Category: Autoethnography & Reflective Practice

Personal Branding, or Rebranding

I was recently reading a college oriented document about having a “personal brand,” and while it was aimed at undergraduates who may have little real-world experience to point to and may benefit from a personal message upon which to focus and highlight their lives in a concise and engaging way, I was intrigued.

I did not read this as an elevator speech, but rather as the little phrase (or tagline, subtitle, or caption) that appears at the top of most blogs. It includes interests, perhaps a value proposition, an idea of what I am passionate about, interests, and such.

I did some brainstorming, and found these common words (and threads):

  • reflective practice
  • critical thinking
  • assumptions
  • paradigms
  • teaching
  • learning
  • postmodernism
  • constructivism
  • qualitative
  • online
  • community of practice

I wonder if it is time for me to revise mine?

Currently, I am using:

Reflective practice in organizational learning, educational technology, and postmodern society.

and I have been thinking about changing it to something more along the lines of:

Challenging assumptions to promote learning and teaching

or:

Challenging assumptions to construct postmodern learning

Now, it is time for some feedback and help with this. I am oftentimes surprised by who reads my blog, and invite some feedback and thoughts here. I have been tinkering with this idea for about four weeks, and now want to decide and have something new to live with and try out. Thoughts?

Continuing Education + About.com (& CCK08) = Reflective Practice

I often blog about adult and continuing education. Makes sense–I am a senior instructional designer, adjunct instructor at New York University, and organizational learning and communication consultant.

I live and breathe teaching and learning, and with many of my influences (Lyotard, Mezirow, Brookfield, and Denzin, among others) encouraging (critical) reflective practice, I tend to regularly toss ideas and experiences around in my mind for extended periods of time. This is after all the purpose (and by-line) of my blog Silence and Voice itself:

Reflective practice in organizational learning, educational technology, and postmodern society.

It was with some surprise to have Deb Peterson find something that piqued her interest and write about it on her About.com blog. She was very generous in her comments, and it certainly made my morning when I learned about it yesterday. It serves to remind me that we never know who finds our work online–colleagues, future colleagues, current / future / past students, clients, friends, and the like. Once our words are out there and shared online, then the public face we wear may show interesting signs of what it means to be a (critical) reflective practitioner. Sometimes it works well, and sometimes it may be more challenging.

With our world increasingly connected and decreasingly isolated, it is no wonder that George Siemens and Stephen Downes have been able to gather 1900+ of their closest friends (and a few colleagues as well) to discuss Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (cck08), which I think speaks nicely to this experience. Interesting how Deb’s comments about my work and thinking helps me to connect some online (and internal) dots. I suppose we never know when opportunities for reflective practice arise.

The world is getting smaller and more connected indeed . . . what an exciting present and future!

Online Communities and the Removal of Distance

I think online communities of practice and even online classes are changing the ways we think about distance. It almost seems, from the perspective of community, that distance no longer exists. Does it matter if I email colleagues who are spread across the globe? Speak with them via Skype whenever and wherever they may be, as long as I get the timezones correct? Has this flattening of our world changed the way we think about people in other cultural contexts, within national identities, and exotic (and not so exotic) locales?

As my work and research begins to more formally be online, do I  have to be concerned with distance at all?

Further to my point here, what does all this mean for where and how communities form and interact? Leigh asked us to consider what online communities are in our FOC08 class, and I have managed to say exactly what they are not–they are not separated by distance.

I started this post before and finished after having a delightful conversation with a colleague in Brazil, Barbara Dieu. We started speaking (via skype text, which is speaking with the fingers) about Second Life and the FOC08 Course, and the next thing I knew is that Bee asked me what interests me and what I want to learn more about. I gushed about Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarrative, Mezirow’s transformative learning, Denzin / Lincoln / Guba’s work in qualitative research, Freire, Brookfield, pugs, cities, theories, technology, and Madame Butterfly.

I think that community is in there someplace. Something about openness to ideas and encouragement to grow and learn and become more present. Something about being with others who share a space next to us along the journey, whatever and wherever it may lead.

This conversation would never have happened without the community focus of this course, and how our different interests and experiences helps to inform and realize them. To all this, community adds and supports, and it has an amazing capacity to do all this without regard to distance.

Perhaps communities of practice help realize the Internet’s claim to make the world a smaller place, though one with more individual possibilities?

Where Is the Summer Going?

Work, teaching, preparing to teach in the Fall, and the general hassle of life in the big city finds me busier than I ever recall being this deep into the summer. With my current Business Communication two-week intensive class beginning last night and its ending just before Labor Day (which means the summer ends in 2 weeks, at least for those of us who function in an academic mentality!), I see the summer slipping away . . .

As I try to dig out from a mountain of email and online discussions and papers and projects, I have to continually remind myself to seize the day and enjoy every last drop of the fleeting summer. After all, tomorrow there will be more communications and tasks and challenges, and the summer of 2008 will only be a memory.

What sort of a memory do I want to make it?

Director of Strategic Reflection

I attended an online book discussion within my organization recently, and there was a very interesting question the class facilitator ended the session with. He asked:

If we were to write our own ideal job title, what would it be? 

I thought that was the grandest thought-provoking question I have encountered in some time, and came up with “Director of Strategic Reflection.”

As a proponent of reflective practice within an ongoing learning organization, I think those of us within human resource development, adult education, communication, and organizational development would greatly benefit from more active (both structured and unstructured) reflection. How else can we identify the assumptions and patterns of behavior that stifle us from moving forward to create a more just and aware organizational structure and society itself? We who engage in organizational, management, and leadership studies know that when people within an organization are more aligned within one another and with the mission and vision, then the organization itself is stronger and healthier.

What would your ideal job title be, and what impact would it have?