Blog Etiquette – developing my own

 

Next topic – Who can I put in my Blog? What can I say about them? How much permission do I need from them?….I find it interesting that I am having difficulty finding an answer to this question online. Yeah – found some help at about.com.

I get a sense now that many conversations that people have are of a semi-private or private nature. I feel hesitant to attribute things to individuals, yet I want to attribute to people their ideas, writing, etc. I often have really good conversations with people and get ideas from them that I probably will want to write about. Clearing it with them makes sense. Sometimes people have ideas that they don’t want to share – their are being incubated. I am reminded by an interview with Maya Angelou where she talks about how she incubates ideas first before she is able to talk about them.Seems like it is a good idea for me to start reading other blogs.

Writing Breakthrough

Well, learning is a never ending process. Writing is the primary tool of academia production and communication. So I was writing tonight to a colleague and was just reflecting a bit on lint and innovation (personal issue)  and had a breakthrough in how I think about my own writing process and in a way – inspired me to start this blog tonight. What I wrote earlier (numbers in front of paragraphs for later reason)

(1) “So I get back from dinner and notice my black slacks are covered with lint from the napkin (I suspect). So I go down to the lobby (people knowledge) to see if they have any lint removers. (I am wearing the same pants again later – lesson from V’s school of traveling light). The hotel staff look and they don’t find a lint removed and I thank them for the effort. hmmm – what to do? Back to my room. What do I have in my backpack that is sticky —- no tape – ah – post-its. So after using six post-its, I realize that this isn’t going to work. Expand search space, I can see the bathroom and coincidentally? think of taking a towel a wetting it to remove the lint – partial success – has to be a certain dampness – not too wet – but still leaving some lint – perhaps adding some if the whole towel isn’t dry. What cloth do I have that doesn’t have any lint – closet is next in view – yes – t-shirts – wet and wring out – again about right – and then success – or at least enough to achieve the 80/20 rule. Notice that proximity is a big factor in this – I think this is more often the case in examine problem spaces and solution spaces. Graphic organizers allow much more detail to be encoded. The same with movies and pictures. But it is a myriad of accessible (quasi-random) materials, ideas and resources that can spur and nurture a receptive mind – your office is a good example of this – tons of things all laid about. “

(2) “One of the people we met with this afternoon – COLLEAGUE’s NAME – was reviewing the resources of the PROJECT NAME CD and was hoping to see how they could be more accessible – in terms of being able to show other people the resources quickly – a sort of back door. And I was thinking about the work with ANOTHER PROJECT NAME. Can participants organize windows into the resources that they have visited? Some people can more readily access things on a temporal basis (with some memory errors of course) or in relation to people or ideas. for the temporal people there are even organizers whose default is listing in temporal order.”

(3) “After writing this – I realize that this is just the sort of thing I can do daily (not write you daily) to get in the habit of writing – I can write to people about different ideas and then just save them – later review and if productive revise and perhaps send. I still haven’t gotten into the writing habit. I remember that you said that writing for you is often about discovery. I found that idea very attractive but not terribly compelling because I had an implicit attitude of writing for writing sake – that the purpose of writing was to create the product. Or writing was for being evaluated instead of writing to express or communicate. This is a shift in perspective – just added to my personal writing guidelines. What is the deal with that shift in perspective thing anyways? Attitude? Disposition? Is it malleable? To what extent are we blind to the implicit perspective or framework?”

(4) “Back to the writing thing. Again I think this could be a breakthrough for me in writing. What is different than the last big idea about writing I found attractive – writing for discovery (which I share often with people) – is that I enjoy and often do write emails to people already – it isn’t something I need to start. And the discovery thing is something that naturally evolves from the writing to people as this very email demonstrates. “

What is interesting in reflection upon this email is that I can’t recall how I made the leap from the 3rd to 4th paragraphs and this just happened in the last 1/2 hour. I think it was a combination of things – thinking about attitudes and dispositions – thinking of linear accumulation of items in an organizer.  But still uncertain what collision of concepts and elicitation of experiential knowledge helped me gain this insight. Well – regardless, I think that I will be doing quite a bit of writing using GMail.