Letter to the North Pole, what class I want at BGI

If I were designing a class, I would like to learn skills that I could apply immediately, readings that are timely and relevant, a assignments that build upon each other in a logical manner and a project that has meaning and positive impact.

Wait I just took that class....

In order of magnitude of what worked:

Incorporating video as a medium of expression and Frank Lopez as a speaker, the combination unleashed a creative force within me. Since I found Adbusters, I have wondered if I would ever be able to create art that also be part of some greater change, now I know how.

Blogging, all of it drove home the discipline necessary to be successful as member of the online community and the tools to do so. The Beat blog generated alot of synergy for me as I began to focus on where to find my right livelihood. I needed some examples of the types of posts to get me started otherwise I felt inspired to get my voice out there.

The tagging exercise should be in LPD, it opened my eyes to how others saw me and how close that aligned with what became my personal brand. The branding was much harder, felt rushed and was one of the most timely parts of the class as it setup nicely with Right Livelihood.

The Social Change Project simply the most important assignment as the sole desirable outcome is change, which is why I am here. To see how social media can immediately impact a community was empowering.

Organizing my online presence at Linkedin Google, Youtube and Twitter offered me great insight into aligning my social networks so they respond to one another.

I loved the readings, so this is where I see room for improvement. Organization, too much information on one page, since we read about simplicity and complexity and how it affects influence made me think, less text on the syllabus and put more of the readings in a resources page with links to them for that week.

I am not sure Delicious deserved the hype it got. It seems right now someone else benefits from my tags and I can't find what I am looking for, I did not see the application of Delicious put into practice in class so other than putting my bookmarks on the web and off my computer.

I think a wiki should come out of this with all the terms listed. Post Mortem reminds me of CSI and something dead, I prefer After action revue or something else.

This is the first course to link me back to Adbusters and how I can participate in the revolution.

Thank you Christopher ! I hope the future BGI'rs will be able to take your class.

Cheers,
Matt

Bonnie commented on my last post and offered some great opportunities for synergy with what we learned in Social Media to enhance intergrated learning with LPD and CRL.

'Matt-- and Tomas--
This makes sense to me. I am always conscious that under each complaint is a commitment: in this case I believe it is a commitment to get maximum value from our time at BGI, and for the school to be everything it promises to be, in every sense. Yes, BGI is a young school, and while the growing pains are felt by all of us, the opportunity to take this kind of complaint to action is huge.

So for the record, I also feel that these Personal Learning Journal blogs have been not only of the kind of great value to me that I think both LPD and CRL are intending, but in fact have been a MORE effective space for the kind of free reflection those two classes aim for.

My vote is more coordination between LPD and CRL, and that we find a way to integrate pretty much all the first half of Christopher's class into the curriculum of the entire school, primarily through LPD and CRL. Then EVERYONE gets the benefits of these skills and tools-- it kind of kills me to think that only some of us have access to this class-- and then when Using the Social Web for Social Change is offered again as a DLM course, the participants are starting with a well-established base of skills and can get going directly into what is currently the second half of the course. I would be happy to talk to anyone in the faculty or administration to tease out the details.'

Beth is incorporating our learning from this class and trying to integrate it right now;

'Emailed Taj tonight about using this blog as a medium for my CRL portfolio... we'll see what she says. I think it would be a great experiment in how to use the learning journal blog concept across various classes and types of assignments.'

Manan and Karen also seek more rigor and execution so I see a use for AI and bring it forward in our LPD/CRL as a commitment to making our last two semester count and leave a legacy as competent change agents for future cohorts to look to for inspiration of what is possible. Table topic, next steps?

And the beat blogs on

Tomas started a dialogue that resonated with a few people about the open ended blogging in our learning journals versus the channel posts. I see an opportunity to change from Apathy to Action and it begins with (I kid you not) pulling Kegan/Leahy off the shelf and turning the complaint into a commitment. We wish to unshackle our postings and open them up to a more creative forum where the room to explore might be infinite.

To answer the call of self directed learning, we call upon our learning circles to come together and set thier own agenda with the help of PDPs and faculty to align with the direction of the overall course and allow for deeper exploration. Each learning circle can run their own creative session to help flush out their short and long term goals and what will help get them there. Faculty help with a framework to focus the effort and we use what we learned in this class to spread the knowledge.

I see Fogle's video blog(vlog) as a new medium to open up how we engage with our post and response program. Many of us seem to be fully engaged and excited about the new skills and tools we learned how to use. I feel we can expand on that by carrying it forward to the next semester  and role modeling what Christopher is trying to get BGI to do for the next incoming class.

