How do we turn a participation map into a “collective impact” map?

See article

Last week I used the graphic at the right in an article about systems thinking. After writing it I shared it on Linkedin and so far it's recorded 3593 views and some great comments.

Yesterday I was updating links in my web library and found several that I added in 2013 while I was participating in the Education, Technology MOOC, or #ETMOOC.  Then a couple of hours later I was mentioned in a Tweet by Alan Levine, talking about the 2013 ETMOOC.

This prompted me to do a search for ETMOOC to see what I've posted about it. The first article on the list was from January 22, 2013, titled "Connected Learning. Collective Action".

I going to re-post that article here, with just a few updates and annotations, showing that the vision I had in 2013, and 20 years before that, is still live and kicking during Covid19 in 2020.

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ETMOOC participants 2013

I’m one of more than 1600 people who have joined the Education Technology Mooc (#ETMOOC) since last Monday. I’ll be participating in the National Mentoring Summit in Washington, DC this Thursday and Friday where more than 500 people will be connected in the same building and for the same purpose.

This article aims to tie the two events together.

I have participated in several ETMOOC events since last Monday, including a session Sunday morning hosted by Dave Cormier, one of the first people to use the term MOOC. Visit this page to find the recording of Dave’s session, along with additional links to his ideas. (The site I originally pointed to is no longer on-line, but click here to read blogs by Dave, from 2006 till 2020) 

As part of the #ETMOOC, participants have written more than 850 blog articles and posted over 1000 Tweets. Most of these have focused on how MOOCs enable personal learning and introduce members and their ideas to each other. You can follow what you want. You can spend as much time reading blogs and taking part in live sessions as you want. You can share your own ideas and you can interact with others. Each participant controls their own learning experience. You can follow some of the blogs at this link.

This is complex problem
that I've focused on.

I’m interested in going beyond personal learning. My goal is to help build and sustain networks that use their learning, and the network, to innovate new ways to solve complex problems.

The ETMOOC network analysis map shows “who’s involved” based on history of participation. If you’ve followed previous articles on this blog you can see how I’ve been trying to map participation in Tutor/Mentor Conferences, the Ning group, and my Facebook and Linked in groups.

You’ll see how I focus on actions that grow the network, while growing the composition of the network at the same time. If we agree that It Takes a Village to Raise a Child, we need to get the business community strategically involved.

With this post I hope to stimulate a couple of different streams of thought.

1) How do we connect people participating in MOOCs with places where they become volunteers, donors, leaders who work together to solve complex social problems? (I'm still trying to do  this.)

2) How do we know if people from all sectors – e.g. business, philanthropy, government, community, religion, youth, etc. – are participating in our MOOCs or community of practice? (We still don't know, and I can't find many who are trying to find out.)

When I started the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993 I could have just focused on sharing ideas I had developed since 1975 when I first started leading a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program in Chicago. However, I did something different. I made a commitment to try to collect, organize and share experiences of others involved in this work. My goal was to collect “all that was known” about volunteer-based tutoring/mentoring, where such programs are needed, why they are needed, what it takes for them to have long term impact, how to support them, how to connect business and philanthropy to them, etc. This represents a vast library of knowledge and literally millions of people.

If you read the systems thinking article I wrote last week you can see this same thought. 

I’ve used Concept Maps to diagram my strategies, and the sections of my library. The diagram below shows the research section of the Tutor/Mentor Connection links library.

Open link to see current version of this cMap

If you click on any of the nodes you’ll go to a specific section of the web library which points to a variety of web sites with information related to that topic. Many of the web sites I point to have similar lists of web sites they point to. The collective knowledge that this represents is constantly expanding.

Every conversation uncovers
new ideas.

Every time I’m in a conversation, conference, or MOOC, I add sites I’m interested in to the library, which makes them immediately available to anyone else who visits the site. There’s an entire section of links in the Library to Knowledge Management articles, which is what I’m doing.

2020 --- I've been thinking about how to describe this lately. How many times are you in a conversation and someone says "Do you know about this or that piece of information?" It could be really valuable. Not just to me, but to others. Most of the time you leave the conversation and the information shared is lost. I've made a habit of taking notes, then adding links to what we talked about to the web library, so others could learn from it, too.

