We’re far from finished with our efforts to determine how massive open online courses (MOOCs) will fit into our learning landscape, recently published articles and personal experiences continue to suggest. A MOOCmate’s engaging "A Record of My #ETMOOC Experience, 2013"; a Chronicle of Higher Education article suggesting that "The MOOC ‘Revolution’ May Not Be as Disruptive as Some Had Imagined"; and my own extensive and ongoing reflections on  #etmooc (the Educational Technology & Media MOOC developed and facilitated by Alec Couros and his wonderful gang of "conspirators" earlier this year) and R. David Lankes’s "New Librarianship Master Class" (a MOOC developed and delivered under the auspices of the University of Syracuse School of Information Studies) help us understand why MOOCs continue to provoke strongly positive as well as intensely negative reactions among those drawn to the topic. Through her thoughtful and encouraging "A Record of My #ETMOOC Experience, 2013," Canadian educator-philosopher-writer Christina Hendricks provides one of the most encouraging in-depth surveys I’ve read from a MOOC participant. The article is a great example of what a well-facilitated MOOC delivers in terms of learning that produces quantifiable results; it also draws more attention to the #etmooc community of learning that continues to thrive in Google+, on Twitter through the #etmooc hashtag, and through other online exchanges. The concrete results, from that MOOC that fostered explorations of educational technology and media, include blog pieces that are, in and of themselves, learning objects organized through a wonderful blog hub hosting more than 3,300 postings from a group of more than 500 individual contributors; videos that can be used by other learners interested in exploring educational technology and media; the thousands of tweets that provided learning resources and extended conversations among learners worldwide; and examples of tech tools used to produce learning objects by learners engaged in learning. Hendricks concludes her "Record" with the suggestion that "[t]hat’s it for my ‘official’ participation in ETMOOC, but I am certain my connections with others will continue…"—as fine a tribute to effective and engaging learning as I can imagine reading. Steve Kolowich, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month, offers a different view with his opening sentence: "In California, the MOOC revolution came to a halt unceremoniously." He accurately describes how a state legislator and educators at San Jose State University backed away from the strong support they had been expressing for MOOCs just a few months earlier, and cites problems the university had with its initial MOOCs: "…a lower pass rate than the face-to-face version" of a course and "similarly underwhelming outcomes" in other MOOCs offered through the university. Students who earned university credit will, he notes, "get to count those credits toward their degrees," but those who opted only for certificates were left with little to show for their efforts, the chair of the university psychology department was quoted as suggesting: "You can’t take that and get a cup of coffee with it." That can’t-get-a-cup-of-coffee approach, for me, illustrates why reactions to MOOCs in their still-early stages of development continue to vary so widely from person to person: Those seeing them only in terms of academic credits while ignoring the positive learning experiences they can produce are justifiably unimpressed; those of us who are motivated by a desire for learning and participation in effective communities of learning find ourselves amply rewarded by and enthusiastic about what we experience—particularly in the connectivist MOOCs that can foster high levels of long-term engagement. Participation in the "New Librarianship Master Class" MOOC is offering a view from a position somewhere in the middle of the to-MOOC-or-not-to-MOOC debate. Far less connectivist in its approach, New Librarianship is centered around online pre-recorded lectures and quizzes—but that doesn’t mean that self-motivated learners didn’t find ways to push it a bit toward connectivist interactions. When many of us leapt beyond the confines of the official course bulletin boards and found ourselves engaging with the instructor and each other via Twitter, the levels of engagement began to flow as they did (and still do) through #etmooc. Tweets provided links to related material, inspired conversations through cross-postings on blogs, and even drew comments from people not formally enrolled in the master class—an amazing demonstration of how learning benefits from permeable (physical and virtual) walls. They also reminded us that those initially involved in the development of MOOCs saw these levels of connection/engagement as integral to this type of learning rather than viewing MOOCs as just another way to transfer onsite learning into an online environment. The writers of the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Project  2013 Higher Education report note that "George Siemens and Stephen Downs in 2008, when they pioneered the first courses in Canada…envisioned MOOCS as ecosystems of connectivism—a pedagogy in which knowledge is not a destination but an ongoing activity, fueled by the relationships people build and the deep discussions catalyzed within the MOOC. That model emphasizes knowledge production over consumption, and new knowledge generated helped to sustain and evolve the MOOC environment…. As massively open online courses continue their high-speed trajectory in the near-term [one-year] horizon, there is a great need for reflection that includes frank discussion about what a sustainable, successful model looks like" (pp. 11-12). Pieces like those produced by Christina Hendricks, Steve Kolowich, and many others contribute to that frank discussion; reports documenting the importance of preparing online learners for their online learning experiences point to the obvious need to support learners in whatever venue they decide to learn. All of these efforts have the potential to inspire us to continue deeply diving into the intoxicating waters of training-teaching-learning and helping us become members of dynamic communities of learning—and they make us far better learning facilitators and learning advocates capable of serving the learners who rely upon us. N.B.: This is the twenty-third in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc and the ninth in a series of posts inspired by the New Librarianship MOOC.