The Crisis of CRL opened up what my learning has been from LPD, CRL, People and Teams and we can use these tools to design and persuade people that we are learning what the tools are and how to apply them for maximum effectiveness. Do you feel this could open up your learning for the reminder of the year?

Growing up 2.0

I read Danah Boyd's piece on her recent experience with the back channel while presenting and shocked at the level of maturity in which twitter was used. What does it mean to be a professional at one of these conferences? One of the comments came from an individual who attended a scientific conference and the norms for their back channel set the bar a bit higher and a result was a cleaner, more present chat.

After 4 semesters at BGI , I noticed chaos ensues when norms and expectation are not articulated and written down. This is true of BGI as well as everyone else, which connects to the Dunbar Number and seems to represent a boundary between good and bad behavior and the requirements to setup best practices. Brian Weller brought up some great research regarding memory(after 40 minutes recall fades), attention spans(20 minutes then focus wanes) and use of a figure ground which has the power to shock and refocus people's attention just when they drift off.

The crowd at Web 2.0 seemed to suffer from ADD and a need for everything to entertain to have value.  Through the many presentations we do at BGI, remembering to be authentic and own what you know helps empower the speaker and engage the audience. Does the IT profession need a courtesy lesson followed by sometime behind the lectern to help with empathy? Maybe the Unconference needs to go mainstream to engage the speaker with the audience at a more personal level to create a collaborative learning enviroment.

my appreciation to the faculty and staff at BGI for role modeling what this looks like to give me the tools I need to affect change in the world.

Who is in Control?

I read Miriam's blog entry about Youtube and wondered who is really in control? I think this is a valid question and Justin Tilson and Tomas had a very interesting points about the topic. In other countries control and public access/space take on a different reality.Our  Anglo/ Saxon/Puritan perspective is apparently quite different from the Southern/ Mediterranean European point of view. Their idea for an internet community center was articulated by Umberto Eco, a professor of Semiotics, satirist and author who was interviewed recently in Wired and had this to say, 

• 'I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs. This will be one of the main functions of Multimedia Arcade: to get people out of the house and - why not? - even into each other's arms. Perhaps we could call it "Plug 'n' Fuck" instead of Multimedia Arcade' 

So that southern perspective brings a more intimate, almost sensual environment, in contrast to the loner on a bar stool mode found on the Northern Euro/North American web experience.The 'Loner' archetype is already prevalent among the under 30 generation in Japan and slowly taking root in North America. Eco also comments,'You have to be careful to distinguish mass delusions from underlying causes.' I think that is important when looking at who is in control. 

I also see while the governments could try to put some controls in effect the borderless web and the volume of participants guarantee these action will only slow not stop the exchange and flow of information. In what way can we ensure our access to information?

From Milton Freidman to Satish are we ready to make room for change?

In the amazing synergy I found with Youtube, Google, Twitter, Facebook and blogger, I found another challenge, podcasting.  I interviewed a friend about her company, Crooked Trails, which is one of the only companies practicing honest sustainable travel and recorded the conversation. An hour long rich conversation brought the realization editing is a great equalizer to enthusiasm. Chris mentioned a ratio of 1 minute of video to i hour of editing, enough time to flatten most dreams with the reality of hard labor. The class videos really inspired me to use the footage I have shot over the last 4 years and make something with it. I am working on a video for Adam Justin's shop to start the video conversation with his customers, who hopefully want to respond with their ski videos and create a visual journal of the ski season.

What is becoming clear, I hold winter in high esteem, a character flaw interwoven to my core. Through my conversation with Yogi during the CRL Eluminate, he brought forth my passion for exploration and education as a way to build and maintain community. I see my entrepreneurship project going into the future revolving around these elements.  Through all this one struggle I am in the middle of, how do students in a school designed to train change agents resist change? With this thought emerged the Social Change project that Justin Fenwick, Karen Goat, Brian Trunk, Tomas Amodio and I are engaged in.

This made me think of Adbusters, the Journal of the Mental Environment. I think this is the where I love exploring the most. The poster below reminded me of my resistance to Microeconomics,

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

J Krishnamurti

namaste!

Video Branding

Elyn inspired me to step up to the mic and put myself visually into cyberspace. Authenticity of her video and Julie's made me step back and look how I could capture my brand. I went back to the branding exercise and let imovie inspire me to try different things without fear it would be swallowed up without a trace. I wasn't, so enjoy and post comments!