I realize I’ll never have “all that is known” but with 2000+ links, the library offers a massive pool of content for that could support a variety of MOOCs (and/or systems thinking projects).

By participating in ETMOOC and events like the Mentor Summit I hope to connect with others who will help with this process. I hope to find partners who will help organize future “tutor/mentor” MOOCs that draw people from the many different sites in my library into an on-line community that offers all of the personal learning and relationship building values that Dave Comier is describing in his presentation.

This is still not happening.

I hope to focus on strategies and actions that make mentor-rich programs available in more of the neighborhoods where they are most needed.

Tutor/Mentor Conference map

As that is happening, network analysis can show who’s participating and geographic maps can show what parts of the geography are represented. Such maps could demonstrate the growth of the network over a period of years, while enabling people from different sections of the library and/or different parts of the country or a big city like Chicago, to connect more easily with each other.

View articles
w this map. 

In one of the ETMOOC blogs I read last week the author told of how he feels others do a much better job of communicating ideas than he does. Then one day someone said “gee that’s really unique”.

I think others can communicate what I’m describing far better than I can. That’s one role interns have been taking. You can see some of their work here.

2020 - As people reach out and ask how can I help I invite them to read my blog articles, then create their own blog, or video, to share their  understanding of what I'm saying. Here's a concept map where I aggregate links to blogs where some people are doing that.

In this 2020 article I encourage students to take on this role, while doing learning from home. Any of the educators who I've met via cMOOCs could engage some of their students in this process, focusing on their own communities, not Chicago (unless they live in this area).

I hope that through the MOOCs and conferences I attend I’ll not only find people who share the same vision and strategy, but who will use their talent to help communicate these ideas in more creative, thoughtful and meaningful ways.

I’ll write more about this tomorrow before I head to the airport. I think this post is long enough already.

----- end rewrite of 2013 article -----

View at this link

Following the ETMOOC in 2013 I joined the CLMOOC and that has continued each year since then.  I've posted 61 articles that point to my participation in the CLMOOC including this article where I show my learning journey.

At the left is the most recent example of how we spark creativity among each other. I had posted an article about network building and Wendy Taleo from Australia included it in a visual poem she was working on with several others. See it here.  I circled where I show up on her journey map.

2020 EndPoverty Summit
in Chicago

At the right is a photo that shows participants at an EndPoverty Summit held in Chicago before Covid19 and hosted by Mayor Lightfoot. I wrote about it here and asked why we can't get non-profit youth program leaders, funders, researchers, volunteers and business partners....and youth/alumni, into on-going cMOOC type on-line conversations.

Covid19 has changed how people connect and communicate. #LearnAtHome and #WorkatHome are now becoming habits. Maybe it's time to make a new push to bring the youth and workforce development ecosystem into more integrated cMOOC-like engagement. 

For that to happen one or more visible leaders needs to step forward and champion the vision. And fund the work.

Today I was one of nearly 100 in a ZOOM meeting led by the Mayor's MyChiMyFuture youth initiative. The Mayor joined in for a few minutes. Maybe someone from that planning team will read this and begin to imagine ways to connect participants in this ecosystem, the same way the ETMOOC and CLMOOC people have been connecting and sharing ideas for many years.

Maybe someone will understand the need to  be mapping participation to show who's there, and who's missing.

If you're reading this and you want to help, create your own version and share it. Maybe you'll be the one that some big shots listen to and provide the funds to do this work.

Connect with me on these social media channels.

If you can, make a contribution to help me pay the bills. Visit this page to use the PayPal button.

Building Local-Global Problem Solving Connections

I've been connecting with people and ideas via Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook for the past 10 years. I currently find Twitter chats more valuable than either other platform so I created this hashtag concept map so others could connect via the same groups I've found.

For the past two weeks I've been part of an on-line #EngageMOOC course focused on "Engagement in a time of Polarization".  The content (videos, articles) for the course is hosted on #EdX, so you need to be logged in to read. However, some materials are also available on YouTube and Hypothes.is.   I put the 2/12/18 YouTube hangout video on my Vialogues page, so others could view and offer comments.  I read and commented on the article titled "Power, Polarization and Tech" using Hypothes.is

The course content will remain on line for at least one year, in archive format, but without the chatter on Twitter, I'm not certain how many more people will find the information, read it, and engage with others. Furthermore, after a year all of this may disappear.