I’m officially a muggle. At least that’s what "Team512"—known more colloquially as Margo Peterson among her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, where she works—playfully confirmed earlier today when I found her on the Hidden Garden Steps here in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District. Muggles, as readers of the J.K. Rowling Harry Potter series (or the Wikipedia "Muggle" article) know, are those lacking magical powers and magical blood. They are also, under the rules of the Geocaching game that brought Peterson to the Steps this morning, those not yet initiated into the pleasures of geocaching—whimsical searches that incorporate GPS technology into excursions introducing residents and visitors to places they might otherwise not be inclined to explore throughout the world. Geocachers who are successful at onsite and online searches find a variety of objects—the one on the Steps is a small ceramic turtle containing a metal cylinder with a piece of paper that geocachers use to document that they were there before also documenting their success online at Geocaching.com. Margo PetersonPeterson says she has more than 6,000 finds to her credit, including objects found in a cave outside of Livermore (here in the San Francisco Bay Area) and at the end of a "Vampire Empire" search that led her through part of the Chicago subway system. And although geocaching is, in her words, "a little nerdy," it also offers the same sort of enticements that involvement in the Hidden Garden Steps project itself offers: an opportunity to be part of a playfully engaging—and engaged—community. Peterson says she knows of barbecues, coffee-house gatherings, and many other social events that have drawn geocachers together when they were not actively engaged in their onsite and online searches. Encountering Peterson and learning about this generally muggle-free endeavor that has led to the creation of more than 2 million caches available to the more than 6 million geocachers who have registered since 2000 is, for me, just the latest unexpected benefit to having been involved in the Hidden Garden Steps project since early 2010. The Steps effort has two explicit goals: to create a second set of ceramic-tile steps, murals, and gardens here in the Inner Sunset District, and to create a community-meeting space that fosters a greater sense of community and collaboration than already exists in one of San Francisco’s great neighborhoods. Mosaic in progress, at preview (7/20/13)Discovering that the Steps—"Stairway to Heaven #3"—has become one of the "premium" (available only to paying members of Geocaching.com) searches even before the mosaic that is nearing completion in the studios of project artists Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher is formally installed onsite on 16th Avenue between Kirkham and Lawton streets is a great sign that the Steps effort continues to attract a community extending far beyond the Inner Sunset District itself. Our fundraising campaign to raise approximately $300,000 in cash and in-kind services successfully concluded in July 2013 with nearly $10,000 in additional individual gifts in 10-day period and a $32,500 grant from the City and County of San Francisco Community Challenge Grant program. Extensive onsite preparation work by City and County of San Francisco Department of Public Works employees is keeping us on track for installation of the mosaic sometime between October 2013 and spring 2014. Visitors drawn to the original tiled steps, on Moraga Street between 15th and 16th avenues, are increasingly finding their way to the new site, where long-hidden views continue to be revealed through the work of volunteers and other supporters. And recent conversations with visitors from other parts of the United States as well as from China, France, and many other countries show that there is a great deal of enthusiasm and excitement about how the project has developed with partnerships and collaborations that include neighborhood associations, the San Francisco Parks Alliance and the San Francisco Department of Public Works (DPW) Street Parks Program, local government representatives, businesses, and more than 500 individuals who purchased tiles that have been incorporated into the mosaic and whose names are still being added to the project website as a sort of snapshot of the levels of support that volunteer-based community-driven efforts can still attract. All of which might have combined to transform me into a muggle-in-transition since I am, through my encounter with Peterson on the Steps, beginning to suspect that the geocache there may not be the last one I encounter. N.B.: This is the eighteenth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco.

One of the sweetest moments in what is a wonderful paean to community, collaboration, and the technology that can help foster those two critically important elements of civilization comes when Gavin Newsom, in the acknowledgment section at the end of the book he has written with Lisa Dickey (Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government), offers "thanks to all government workers whose work directly and indirectly impacts all our lives each and every day. And to elected officials of all stripes—a heartfelt thank-you for stepping up to serve the public. Thanks you for not sitting on the sidelines and for being willing to suffer the slings and arrows so often associated with public service." It is, in some ways, a shame that those words from a successful politician to his peers and others with whom he has worked in government appear after the formal conclusion of the text, for it is in that brief acknowledgement that the former mayor of San Francisco—currently serving as California’s lieutenant governor—reminds us that we have plenty of great colleagues working at all levels of government in spite of the overwhelmingly negative attitudes so many people openly express toward those involved holding elected or civil service positions. On the other hand, it’s entirely consistent with the approach taken throughout the book: encouraging all of us to look for ways that we can use technology as a tool in playing more actively positive roles in shaping the communities we cherish rather than expecting others, e.g., elected officials and civil servants, to be prescient and powerful enough to create the world of our dreams without our explicit engagement in that process. Written very much in the spirit of Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging, Block and John McKnight’s The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, Jim Diers’s Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way, and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Citizenville promotes the idea of individual community members collaborating with each other and their colleagues in government to produce positive change. More importantly, it pushes us toward an approach that already fosters levels of engagement in playful ways: transferring our love of game-playing for virtual results into a form of game with more rewarding real-world results, as summarized in this excerpt from the introduction to Citizenville: "Shauna Robertson, cofounder of the Crowdrise fund-raising and social-networking site, asked me why we couldn’t transfer the principles of FarmVille to civic engagement. ‘Why can’t I take ownership of my little area of California and say, ‘This is what I want to do—I want to build my schools here’? Or fix the potholes or landscape the traffic medians? In other words, instead of taking care of a fictional farm, why can’t we create a game in which you take care of your actual neighborhood or your town? "We could combine the fun of a game with the social good of solving real problems. Here’s one way it could work: Let’s say you live in a neighborhood of twenty blocks. If four people there want to play the game—let’s call it Citizenville—you can divide the neighborhood into four areas delineated by an interactive map on the Citizenville Web site. Each player takes responsibility for his or her area, and if others living there decide they want to play too, they can either join forces and create a team or subdivide into even smaller areas." Newsom is explicit about the challenges we face in attempting to use technology to increase citizen-government collaborations: "The sad truth is that the history of government is a history of technophobia" (p. 6); government workers often collect magnificent amounts of useful data without working to make it accessible (p. 22); government agencies are much better at attracting constituents to one-time events than to encouraging long-term involvement (p. 115); and "…government isn’t interested in solving problems so much as managing them" (p. 220). That’s not a situation, he suggests, that is sustainable: "No one foresaw that sea change for newspapers, but in hindsight it had to happen. The same is true for government. It’s hard to predict exactly how this will unfold, but it’s absolutely inevitable that the relationship between people and government will change. If nothing else, the changing expectations of new generations, weaned on smartphones and the Internet, guarantee that we can’t just continue with business as usual" (pp. 174-175). He offers plenty of positive examples, including the 68-page report titled Road Map for the Digital City—"a blueprint for how to propel New York into the digital age" (an updated version is available at http://www.nyc.gov/html/digital/html/roadmap/roadmap.shtml) and the New America Foundation release Hear Us Now? A California Survey of Digital Technology’s Role in Civic Engagement and Local Government (2011)," a report about technology and civic innovation." He also reminds us that sites where participants clearly identify themselves rather than hiding behind pseudonyms produce much higher levels of discourse and engagement than those where the anonymous posters engage in "name-calling, insults, and flame wars" (p. 64). My own explorations of and involvement in community-government collaborations convince me not only that Newsom is, overall, right on track throughout Citizenville, but that there are plenty of models we can follow, including the work cited above (Block, Diers, McKnight, and Putnam) as well as local examples such as San Francisco’s Hidden Garden Steps project, which I’m continuing to document on this blog. The Steps project, designed to create a second set of ceramic-tiled steps in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District while strengthening the sense of community that already exists here, is  nearing completion exactly through the sort of private-public collaboration that appears to be Newsom’s gold standard in Citizenville. Our local elected public officials and colleagues in City-County government have become as enchanted with the project as we are and, as a result, have been helping us create a volunteer-driven, community-based project even more dynamic, beautiful, and engaging than we originally envisioned. The collaborations have grown from numerous face-to-face meetings, online interactions using a variety of social media tools, face-to-face contact to reach the greatest number of neighbors possible, and partnerships with existing community organizations, local business representatives, and local media representatives. And while none of this has played out within the context of an online game along the lines of Citizenville, the playfulness inherent in Newsom’s Citizenville model has certainly found its way into our tweets, our Facebook postings, our website, the results we are producing, and the overall approach we’ve taken to working with colleagues at all levels rather than falling into the destructively nonproductive trap of complaining about government and those involved in it rather than seeking opportunities to make it work for—and with—all of us. And then, as Newsom does in his acknowledgements, profusely thanking everyone who has contributed to making our community better. N.B.: This is the nineteenth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco.

Students, faculty, and administrators at Wyoming Catholic College are voluntarily, collectively, and enthusiastically engaged in an unusual approach to the use of contemporary technology, a Yahoo!News "Born Digital" series article reports in the following terms: "No cell phones allowed: Some colleges ban modern-day gadgets." "Also banned…are televisions and access to most websites in dorm rooms," Ron Recinto writes in his article about the small liberal arts college. "Administrators allow only limited Internet connectivity throughout the campus, so students can do online research." It’s a fascinating contrast to the approach taken by another school with strong spiritual roots—Abilene Christian University, in Texas—which was the first university in the United States to provide incoming students with smartphones. It’s also a fascinating response to a problem described by a Wyoming student as "our inability to genuinely communicate at a human-to-human, face-to-face level," and an interesting approach to the school’s stated "primary educational objective" of offering "a traditional liberal arts education that schools the whole person in all three dimensions—mind, body, and spirit." And while I couldn’t help but feel drawn to and impressed by the school’s description of its rigorous intellectual standards and broad-based curriculum embracing "history, imaginative literature, writing, reasoning, oratory, Latin, art history, music, mathematics, natural science, philosophy, theology, spirituality, outdoor leadership, and horsemanship," I am left wondering whether the approach of agreeing to prohibit the use of cell phones except in extremely well-defined situations really is an effective way to help contemporary learners respond to the problems they believe technology fosters and the challenges technology produces. The college’s dean of students, for example, explains that the policy helps eliminate the temptation to disengage from face-to-face interactions by answering cell phone calls and text messages as if "people you aren’t with are more important than the people you are with." He also is quoted as suggesting that "We’re allowing a freedom and a vacation from all that so that students can work on something different: true friendship, true virtue, true study." What all of this seems to miss—at least as described in the Yahoo! News article—is a greater, far more dynamic learning opportunity: the chance to develop first-rate 21st-century person-to-person and online communication skills, friendship, virtue, and study by discussing, adopting, and maintaining nuanced forms of positive behavior in our onsite-online world rather than simply agreeing to remove bits and pieces of contemporary technology from an apparently wonderful learning environment. Helping students develop practices that prepare them for effective engagement in a highly-collaborative, globally-interactive world where tech tools can, if used judiciously, foster incredible levels of creativity, innovation, and collaboration seems far more responsive to contemporary learning needs than simply removing widely-available tech tools from their daily lives. Helping students develop habits that encourage them to control rather than be controlled by their tech tools seems to offer greater long-term benefit to them than having them, during this phase of their formal education, withdraw from what is commonly used in the world they inhabit. And helping students define, develop, and maintain digital literacy to remain competitive and effective in the contemporary workplace seems to be a more productive approach to their intellectual and societal development than setting aside the tools those workplaces and that society expect them to be able to effectively use. I’m not at all unsympathetic to the challenges the Wyoming Catholic University community is attempting to address. As my own friends, colleagues, and learners know, I’ve traveled similar extremes over the past several years, having gone from having little interest in using laptops, cell phones, and social media to being someone who works face to face and online with learners across the country to help them adopt new technology and social media tools in their professional and personal lives. I’ve gone from holding a strong preference for face-to-face learning to an evidence-based belief that the best of online learning can be every bit as engaging and effective as the best of face-to-face learning. I’ve gone from not having a cell phone to having an admittedly old cell phone—a friend disparagingly refers to it as a "cellosaurus"; a (fairly up to date) laptop; and a tablet that provides me with levels of connectivity and engagement at a deeply personal and professional level I couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. What I’ve also developed, with continual experimentation as a trainer-teacher-learner, is a sense of when to set the technology aside so that I don’t miss that human-to-human contact the Wyoming community seems to crave. By consistently paying attention to people rather than technology, I believe I’ve had the richly-rewarding benefits of experiential learning to become even more adept at nurturing the person-to-person connections that make life worth living—on as well as off campus.