The Garage, the Switch and the Two Year Old

If there was another author by the name of Lewis, the Garage door opener would of been some outrageous gateway where Charlotte and I get to grow up and play with swords. Reality today was an early am trip to Home Depot, replacing garage door openers and dancing to live music at the Farmer's Market. As Charlotte picked up a piece of pizza and started swaying to an accordionversion of Pink Floyd, I realized without an i-phone, digital camera, and or a ipod that moment was mine alone to enjoy, no way to let everyone know with a quick shot and upload to FB.

That tension to share and be externally connected versus reveling in the moment, being present with everything and everyone around you increasingly draws my focus. After many days reviewing my personal brand with Bonnie and Melissa, the distillation reads like this:

Now his vocation is sharing his passion for global exploration of cultural and mountain landscapes and believes in building community through shared experiences of immersion in raw nature, which offers the one of best teaching environments.

There is more yet the essence it right there, which brings me back to that tension, without the shared experience can that really express why I do what I do? Another reality check came from a google alert(Sauron's Eye?) letting me know when my name appears on a website on a profile website called zoominfo. I clicked on the link and I saw fragments of a few jobs I previously held, my university degree and a professional membership. It actually asked me if I wanted to claim this profile, did that just imply anyone could of claimed that profile? I did not set it up, it was information swept up by this site found around the web, so I claimed it to avoid having my personal brand taken out of my hands.


I will claim the domain for my BGI beat, Travel Sustainably as it is a passion of mine and fits into my Marketing and Entrepreneurship projects. I am still figuring out my blog peers, which keeps me engaged with topics to write about as each new peer inspires new ideas. I feel a little closer to claiming my professional brand through this blog, my company, BC Adventure Guides and the company blog.

My question to the BGI peeps, does my brand reflect who you know and see, if not where does my branding need to go?

Branding and so on..

I have a confession, I hate tags and tag clouds. I watched TED's Jill Bolte Taylor talk,'A Stroke of Insight' and realized two important points on how I deal with information and the internet. First, I am a left handed, epileptic who suffered from a drug induced dyslexia and sensitivity to artificial light, the cat is out of the bag now. The results in my audio oriented information preferences, using podcasts and some video and a habit of listening to them outside. I also tend to use a few sites frequently and perform random searches when necessary. I know Google Reader and Delicious serve a purpose, yet they serve a certain set of people as well. My question, is system meant as a one size fits all? If I tag and filter will that make me use it more?

Bonnie brought out some points about my profiles I was not aware of from a branding perspective. She noted my attention to community and relationships as well as my passion for mountain culture and environment She also commented that my brand was closely linked to my profession and it should evolve into something larger than my job. For a long time I was identified with the company I used to work with and a year and half later that is finally starting to happen. What I am finding is the need to unwind my personal from my professional online brands and Bonnie was spot on with that assessment.

This made me re-examine the tags other people gave me: curious strength, holds safe space and thoughtful questions jumped out at me after letting them sit for a few weeks. This process is slower that I thought would be possible, I think my daughter will potty train herself by the time this makes sense to me. I am making strides and will roll out some surprises this week! One thing I did not do is create a bgi id simply because my brain is too small for multiple accounts let alone multiple personalities. 'The Avatar' makes me think of Dungeons and Dragons, which I struggled with as well and just stuck with comics. Again I stopped short of talking about characters as if they were real people. The comic fans that did made me feel uncomfortable, as if the van with traquilizers and strait jacket would arrive to take them away to a quiet place....

We are in trouble now.

After watching Danah Boyd about the digital divide in social media and the political oppression elsewhere, I felt a bit apocalyptic. I certainly felt like I literally was up a creek without a paddle given the scope of both problems and the limited reach social media currently has for real social change.

I fell a bit better now, with the paddle store and all.....buenos noches!

Google Sidewiki entry by Matt

Makes the expression head in the sand seem more relevant.

in reference to: The Associated Press: Saudis ask for aid if world cuts dependence on oil (view on Google Sidewiki)

Glen Plake and Personal Brand

I first saw Glen Plake in the Greg Stump Film, Blizzard of Ahhs. That experience showed many skiers the world of skiing steep, big mountains, which cracked open my reality and inspired me to turn skiing into a vocation as well as a passion. Glen provides a great example of personal branding with his signature mohawk, trademark american flag on his jacket and skis as he plays ambassador for the sport of skiing and K2 skis around the world. now he is the most recognizable figure in the sport.