The problems we focus on will extend much longer than that.

I've been building a web library for the past 20 years (which before that was a paper-based library hosted at my office in Chicago).  If you view tweets I've posted about #tutor #mentor and #learning, you'll see that I point to this regularly, as a resource for anyone in the world who wants to get involved in reducing poverty, which includes building and sustaining non-school tutor, mentor and learning programs that reach k-12 youth in every high poverty neighborhood of Chicago and any other city.

I created the cMap shown below today to illustrate the need to archive information and keep it available for decades and to motivate growing numbers of people to spend time learning from the library to support ways they use their own time, talent, dollars and civic engagement, where ever they live, or in what ever issue they focus on.

Yesterday I attended a lunch event at the Chicago Hyatt Regency in Chicago, along with at least 300 others. I sat between the General Consul from Japan and the General Consul from South Korea. We listened to Senator Tammy Duckworth describe 21st century threats and opportunities.

“If we are to remain successful as a nation, we must be active in our efforts to safeguard our position as a global economic and cultural power, not just a military one.” - Thrilled to have @SenDuckworth reinforce the importance of America's continued global engagement #usglcIL pic.twitter.com/1r3ne0C5mA

— USGLC (@USGLC) February 23, 2018

As I listened I tweeted out a wish that all these people were connected and engaged via Twitter chats and other social media platforms, the way I've been growing my engagements. Furthermore, I hoped that more and more of the on-line interactions would point to reading material and videos the way the #engageMOOC course has been doing.

The Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) is an "information based 4-part problem solving strategy, visualized in the cmap at the right, and in this article. It uses information to support decisions and actions, including the flow of resources into high poverty areas.

I hope that my conversations on-line and with people I sit next to at lunch will lead them to look at what I'm writing, and will lead them to engage youth as intermediaries, like myself, in bringing more people to on-line forums and on-line libraries.  The video below is an example of what's possible. It was created by an intern from South Korea and it shows work that previous interns did when they were working with me.



This is one of many visualizations created by interns between 2005 and 2015.   On this page you can see a list of interns who have worked with my organization, and the universities they came from.

I've been reaching out to universities since starting the Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) in 1993, with a request for shared ownership that involves students, faculty and alumni. While I've been fortunate to have many interns take short term roles, up to one year, I've not been able to embed a Tutor/Mentor Connection/Institute program on any campus, where it shares the goal of the university and many different departments of the university, as well of many different alumni.

I've never been able to bring money to the table, thus my ideas get polite nods and "go find a younger professor" suggestions.

Many of the people who I'm meeting in on-line communities come from high schools and higher education.  Here's an article where I invite universities to form an on-campus program that duplicates what I've been trying to do, and does it better, and for many more years into the future. I think this could be happening at the high school level, too.

Learning Communities
Graphic created by Intern 

At some point in the future a #clmooc that I point to should be one where students and alumni from different universities, in different countries, are sharing work they've been doing to learn what I've been trying to do and to apply those ideas to help reduce poverty in their own communities.

Interested? Connect with me @tutormentorteam on Twitter or on Linkedin or Facebook. Or introduce yourself with a comment on this article.

Bringing Youth Tutor/Mentor Learning Ecosystem Together on the Internet

This screenshot is from a Tweet posted a few days ago, showing how more than 300 people from around the world have been connected to each other since February 10 via an on-line "Engagement in a time of Polarization" EdX course and via Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. The hashtag is #EngageMOOC

I've been participating in various cMOOCs since 2011 and wrote about them here, here and here.

I'm fascinated by their potential for bringing people together in ways that's not possible face-to-face. I've wanted to build this capacity into the Tutor/Mentor Connection for more than 15 years. 

I and six other volunteers created the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993 to "gather and organize all that is known about successful non-school tutoring/mentoring programs and apply that knowledge to expand the availability and enhance the effectiveness of these services to children throughout the Chicago region."