Festina lente, the wonderfully evocative Latin expression commonly translated as "make haste slowly," is a mantra we need to share with our social media learners who express concerns, in the early stages of their efforts to effectively communicate with the myriad resources available to them, about how to control their online content and presence. Festina Lente plaque over gate in Filoli Gardens, south of San Francisco It’s that bit of guidance that suggests we should think before we act; avoid the "ready, fire, aim" sequence that leads to so many regrets; and temper our obsession to use speed-of-light communication tools in a moment that is almost certain to expand over a much longer period of time than anything we can imagine at the moment we post something online. It’s also a great way to remind them that there really is no absolute control or room for second thoughts once our words are published in the virtual world. This tantalizingly contradictory guidance to act quickly and with consideration to avoid disasters is certainly not unique to situations in which we post social media comments in haste. We can really only imagine the "what-could-we-have-been-thinking?" recriminations harbored by key players after the existence of the previously-secret White House taping system was revealed and contributed to the end of the Nixon administration. Or after videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrikes and photographs of the torture and abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib were released. But those are world-changing revelations, far from the minds of most of us when we decide to "like" something on Facebook, use the "favorite" tool to call attention to a tweet, or post on our social media platform(s) of choice the latest fleeting thought we have before thinking about what a long life that thought may have online. Those of us who attempt to be thoughtful about what we cast out into the virtual world often mistakenly assume that by being diligent about our Facebook privacy settings and using allegedly secure means of online communication, we are establishing some sort of control over who sees what we choose to share online—an idea repeatedly debunked through numerous articles about Facebook’s ever-changing privacy policies, the ways other gain access to information we erroneously assume is ours to control, and the ways prospective and current employers as well as school officials review online content for a variety of reasons. The latest report documenting how little control we have over our online content appears in an extremely detailed New York Times article published today: "N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web." This is far more than the significant story it appears to be about how National Security Agency employees were building "entry points"—intentional flaws—into the encryption products that were supposed to assure privacy in online communications; it’s also an enormous reminder that regardless of what we do to try to control our online content, there’s someone out there capable of overcoming those controls if the motivation to do so exists. But we really don’t even have to dive into the Spy vs. Spy world of surveillance to respond honestly to our learners’ questions about how to approach our online postings and overall presence. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, in their book The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, provide an extreme example of what happens when we post without thinking about potential repercussions: "In February 2012, a young Saudi newspaper columnist named Hamza Kashgari posted an imaginary conversation with the Prophet Muhammad on his personal Twitter account," leading to "thousands of angry responses, death threats and the creation of a Facebook group called ‘The Saudi People Demand Hamza Kashgari’s Execution.’…Despite his immediate apology after the incident and a subsequent August 2012 apology, the Saudi government refused to release him. In the future, it won’t matter whether messages like these are public for six hours or six seconds; they will be preserved as soon as electronic ink hits digital paper. Kashgari’s experience is just one of many sad and cautionary stories" (p. 56). (We can only assume that Kashgari somehow missed reading about Salman Rushdie’s experiences—and wonder why Schmidt and Cohen see this as something that won’t matter "in the future" after documenting that it already occurs.) Which brings us back to our roles as trainer-teacher-learners helping others to work as effectively as possible online: invoking festina lente as a guiding principle before we post will not give them—or us—the level of control we crave, but it might lead to better experiences overall online—as long as we don’t let it keep us from saying what we and wonderful colleagues like Sarah Hougton know must be said.

