Perspectance

I’ve started some domains, some different blogs, and now struggle with focus. I feel like I want to write, but to myself, and that is too much trouble outside of my paper journal. Real blogging, on a topic, for people who might benefit by stopping by is another kind of writing I want to do, but I am struggling with focus.

Lorelle on WordPress has some great encouragement and guidance:

The best part of blogging with a narrow blog focus is that I have less self doubt about my abilities and my ability to blog. I know my subject matter. I know it from a variety of perspectives. I’m constantly challenging my information, resources, sources, and expertise as I write on the subject from different angles and points of view.

My problem is that looking at everything, well maybe not everything, but so many different things, about the way we learn to “be” in the world – is a broad, not focused topic. Actually, that right there is a more focused topic than I had arrived at ever before. Lorelle is inspiring though, and I want to work more with her concept of pulling a thread:

As you consider your blog’s focus, I want you to look at your entire life, all the threads that make up the tapestry of your life. They all make you, the resulting “fabric” of your life as it is right now. On that fabric you will find colors and patterns repeating themselves. Loudly. Vibrantly. Or possibly they are subtle and almost invisible, but when you look with fresh eyes, they start to stand out from the rest of the threads.

Lorelle prompts me to look for passion threads that “repeat themselves throughout the fabric” of my life and how “that could define the blog’s focus and content.” I’ve been doing a lot of this, and am choosing now to post publicly as a matter of showing myself progress toward this goal. In some small way, it’s holding myself accountable to write.

That one last check of email before getting back on task was (as so often is), the derailment event. I’m deciding to at least blog the sequence for the sake of checking off one to do (blog something by the end of the day). It started with this:

Email: Stewart Mader sent a message to the members of the “Using Wiki in Education” Facebook group.
Subject: Message from Stewart (group founder): new Wikipatterns book, and a chance to win an iPhone!

I didn’t care about the Iphone, but people talk to me every day about wikis, so had to check this out:

Wiley Publishing is releasing Wikipatterns, a how-to guide for growing wiki use in organizations.

Stewart says the book is…

A how-to guide for growing wiki use in organizations with practical advice from a wiki expert.

Inspired by the vibrant community on Wikipatterns.com.

Loaded with case studies from organizations big and small including Sun Microsystems, Johns Hopkins University, LeapFrog, Red Ant, and National Constitution Day.

Written to answer questions such as:
* How an organization’s wiki differs from Wikipedia
* The best ways to get started
* How wikis streamline and simplify day-to-day activity
* How to encourage participation and make the wiki “stick”

It’s available on Amazon.com: http://snurl.com/1wdti
For more information: http://www.ikiw.org/wikipatterns

So I click over to the Amazon site. Cute cover. Subtitle reminds me I don’t have time for this right now, but can’t resist the Search inside the book! feature- and I pick the table of contents. Hmm, nothing in the first 25 pgs I need to read. Wait…. pgs 28-29 The All Virtual Community vs. Wiki that Mirrors Physical Community, and Why Mischief Doesn’t Happen, gotta see what they say there…but first…the rest of the TOC….

Pgs 57-59 looks like they’ll compare wikis to Intranet-powered CMS and shared drives (wonder if they include pen drives?). I was just looking into that yesterday! Hmm Atlassian, never heard of that one…should check it out - and the email had said that Atlassian is having a t-shirt design contest, so is the book a pitch for that company’s wiki? Interesting, like a fat white paper maybe. I really need to stop this and get back to work, but what about these links?

They keep listing questions that refer to wikipatterns.com. I pop that into the browser and ahhh…I like the pattern language concept lots, and scrolling down see plentiful promises to coalesce my experience in this area. Rich stuff. Got to share, I tag it on del.icio.us and think, now back to work…but first, back to the Amazon site. I pop it onto my wish list and notice Managing Virtual Teams. Rationalizing that this one is even more relevant to recent inquiries, I repeat this whole process. Checking out their companion site, I think, interesting concept for left links, but I don’t tag it. I add the book to my wish list though, X out of all my open browser tabs, and finally, except for writing this…get back to work, except…there’s a new email now…

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

Did you ever have a teacher who had you write down every word you didn’t know in a new book and then go look up definitions and then use the word in a new sentence? That was one of my favorite school activities from the earliest age. When I was done, I felt so much smarter. Most of the time now, I can make sense of content in context with enough surrounding words, but once in awhile I stumble into a delectable berry patch where too many of the surrounding words are also new - but tasty.  

Such is the case with much of my reading on the Ning Developer’s Network.:

Some of the most common questions from developers new to the Ning environment have to do with the Ning Store (XNS from now on). These questions fall roughly in one of two categories:

• Mapping of relational (or more generally, traditional) database concepts to the XNS. This included questions regarding locking, concurrency, referential integrity, etc.
• Usage details. What are types? How are fields defined? And so on.

I’m not really a developer, but I am happy to be splashing around in there. I joined it and said in my profile I’m a NooB. (I should look that up.)  I’m a wannabe lots of things, one being a community developer; and because the people I know (and want to know) and work with are geographically dispersed, online is a good place to try and develop community.

Somehow, my want of bringing about community has combined with my Ms. Breakit, Makeit, Fixit approach to the world and landed me in the weeds of one after another computer science estuaries. 
Fortunately, I love estuaries- all kinds of them- every sense of them, metaphorical and tangible. As a child, I crabbed, fished, and swam in one. I’m a native of the briny edges (hmm, good blog title), which is perhaps why I’m at home adapting to new environments on my way out to sea.

I stopped reading to come write here because I noticed in the Ning Developer’s Network familiar characteristics of nurturing growth/learning environments.  

1. First, there’s Diego, believing and presenting the need for at least a little relational database theory before explaining how to do something.
2. Then, there is readable structure in the form of a Table of Contents, Intro, sections, and from a cursory look, liberal illustrations. These are great signposts that encourage me to swim out just so far, dart back, then swim out further.
3. He talks about models the reader can compare and contrast with this unfamiliar one. I particularly warmed up reading that my new learning can hook in somehow with a Network model - which I understand better.
4. Finally, there is the company of others to feed and swarm with, afforded by the discussion section immediately below the article.
   

I’m excited about Ning Networks! I’m excited about the level of help available among people who’ve started social networks and landed there with their questions and answers, and that I have learned the power of social learning. I’m excited that Ning makes it easy to pull a site and group together with little or no technical expertise, then turn over keys to the back door, basement, closets, and attic with the click of a button. There is so much I want to explore and do with our new site, and I just expect to be able to do it with a few searches of the Ning resources. 

Why was I writing this again? Oh yes, because the Ning page provoked it! So there’s this Primer….written by developer Diego, and I can see that if I read all the way through it, maybe a few times, I will LEARN all kinds of stuff about not only Ning, but the principles of database theory in general. This excites me so much I had to stop reading and capture what is happening here.

OK, my Mac is back, and I’m gradually re-acculturating myself to getting work done on it. I was a NooB to Macs during the three months before my crash, just long enough to store up plenty of works in progress - including ideas to blather about. 

So in classic SueW style, on my MacBook Pro desktop, I have stickies open on 5 projects, my twitter tape running on the right (hoping for happenstance helps), Dreamweaver open to edit my homepage, edits for a friend’s doc in Word, my iGoogle collection (did I have an appointment today?), Horde email up on my server, Skype, the wikispace I’m moving stuff from over into a spanking new Ning network for WAM, and finally…..the Ning Developers Network page on The Ning content Store - which I was in the middle of making sense of when starting this post.

Finally, a container. Now when I get my laptop back, if anything was recovered from my hard drive, I’ll copy some posts here.