It's 2018. I'm still leading that effort, via the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC

1998 Crain's Chicago Business

I'd been leading a tutor/mentor program in Chicago since 1975 when we formed the T/MC. So I already had an extensive database of other programs in Chicago, as well as of foundations, businesses, volunteers and media. We did our research and planning, and developed a 4-part strategy in 1993. Then, we launched our first Chicago tutor/mentor program survey in January 1994 to systematically learn who else was offering non-school tutor and/or mentor services.

As we started reaching out to learn about programs we began sharing what we were learning with other programs, and with resource providers and other stakeholders, via printed newsletters. We began drawing stakeholders together to share and learn from each other via organized conferences in May 1994 and started organizing an annual Aug/Sept Chicagoland Tutor/Mentor Volunteer Recruitment Campaign in 1995.  You can view the goals of the conference here. See recruitment campaign history here.

We began sharing our list of Chicago tutor/mentor programs in a printed directory in 1994, but never circulated more than 500 copies a year. As we put our library on line in 1998, we also put our list of programs on line.

In 2004 we were able to launch an on-line portal where people could search for information about Chicago area tutor and mentor programs by zip code, type of program and age group served. In 2008 we launched a map based version of this.

With the maps we could show all the places where programs were needed, as well as what places already had service from existing programs.  Thus, our conversations were focused on a) helping existing programs get a more consistent flow of resources needed to constantly improve, while b) helping new program start where more are needed, borrowing ideas from existing programs, rather than starting from scratch.

The conferences and annual recruiting events we organized helped us generate a flow of print news stories, drawing attention to tutor/mentor programs throughout Chicago, not just to our own program. While we stopped our printed newsletter in 2002 we've been sending email newsletters every month since 2000. With our maps we crated map-stories following negative news, in an effort to draw more attention and resources to neighborhoods where help was needed.

While we hosted Tutor/Mentor conferences for 20 years, the goals never changed.

However, we were only reaching a small fraction of those in Chicago who needed to be involved in building and sustaining mentor-rich programs in all high poverty neighborhoods.  And even when we had 250 to 300 people at a 2-day conference, we and every other participant could only really talk and engage with a few other participants. Even in small groups of 10 to 20 people only a few people were able to share much from their own depth of experiences. It was almost impossible to get all of those who need to be involved into the same space, and keep them coming back, month after month and year after year.

In addition, we were not getting participation from business, foundations, media, political leaders and many others who need to be engaged in efforts to fill city neighborhoods with great programs helping kids move safely from birth to work.

Thus when the Internet became available as an on-line library and meeting place in the late 1990s, I fully embraced this potential.  We held our first on-line conference in 2004 with the aid of IUPUI in Indianapolis.  I've been sharing information on web sites since 1998 and on blogs since 2005. I've been on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn since the late 2000s.

I outlined our eLearning goals in 2004 and you can read them here.  I described them again in this blog article (and many others)

In 2011 I created a "Mentoring Kids to Careers" discussion outline on Debategraph's platform (see graphic at left).

As I participate in cMOOCs, I look at the structure and how they are organized. I created a sub section of the Tutor/Mentor library that others can  use to learn about cMOOCs and that I can refer back to when describing them to others. As I share ideas on Twitter, using the #engageMOOC or the #clmooc hashtag, I'm also using #tutor #mentor to connect organizations I network with to people throughout the world.

As I do this I'm also envisioning an #engageTutorMentorMOOC or a #Tutor/MentorCLMOOC or a Tutor/Mentor Google+ community (similar to this CLMOOC group)  where we're connecting all those who need to be involved in building and sustaining constantly improving tutor, mentor and learning programs in on-going on-line learning, conversation, brainstorming, training and resource development.

What does this mean?

Talent needed

I've used cMaps to visualize "all who need to be involved".  This map shows skills and talents. A similar map shows networks that need to be involved. A social network analysis map of participation could put names of people in each of these nodes and help us understand "who is participating, and who's missing".

Another cMap visualizes "who needs to be involved" under the "It takes a village" heading.

In another cMap I show how information we were collected was intended to support the learning of many different groups of stakeholders.

Knowledge Flow cMap

Ultimately my goal is that people from different sectors and different places are forming study and learning groups which draw from information libraries they find on line. While these groups engage in on-going face-to-face learning, they also engage in on-line conversations, with each other, and with people in other groups, expanding their  understanding of problems and solutions and building relationships with people who who might help...