The San Francisco-based online service Klout purports to provide a score that documents how much influence we have through our online use of social media tools. What it actually deliberately does is lower scores if users do not agree to provide access to secondary (demographic) information in their Facebook accounts. This provides a social-media lesson meriting attention: we need to be diligent about determining what online services offer as opposed to what they claim to offer. And we need to make others aware of what we learn to provide a context for the information that businesses like Klout disseminate. Let’s be explicit about what we’re seeing here. Klout claims to offer a beneficial service: a tool, that if it were accurate, could offer us an insight into the strengths and weaknesses of our online presence and provide impetus for us to improve what we are doing. Because Klout representatives insist on collecting data including date of birth and what we have liked on Facebook—information ostensibly of more use to Klout’s advertisers than to the process of determining the level of influence we have allegedly achieved online—before they will include accurate information about our levels of online interactions in those scores, I’ve joined those who tried Klout, didn’t like what we saw, and have taken steps to shut down our accounts rather that acquiesce to Klout’s clumsy—and ultimately unnecessary—attempt to bargain access to information for a higher Klout score. Here’s how it works. Once you start using Klout, you and others can view a score that is supposed to document your levels on online interactions and the influence those interactions suggest. Only after you have used Klout for a while do you start receiving email messages that feel like a low-level dose of blackmail: Klout representatives’ insistence that you start allowing Klout to access additional information in your Facebook account, including "your birthday, work history, education history, current city and likes." The notes explicitly warn that failure to provide access will result in a lower Klout score because the service will not include any of your Facebook activity that Klout should already have been able to access when you initially connected your Klout and Facebook accounts. There is something more than a bit disingenuous about Klout representatives’ approach to this issue. When I initially added the service to my social media mix, I had no problem using it without having to respond to the sort of one-line agreement that now pops up when Klout directs me to log in to my Klout account via Facebook. (I’ve generally accessed Klout via Twitter.) It was only after using Klout for a few months that I started receiving email messages from Klout informing me that "Recently (emphasis added), our systems haven’t been able to access the Facebook account you’ve linked to Klout. As a result, your Facebook activity is not contributing to your Klout Score right now. You might not have logged into Klout using Facebook in a while. A day after clicking ‘Reconnect’ below, your Facebook activity will contribute to your Klout Score again (emphasis added to confirm that this apparently wasn’t a problem for Klout before now)." The catch is that you can’t "reconnect" without authorizing access to that additional demographic information. An exchange with a Klout representative yesterday afternoon produced the following inaccurate statement regarding "current permissions": "The current permissions allow us to access your public profile, friend list, email address, News Feed, birthday, work history, education history, current city and likes." But that statement contradicts the report that my Facebook activity could no longer be accessed without a new acceptance of what Klout claimed it could already access. Seems to me that Klout’s representatives can’t have it both ways. What’s interesting about this sort of low-grade online ultimatum is that little of this demographic information is particularly difficult to track down online, but Klout representatives’ admission that the measurement they propose to provide would deliberately be lowered if I didn’t agree to actively provide additional access to information in my Facebook account made me wonder what other "new current permissions" I would be forced to accept down the road. Besides, my Klout score really doesn’t have that much of an impact on what I do; it simply appeared to be another interesting but far-from-essential tool in my efforts to track online successes and failures to improve my ability to reach colleagues, clients, and others who are important to me. Losing Klout will simply provide a bit of additional time to use more credible web analytics tools to make me a more effective user of social media tools. Another interesting aspect of Klout’s approach is the range of reactions online writers have expressed in discussing the company’s ability—and inability—to accurately document the online clout that matters. At one extreme is the Wired magazine article published in April 2012 suggesting that a low Klout score can have a significantly negative effect on a person’s opportunity to thrive in our competitive business environment—although the writer does undercut that argument with a concluding admission that "folks with the lowest Klout scores…were the people I paid most attention to." The suggestion that a Klout score affects employment possibilities certainly contributes to the anxiety some users describe regarding perceptions that their online clout, per their Klout score, is lower than it should and needs to be. A view from the opposite extreme side of these discussions comes through British author Charles Stross’s characterization of Klout as "something that spreads like herpes and…[is] just as hard to get rid of." His online post on the topic (under the title "Evil social networks"—Stross obviously isn’t taking a subtle approach) asserts that Klout is "flagrantly in violation of UK data protection law" in terms of how it collects and uses data—very strong and troubling words at a time when the term "online privacy" seems to be an oxymoron and a recent New York Times article confirms that National Security Agency employees have for more than a decade been working to "foil basic safeguards of privacy" on the Internet. The Wikipedia Klout article appears to provide a balanced introduction to Klout, beginning with a description of the methodology used to produce a score, continuing with a summary of criticism leveled against that methodology, and concluding with a series of references for anyone interested in knowing more about the service and how it works. What strikes me based on the experiences I’ve had is that Klout appears to play upon its users’ anxieties and insecurities. It starts with an appealing offer to help determine how much online influence we have (or, in a more worrisome way, how ineffective our online efforts might be in reaching those important to us), then takes actions that require we provide access to information in other social media accounts if we want our online activity within those accounts to be accurately reflected in our Klout scores—which then raises the question as to why anyone would rely on scores that are admittedly manipulated. It’s also worth noting that the scoring system itself is not at all intuitive. Its scale of 1 - 100 would, at a glance, seem to imply that a score of 50 would be in the middle of online influence compared to what others have achieved. Online documentation, however, explains that "The average Klout score is around 20 and a [capital-S] Score [sic] of 50 or above puts you in the 95th percentile of scored users." Clout is that valuable commodity that we nurture, maintain, and cherish when we provide something grounded in honest and ethical behavior face to face and online—a commodity that increases as our clients, colleagues, and friends share the work we do and the successes we have. Klout-with a-K is what we’re left with when we agree to support a service that deliberately mismeasures and misrepresents online information if we don’t actively agree to facilitate the gathering of online information that has little to do with capital-C Clout—which is why I’ve decided to lose Klout and share this information with those I help in my role as a social media trainer-teacher-learner.