As for branding, this has been my ongoing project since quitting my previous job at Mountain Madness and trying to separate myself from MM.My Twitter ID is serial skier, a play on words. While a serial killer repeatedly commits his or her crime, the serial skier commits to his or her passion as frequently as possible, hopefully with friends. I believe this works because it is the only thing outside the bedroom that gives me pleasure rain or shine.

For my blog, I chose Sustainable Skier meets...., recognizing my current direction life while alluding to the idea of a future fork in the road, not sure what that outcome would be.

For my company, BC Adventure Guides, the name took me a very long time to figure out. I played with my initials, different words for snow, travel, alpine and found the letters BC meant more than one thing. This was important to me as the connotation for most people's first impression was British Columbia, which I found useful since that was a positive image and a place most people I work and play with want to go. The denotation is back country, which is the destination for almost all the activities I sell my services for. The letters BCA also come from a popular brand of snow safety and travel gear which I haved used for many years and felt that alignment would help me with name recognition for a quality product.

Youtube now makes everyone a film-maker and twenty years later Glen and legendary Chamonix guide, Remy Lecluse, ski the peaks of Peru, my heroes! Am I creating the right identity? I feel comfortable with it so does Youtube fit in with this branding exercies? What about audio clips?


Enjoy the footage!

My New Beat-Sustainable Travel

I seem drawn to irony so naturally I chose Sustainable Travel as my BGI beat. It currently is a failed internship I attempted to do with a group called, Sustainable Travel International. They developed a certification program for sustainable travel practice for the entire travel industry, hotels to travellers themselves. They facilitate carbon offsets, help connect people with philanthropic groups to help while traveling. While they offer many services, the general public has little concept of what sustainable is or looks like. My attempted internship project was to create a social media campaign to make the genreal public aware of the tenets of sustainable travel and whatthey can to do minimize their impact while roaming the globe.

The dam broke and washed away my attention

Last week, I experienced a tsunami last week that took my time and attention span out to sea, now on its way to Hawaii. I actually found myself getting anxious with every visit to the channel, as I struggled to find readings, appropriate announcements and responses as well as missing both eluminate sessions due to work.

We need a google reader for the channel, standard syllabus formatting, a work scale to balance classes with each other, blah, blah, blah.... So I clocked out, forgot to answer my phone, read comic books for 24 hours and went to a college reunion. Nothing to tag or twit (do not worry I am aware there is a different verb) with which gave me sense of freedom to roam and anxiety about the mounting work load washing into my inbox.

I finally found my way back to school and read The Dunbar Number, which I felt comfortable with. My background in organizing groups in remote settings helped me feel like our inner primate still kept us from getting bogged down in big groups. Gifford brought up the optimum number in a creative session of seven which Chris spoke to when discussing Unstructured Trust. I believe there are many more factors why groups size is hard wired for survival and performance.

Like the arbitrators of social web knowledge, information as well as people seek flat organization that allows for autonomy and ownership of shared purpose. Teamwork at this scale does not require a single leader, just leadership. I see certain numbers repeat themselves in many contexts, 3,4,6,7,8 & 12 are used in every religion as a way to order important concepts, such as 12 disciples, 8 noble truths, 7 deady sins, 4 fold path and the holy trinity as just a few examples. What I see this as is unveiling our human software in the digital world, these numbers are what Dunbar helped with survival of groups.

I learned how Twitter creates back channels, which sound like a side conversation while another conversation or presentation is going on. The example used at a conference how the audience redirected the interview via back channel tweeting and eventually gave the interviewer questions they wanted answers to.

Power to the people, however the tags I added to delicious last week spoke to the other side of this activism, oppression for that same action by the governments of Moldova, United States and Iran in response to twitter feeds helping activist organize rapidly and mobilize to avoid police. A dangerous precedent which I have not seen a good response to. This seems like the creative commons has its head in the sands talking about good business practices, while the paranoid guys from the x-files are being arrested for using this technology for trying preserve what little bit of democracy is left.

Leaving political oppression via technology behind, the term, hashtag, presented itself in one of our Twitter Commons videos. While I followed the meaning of creating a tag that could help develop into a trend by aggregating more common words from tweets to a single tag. I could use some help here, how is this really different from another tag that catches the right word to help organize other tweets?

Will of Sustainability

William is simply a role model of will, if you want to do it, that is enough to get to work.

Personal versus Professional Branding

Interesting point that I have been struggling to commit to until now.

My professional brand is BC Adventure Guides, an intentional reference to British Columbia, while actually meaning Back Country, which believe it or not in my circle most people understand.

