates (particularly in large metropolitan areas), the economic constraints that face public education in the next decade, and the uncertain national leadership in education system, it is unsure whether the student age population that matures along with the personal democracy platform will engage in a personal democracy even if there is access.

There are some hopeful signs on the horizon. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is working with educators in 10 states to introduce a new curriculum framework that includes 21st century themes (such as global awareness, civic literacy, health & wellness awareness, and financial literacy)  along with Life & Career Skills; Information, Media, and Technology Skills; and Learning & Innovation Skills.  While Partnership for 21st Century skills tends to weigh heavily on workplace skills for a knowledge economy, stressing global competition as a key element in its rationale, the effort moves curriculum away from traditionally siloed subject areas and toward relevant, integrated activities that connect students with their broader world.   And CIRCLE at Tufts University is a research and information center supporting the link between academic success and civic education and engagement.  Service learning is becoming more common at K-12 schools and the eco-schools movement is using food and nutrition to make the link youth, health, geographic community, and learning.

In order to achieve the personal democracy envisioned at the PD Forum, the tools of personal democracy, the digital media applications and the cooperative, bottom up, social practices, need to be used to bring a systemic alternative to education in the U.S.   Perhaps having the equivalent of a Vivek Kundra and a Beth Noveck (Wiki Government) in the Department of Education could bring a sophisticated awareness and understanding of transparency, openness and bottom-up, co-creation to the education policy and institutional worlds.   What kind of incentives would catalyze social media application developers to focus on mobile and web-based apps for families and communities to self-organize and create their own relevant learning ecologies?  We need an Obama style campaign to get education raised to a first tier issue in this country at the national and local levels.

Perhaps these can be threads discussed at the next PD Forum so that we can ensure that personal democracy is not just accessible to all, but meaningful, relevant, and treasured by all.

Here is a  post I wrote for the KnowledgeWorks Foundation blog about designing education and schools by process rather than outcomes.   Thinking about the interactions and processes involved in learning can open up possibilities for imagining new kinds of roles and functions, and ultimately new relationships between schools and their broader community.  The post was inspired by a terrific blog post by Will Richardson and links to research on learning agents by KWF.

Last year I was fortunate to be invited to speak at the Nlab Social Networking Conference at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. The day focused on discussing the implications of Web 2.0 tools and applications and social networking for small business.  It was a great event, in part due to the wonderful hospitality of the folks at the University and the Institute of Creative Technologies, but also because we tried to bridge big ideas and concepts with the practical challenges of managing small business.

This year, my colleague Sue Thomas, Professor at DeMotfort University,  invited me to prepare a short video for their NLab event, Amplified Individuals and Business Resilience.  I was sorry not to be there, but at least I got to share some ideas, via video, of the opportunities for using participatory digital media to infuse communities and business with resilience – the capacity to reorganize and recover from crisis – to meet the challenges of a complex and uncertain world.

Here is a link to a page with the video and other audio clips from participants in the seminar.

What is most inspiring to me about this topic is the opportunity for local organizations to gain a bit more agency,  in the creation of information and the discussion around that information, in the ability to create more transparency in local processes and decisions, and in the ability to create, share, and direct resources.

Early in my career I was fortunate to be exposed to the work of David Sibbet of The Grove Consultants International, a pioneer in visual thinking and using graphic language, templates, and “panoramic visualization” to create systemic change for organizations.   A phrase that has stuck with me from my experiences working with the Grove is the powerful “I see what you mean!”  All of a sudden, from a wall chart full of imagery generated by a group – icons, selected words, squiggly arrows, and colors – the complex rationale for a redirection in strategy or the seeds of a new vision would emerge.  I see what you mean!

As we enter a time in which we create abundant data streams (zillionics according to Kevin Kelly) and leave data trails about ourselves and our world with every Tweet, blog post, camera phone, mobile sensors, wiki, etc., the need for visualization to understand this data layer of our lives is critical.  We need to be able to see the meaning in the multitude of data and information.   New approaches to sense making and pattern recognition, and the development of visual literacy, will be increasingly important for navigating the data abundant world and for designing useful tools, services, and institutions.  Our children will need to be able to interact, create, and discover meaning in this quantified and data prolific world.

Larry Myatt describes the opportunities,and implications, for visual thinking and visual literacy in his article Connecting the Dots: The Unexplored Promise of Visual Literacy in American Classrooms from the The Forum for Education and Democracy. I particularly like this part, but read the whole article.

Among those making sense of these issues is Kristina Lamour-Sansone, founder of The Design Education Consultancy, whose commitment to bringing highly-challenging and disciplined graphic design values and applications into classrooms in a number of cities has shown exceptional promise. … Her visual-literacy approach captures the energy and vitality needed to liberate learning for those youngsters least likely to succeed in passing through the ever-shrinking “eye of the needle” of text-driven instruction. Lamour-Sansone works with teachers eager to plan lessons that turn students loose on their machines and in their mind’s eyes, to design complicated, eye-catching visual arrays that reveal sophisticated reasoning and high levels of intellectual engagement. These organic “maps” that interweave concepts, skills, connections, and comparisons are then deconstructed and converted back into thoughtful, highly organized outlines and drafts for use in chapter summaries, research papers, essays and portfolio artifacts.