Shakespeare’s famous question "What’s in a name?" in Romeo and Juliet came to mind again last night while I was looking at a photograph documenting the latest upgrades on the Hidden Garden Steps site here in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District. And the answer, I realized as I unconsciously connected the existing name "Hidden Garden Steps" to the photograph showing a section of the gardens-in-progress near the top of the site, was "more than we can ever imagine at the moment when we choose (or receive) a name." Newly-installed gravel near top of Hidden Garden Steps Parents certainly have an inkling of what they are doing when they select something along the lines of Royal Forest Oakes (a college classmate I hadn’t thought about in years until I began writing this piece) or Sandy Beach (a cherished friend who is probably only half joking when she claims to be one of the few people who would be ecstatic about acquiring a four-syllable Japanese surname through the act of marriage rather than keeping her considerably shorter maiden name). Fundraisers intuitively understand the importance of what we call "naming opportunities" when placing donors’ names on buildings, concert halls, museum galleries, special-interest centers in libraries, or something as unusual as the 148-step ceramic-tile mosaic that project artists Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher are a breath away from completing for installation on the Hidden Garden Steps site on 16th Avenue, between Kirkham and Lawton streets. Naming the Steps was a process that extended over a several-month period. Members of the project organizing committee approached the challenge knowing that the neighbors who inspired our project with their original set of ceramic-tiled steps (also designed and fabricated by Barr and Crutcher, on Moraga Street between 15th and 16th avenues) had already been using the name "The 16th Avenue Tiled Steps" for five years before we asked the artists to work with us on a second set for the neighborhood, and none of us appeared to be particularly enamored of being stuck with the name "The Other 16th Avenue Tiled Steps." Starting with the generic "Kirkham-16th Avenue Mosaic Steps" designation as a placeholder, we tossed ideas around for months as we designed and planned for implementation of the fundraising and marketing efforts capable of igniting the enthusiasm and support needed to bring a $300,000 volunteer-driven community-based project to fruition. As the time to create a project website as well as design and print marketing materials approached, we finally engaged in the hour-long exercise that produced the name that stuck. We started with a timed two-minute period in which everyone tossed out every word or term that came to mind to describe the site—which, at the time, was a pedestrian corridor containing plenty of graffiti, overgrown trees, plants, and weeds that hadn’t been touched in years, and unimaginable amounts of trash that had been left and covered by other trash, leaves, and branches. (Among the most interesting discoveries when we began cleaning the area were a vacuum cleaner, a typewriter, and a golf ball; I’m sure there’s a story there.) Once we had those myriad words in front of us, we eliminated the negative ones from the list; we knew enough to avoid calling the project "Golf-ball and Typewriter Alley" or "The ‘Run for Your Life, There Are Monsters in the Trees’ Steps." What did begin to take shape was a set of options that focused on the potential beauty to be carved out of the long-neglected site; the idea that there was something capable of drawing members of our extended community together through creation and maintenance of a new neighborhood focal point; and the obvious project elements of art, ceramic tiles, gardens, and steps. By eliminating the less-descriptive words, the name "Hidden Garden Steps" more or less presented itself as the now-inevitable choice. Detail of Hidden Garden Steps mosaic It didn’t, during those initial moments of discovery, inspire the sense of enthusiasm we were seeking—but then we did a reverse two-minute timed exercise which required only that everyone toss out every image that the name suggested to them. When responses along the lines of "a children’s fairy-tale garden," "something mysterious that reveals more of itself the more it’s explored," and "art and gardens and community," we could feel our mood shifting. The name started to become something that actually helped transform the idea of the Hidden Garden Steps into concrete elements that we wanted to create through a combination of the ceramic-tile mosaic; the gardens that would feature succulents, California natives, and other drought-tolerant plants; and any murals we added to the existing graffiti-tagged walls along the site. The name, in essence, had already begun to transform the project by making us more aware of what we were potentially in a position to develop. Our intention has been consistent: to create a cohesive project where the mosaic, the gardens, and the murals were so carefully interwoven and dependent upon each other that it would be impossible to imagine the site without all three of those elements present. And yet the mosaic has been the obvious focus of attention all along—until I saw that photograph last night. It’s a simple, unremarkable image: a close-up of newly-installed gravel in a narrow space between a drainage gutter and the terraced garden along the top third of the Steps. But as I looked at that gravel, how it complemented the Steps, and how it added to the beauty and called a bit more attention to those still partially-hidden gardens, I realized I was beginning to think of the name in a much more expansive and cohesive way than ever before: it was as if the "hidden garden Steps," with an emphasis on the steps, had grown into the richer more nuanced possibilities suggested by the capitalized, equally-weighted words "Hidden," with its implication of something wonderful waiting to be discovered; "Garden," which contains the living thriving plants reflected within the design of the mosaic itself; and "Steps," the platform upon which we will walk and from which we will admire that stunningly beautiful mosaic as it reflects a dynamic artistic vision of the life and community that will continue to develop around it in the years and decades before us. N.B.: This is the twentieth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco.

