Category: Power & Positionality

Lyotard and Baudrillard for Educational Technology

There is a very interesting discussion going on over at SCoPE on the Virtual Museum Project. It made me consider my favorite postmodern thinker, Jean-Francois Lyotard, as well as another colorful character, Jean Baudrillard, and how and why I saw them both as influential thinkers in the history of educational technology.

Any other Lyotard fans out there in the world of adult education and educational technology?

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? 

Liveblogging 101

Our long-awaited presentation we are doing at this year’s Northern Voice has finally appeared on their website. As an all-volunteer conference, I really appreciate all the work and efforts the organizers are giving to make this year’s personal blogging and social media conference a success.

My session will be on Friday, February 22, 2008, from 14:00 – 14:30 (2:00-2:30pm) in a new track–Internet Bootcamp. Entitled Liveblogging 101, it is meant to introduce newbies to liveblogging.

As a technologist and qualitative researcher, I am really interested in how liveblogging is an act of involvement and participation. It is not a narrative of the events–that is stenography. It is an interactive co-creation of the event itself from the perspective of an active participant. This in fact summarizes what my blog title, Silence and Voice, is all about. With liveblogging, the silence is ended as participants take up and use their own voices to record the event as they experience it.

Liveblogging:  Unfiltered. Raw. Authentic. If you want it nice and neat, buy a book.

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Hierarchy and Communication

Have you ever had an experience like this Dilbert comic?

dilbert_hierarchy

This reminds me about working in a new company, or on a new team, in a new department, with a strict union, etc. Strange how complicated work and relationships / territory / job security / sense of worth or importance can make some things that seem to be easily understood into situations that are much more complex. Power and positionality in organizations are often more complex than they seem at face value.

Perhaps the lessons here will help reveal us to who will win in the next presidential election?