My personal brand is a little harder to pin down. I have thought of myself as a brand, just my professional life until now. I have not written down the list from class, which I misinterpreted the first part of the exercise so I am not sure if will actually align.

Circle-a space for change

A safe space in real time offers rich opportunity for experimentation. The Social web may possess the tools to accommodate these experiments. Let's break out the components:

• Moments of silence
• Appreciations
• Announcements
• Problems with Solutions
• Hopes and Dreams

Can online real time activity help anyone of these? We can link to projector and use the large screen to post information to the community, will this serve the same purpose, allowing other voices to speak on a more personal level? Let announcements became virtual, on screen for one or two circles simultaneously while allowing greater exploration of community appreciations, cpt, puzzles with solutions.

In a large class we can have a screen where students post their comments via google docs eluminate white board to questions while other students voice their answers so everyone can say something if they want.

I have more questions than answers. Will people take the introduction of a screen and media as an intrusion into personal space?

Intensive Moments

The voice in the community is just a little harder to hear now, it that true for the internet? Can BGI look at social media concepts to make sure we all heard? Can there be online appreciations on screen as well as real time? Can announcements become virtual and appreciations stay offline? Maybe two circles, one online connection?

Another issue for me, is the source the new generation of bloggers using information from word of mouth, wikipedia, footnotes? What constitutes an online footnote? This is not as simple as a link, since content changes or the material disappears over time leaving the source altered or gone. If one uses information directly from a source then that source should be cited so others can review the evidence.

Is this really an academic exercise or a way to create a baseline set of ethics? I see alot of soothsaying disguised as expertise.

Sometimes its in the details...

Chris asked the class to do a simple task of inviting people to our learning journals. It turns out this not a simple request to this hairless monkey. I must of eaten enough bananas as a kid 'cause I'm doing laps around this blog trying to find the invite function and function is available that I can find.

Humbling when I feel perfectly comfortable navigating out my door to any destination on land and make sure everyone can follow. The deeper I go into the web, my vision blurs and my brain flattens out due to unseen pressure I can't seem to address. The functions seem to elude my understanding and my eyes fatigue when too much time is spent spinning around and around the web.

I understand why delicious is relevant, it takes and extraordinary amount of effort not to consume a large bottle of fermented beverage to calm nerves and avoid scaring my dog, toddler and cat in that order. The simple truth that I struggle with is where do people have the time to be present on the web as much as they to be effective and influential in this environment?

I must admit for reasons of bias, I am an anarchist, not in the co-opted punkrock, skater sense, but in the original meaning,

'a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable, and favors the absence of the state (anarchy).^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

With this in mind, I am aware that structure is often subjective and confining. I have struggled with the notion that this 'new organization of information' was a radical notion from Silicon Valley, actually it made me slightly ill. The source of this virus is the simple fact that much of the videos and blogs I watched owe their ideas to a Chinese Taoist philosopher, Zhuangzi, who lived*(some question about who actually wrote his ideas down and when) 2,400 years ago,

'In general, Zhuangzi's philosophy is mildly skeptical, arguing that life is limited and the amount of things to know is unlimited. To use the limited to pursue the unlimited, he said, was foolish. Our language and cognition in general presuppose a dao to which each of us is committed by our separate past—our paths. Consequently, we should be aware that our most carefully considered conclusions might seem misguided had we experienced a different past. "Our heart-minds are completed along with our bodies." Natural dispositions to behavior combine with acquired ones—including dispositions to use names of things, to approve/disapprove based on those names and to act in accordance to the embodied standards. Thinking about and choosing our next step down our dao or path is conditioned by this unique set of natural acquisitions.'

Among the concepts he put forth was linguistic chaos, such as the creation and definition of words was like the flowing water following gravity where ever the path of least resistance led. What I found interesting was how most of the argument about the need for less hierarchy came from a very centrist point of view. It seems the internet is not staying current with philosophy which has long questioned the underpinnings that the Web 2.0 architects are just now dealing with using Social Media.

Within Social Media, the flattening of organizations, definitions, and dispersal of sources of information opens up an enormous volume of information coming from almost infinite sources, upending the 20th century paradigm of limited media outlets. Needless to say, this gives me hope in the face of other more pressing challenges.

Where I get on the bus in the quest of better understanding is how to approach this new media and what audience it is addressing. What I learned from the reading is no matter what you do be authentic and passionate, otherwise you are just taking up unnecessary room in cyber space. I also appreciate there is now a place where I feel at home without an imposed structure, Amen!