Sometimes the slightest shift in perspective reveals the presence of stunningly beautiful interweavings that moments earlier hadn’t been obvious between various elements of our lives. That moment came for me this morning while viewing a colleague’s newly-posted video on YouTube. Community, collaboration, and creativity in a variety of venues seemed to be coalescing into an incredibly beautiful tapestry as I watched  the video prepared by Hidden Garden Steps organizing committee co-chair Liz McLoughlin. I was initially captivated simply by what Liz had produced: a chronicle of the community collaborations between Steps volunteers, elected officials and civil servants here in San Francisco, and partners including the San Francisco Parks Alliance and the San Francisco Department of Public Works Street Parks Program; cash and in-kind donation successes; and community workshops designed to allow hands-on involvement in the actual construction of the mosaic that is at the heart of the project. I became even more enchanted and emotionally moved when I shifted my perspective slightly so that the connections between Liz’s work and other elements of my own current explorations in online  and blended learning as well as with building abundant communities became obvious. What made me see that video in the larger context of creative interactions, collaborations, and community-building was the fact that that Liz, as one of many who are pushing this volunteer-driven community based effort to create a second set of ceramic-tiled steps along with gardens and murals  in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District, had perfectly captured the playful spirit and energy of the Hidden Garden Steps effort. There was also the simultaneous realization that Liz, in the context of documenting successes for the Hidden Garden Steps project, had produced a wonderful example of digital storytelling. By combining enticing music, wonderful images, a set of PowerPoint slides, and an engaging story into a video, Liz had, all at once, produced an attractively positive story of how members of communities work together to bring dreams to fruition; an update to current and prospective project supporters; and a great example of what thousands of us are currently studying in #etmooc, the Education Technology and Media MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) organized by University of Regina professor of educational technology and media Alec Couros and several co-conspirators." As I’ve documented in two interrelated posts here on Building Creative Bridges, digital storytelling draws upon archetypal elements at the heart of vibrant, creative communities by enticingly documenting what is most important to us. And the experience of exploring digital storytelling within such a dynamically stimulating community as the one developed by those who have organized and are facilitating #etmooc has certainly been inspiring me to look more deeply about how the stories we tell are at the heart of nearly every successful effort that attracts my attention. I see this in my various roles as a volunteer, in the work I do as a trainer-teacher-learner, and in the writing that puts me in touch with creative colleagues worldwide through our promotion and use of social media tools—including those we routinely use to complete assignments within #etmooc and the Social Media Basics course I just finished facilitating again. The more I think about the interwoven threads of these various stories that are unfolding in my life (the Hidden Garden Steps project, #etmooc and digital storytelling, the Social Media Basics course, my face-to-face and online interactions with colleagues at conferences and in social media platforms, and my ongoing efforts as a trainer-teacher-learner), the more fascinated I become at how the smallest part of any of them sends out tendrils along the lines of the rhizomatic learning concepts we’ve also been studying in #etmooc. But then I also realize that I’m falling into the trap of making all of this too complex. What it really comes down to is that we’re incredibly social and interconnected people living in an incredibly interconnected onsite-online world. We live socially, we learn socially, we dine socially, we thrive socially, and we build socially. And, at least for me, one of the key pleasures comes from the leaning that occurs in each of these personal and shared short stories that become the extended stories—the novels—that we are creating by living them. With that act of circling back to learning as a key element of our individual stories, we find one more thread that ties this all together. Given that learning is a process of responding to an immediate need by engaging in positive transformation, we can all continue learning—and creating the stories that give meaning to our lives—through our involvement with challenges along the lines of nurturing the Hidden Garden Steps project, finding community in #etmooc, and becoming active participants in a variety of other collaborative and community-based efforts. The more we look for and document interweavings between these seemingly disparate endeavors, the better learners—and storytellers—we become. N.B.: This is the fifteenth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc and the fifteenth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco. 0.000000 0.000000

There was no need this week to read yet another book or article on how to effectively create and nurture great communities. Participating in live online sessions with colleagues in two wonderful communities of learning (#etmooc, using the #etmchat hashtag and a Google+ community for online exchanges, and #lrnchat) provided experiential learning opportunities among those trainer-teacher-learners: participating in discussions to explore what makes our communities attractive or unattractive, and contributing to the conversations in ways that produced immediate results, e.g., a name for a new learning community that is in the early stages of formation in Australia. The first of the two communities—#etmooc—is relatively young, having grown out of the Educational Technology & Media massive open online course (MOOC) developed by Alec Couros and colleagues earlier this year, while #lrnchat appears to have been in existence at least since early 2009 and is currently facilitated by David Kelly, Clark Quinn, Cammy Bean, and Jane Bozarth. While #etmooc draws together a worldwide group of trainer-teacher-learners interested in improving their ability to effectively and engagingly incorporate technology into the learning process, #lrnchat has the somewhat broader goal of serving as a community "for people interested in the topic of learning [and] who use the social messaging service Twitter to learn from one another and discuss how to help other people learn"; those first-rate #lrnchat organizers also routinely post session transcripts that in and of themselves are great learning resources for others involved in training-teaching learning. Participants and discussion topics sometimes, as was the case this week, overlap in #etmchat and #lrnchat sessions in fortuitous ways. Those of us who joined the #etmchat session on Wednesday and then joined #lrnchat on Thursday were able see these two overlapping yet significantly different communities explore (and, in many ways, celebrate) the elements that have made both communities dynamically successful. (Stats posted this afternoon by #lrnchat colleague Bruno Winck, aka @brunowinck, suggest that the one-hour session produced 642 tweets and 264 retweets from a total of 79 participants.) What was obviously common to both groups was the presence of strong, dedicated, highly-skilled facilitators who kept the conversations flowing, on topic, and open to the largest possible number of participants. There was also an obvious sense of respect and encouragement offered to newcomers as well as to those with long-term involvement—a willingness to listen as well as to contribute, and a commitment to extending the conversation to others not immediately involved. (Retweeting of comments was fairly common in both groups, indicating a commitment to sharing others’ comments rather than trying to dominate any part of the conversation solely through personal observations). What we continually see in both groups is an invitation to engage and a willingness to listen as well as contribute rather than the tendency to create and foster cliques that exists in less effective and less cohesive communities. A sense of humor and a fair amount of humility also appears to support the high levels of engagement visible in both groups—those who are most inclined to offer the occasional ironic/sarcastic/snarky comment just as quickly turn those comments back on themselves to draw a laugh and make a point that contributes to the overall advancement of discussion—and learning—that both communities foster. There also is more than a hint in both communities of creating learning objects through the transcripts and conversational excerpts (e.g., through the use of Storify) generated via these discussions. And that’s where some of the most significant results are produced, for embedded in those transcripts and excerpts are links to other learning resources that many of us may not have previously encountered. Following those links during or after the conversations continues our own personal learning process and, as was the case with #lrnchat yesterday, actually produce something with the potential to last far longer than any single discussion session. One of those unexpectedly productive moments of community-sharing-in-action yesterday came when, from my desk here in San Francisco, I posted a link to a Wikipedia article about third places—that wonderful concept of the places outside of home and work that serve as "the heart of community" and the third places in our lives, as defined and described by Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (1989). A colleague in Melbourne (Helen Blunden), seeing that link, quickly followed it to familiarize herself with the concept, then realized that "Third Place" would serve nicely as the name for a new learning and development community she is currently forming in Melbourne—which means that when members of #3placemelb (Third Place Melbourne) interact online, they’ll be the latest offshoot of a learning tree with roots in Oldenburg’s book first published in 1989; a well-developed trunk that has branches representing a variety of settings, including libraries; and continues to sprout twigs in online virtual communities such as #etmooc and #lrnchat, blended (onsite-online) settings, and that latest growth in Melbourne—all because great communities seem to beget additional great communities through collaboration rather than competition. N.B.: The #lrnchat sessions currently take place every Thursday from 8:30-9:30 pm EST/5:30-6:30 PST; #etmchat sessions are generally announced on Twitter via the #etmooc hashtag and are also promoted in the #etmooc Google+ community.

Reading the sixth edition of The Adult Learner (in which Elwood Holton and Richard Swanson further build upon what Malcolm Knowles wrote in the first four editions) reminds us why the book justifiably carries the subtitle "The Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development" (added to the fifth edition)—and why a seventh edition is also available. It’s thoughtful. It’s thorough. It’s engaging. It acknowledges its limitations. It surveys a variety of other seminal learning texts produced over a period of several decades and leaves us with nearly 40 pages of additional resources to explore. And, most importantly, it reminds us of how consistently we have identified and sought solutions to the challenges learners of all ages face and also reminds us how far we still have to go in effectively responding to those challenges. Current calls for finding alternatives to our antiquated approach of facilitating learning through lectures, for example, seem to place us at the cutting edge of contemporary training-teaching-learning efforts—until we reread (on p. 44) an educator’s call, first published in the Journal of Adult Education in 1940, for change: "Not only the content of the courses, but the method of teaching also must be changed. Lectures must be replaced by class exercises in which there is a large share of student participation…" (Harold Fields, acting assistant director of Evening Schools, Board of Education, New York City). Fields might have been fascinated by what Michael Wesch accomplishes through experiential learning with students participating in his mediated cultures projects at Kansas State University. Or by what some of us are experiencing through webinars with interactive learning opportunities for participants rather than relying on the one-way-transmission-of-information model that only occasionally takes a break for brief question-and-answer sessions before returning to the teacher-as-center-of-learning experience and often leaves learners uninspired. Or by the possibilities for engagement in connectivist massive open online courses (MOOCs) if learners are properly prepared to take advantage of what those courses can offer. Or what learners experience through flipped classroom efforts that at least partially move lectures out of the classroom to make space for more engaging experiential learning, with Kahn Academy videos being one highly recognizable example of how the process works. Furthermore, those of us who mistakenly believe that formal lifelong learning is a new concept precipitated by the need to keep up with our rapidly-changing tech environment gain, from revisiting The Adult Learner, a more accurate appreciation for how long lifelong learning has been part of our learning landscape. We read the observation made by a college president in 1930 in the Journal of Adult Education that "[a]t the other end of the traditional academic ladder the adult educational movement is forcing recognition of the value and importance of continuing the learning process indefinitely"—a lesson some still don’t appear to have absorbed as we read about reduced funding for community college programs that can be an important part of the adult learning landscape. Adult learning, the college president continues, "is recognized not so much as a substitute for inadequate schooling in youth as an educational opportunity superior to that offered in youth…" (p. 41). Even the term for adult learning—andragogy, as opposed to pedagogy ("the art and science of teaching children")—that is at the heart of what Knowles built into the first edition of his book has far deeper roots than many of us suspect. The earliest citation found for andragogy was from a German educator who used the term in 1833. Subsequent citations include those from a German social scientist in 1921 and a Swiss psychiatrist in 1951 before Knowles included it in the first edition of what was then titled The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species. Knowles eventually created the now-familiar model of andragogy grounded in a series of assumptions including the idea that adults "need to know why they need to learn something before undertaking to learn it," "resent and resist situations in which they feel others are imposing their wills on them," "become ready to learn…to cope effectively with their real-life situations," are "task-centered or problem-centered" in their approach to learning, and are effectively motivated by "the desire for increased job satisfaction, self-esteem, quality of life, and the like" (pp. 64-68). I suspect many of us also note the same assumptions with many of the younger learners we serve. It’s an approach that’s compatible with what others, including Eduard Lindeman, Carl Rogers, and Robert Gagné, have written in their own classic works on learning. It’s an approach that appeals to us at a personal level and that can easily be recognized in our own experiences and drive to remain immersed in learning. And it supports a wonderfully inspiring philosophy expressed by Canadian psychologist Sidney Journard in 1972 and included in The Adult Learner: "Learning is not a task or problem; it is a way to be in the world" (p. 15)—words that might help all of us be more effective in our efforts to facilitate training-teaching-learning that produces positive results. N.B.: This is the first in a series of reflections on classic training-teaching-learning resources.