....all with the goal of filling high poverty areas with needed programs and services that help kids move safely through school and into adult lives, jobs and careers  (see strategy map).

As I was writing this article my #engageMOOC feed included the response shown below response to one of my Tweets.

Here are some good examples:https://t.co/ft6rXsvvH2https://t.co/WZJ1pDcaFkhttps://t.co/WKfvFkhNT8https://t.co/0ywRWzlijd

— Connected Action (@ConnectedAction) February 19, 2018

I was asking for examples of using network analysis tools to understand participation in conferences or organized Twitter events.  The links provided pointed to two fascinating articles on the #ScotPublicHealth blog.  Click the links. You can read the articles yourself.  I'm adding this link to the Tutor/Mentor web library so that I and others who want to build an on-line engagement connecting people and organizations in the youth development, tutor, mentor, education, etc. ecosystem, can learn from this model.

However, by putting the link in my library and posting it here and re-tweeting it, anyone else can find and use this information to do better work in their own problem solving efforts.

If you've read this far, thank you! I hope you'll visit some of the links and build your own understanding of the different cMOOCs  and Twitter chats I've pointed to.  I hope you understand how this supports my own on-going learning and efforts to do "better today than I was able to do yesterday". 

I don't yet see this type of on-line engagement connecting the ecosystem of youth tutor/mentor and learning programs and the businesses, foundations, policy makers and others who need to support the growth of such programs.

If you'd like to help make such a community a reality, let's connect.

Engaging on-line - #engageMOOC

I signed up a couple of weeks ago to participate in this two week on-line course titled "Engagement in a time of Polarization", and my Twitter feed gave me some reminders today.

#engageMOOC pic.twitter.com/2kXOrlws6M

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) February 13, 2018

So I looked at a video, read an article, added comments via Hypothesis, then saw this tweet by Christina Hendricks.

Did a blog post for #engageMOOC, reflecting on what I watched today: https://t.co/pX5NSdiGcC Have added my blog to the contribution hub for the course: https://t.co/4V1WbsV2sr (takes a day or so to get there!)

— Christina Hendricks (@clhendricksbc) February 13, 2018

After reading I posted some thoughts. As I was finishing, I decided to also post those thoughts here;

Hi Christina. I think we first connected via ETMOOC a few years ago. I'm on Mastodon, too and I've seen some of your posts there.

I agree with your comment about the potential of blogs to support deeper learning. I've been writing mine for over 10 years, with the same overall goal of connecting people and ideas that support the growth of non-school tutor, mentor, learning programs in high poverty areas.

I see three levels of engagement.

1. Current social media, or the stream and flow (Clay Shirky wrote about this). We dip in and out of the stream. We add to it. We draw from it. We ignore much of it. We miss the majority of what's there due to limited time on-line and limited connections in our networks. It may be that we're now missing much due to how social media platform algorithms determine who sees our posts and who we see.

2. Blog posts - these enable anyone to comment in greater depth about what they are seeing on social media, traditional media as well as from events and meetings they host or participate in. They allow us to share work we're doing in real life, in schools, non-school, programs, feeding the hungry, resisting, etc.  Using hyperlinks, they enable us to connect our readers to a much deeper and extensive library of information.

3. The world wide library - curated collections. This to me is critically important. While a Google search can lead you to information posted anywhere in the world, you need to know what you're looking for to find it in the first 10 to 20 links that show up as a search result.  Many people may now know what they are looking for. Thus if someone is building a web library with information related to a topic (such as the references posted on articles with the #engageMOOC), then anyone can be pointed to that library at any time via hyperlinks in a blog article or via hypelinks attached to a post on one of the social media platforms.

This means anyone can pick out a video, article, piece of research, blog post, etc. and gather friends, co-workers, etc. to read, reflect, discuss, and over time integrate into their understanding of a situation and ways they might respond to it.

As you wrote above, fewer people seem to be commenting on blog posts. From my Google Analytics, fewer people are viewing these. It may be that no one likes what I'm writing, but I think it's more the result of so many people posting on different platforms and much fewer people taking time to read and reflect on what other people are writing.

Thus, as we go through #engageMOOC and beyond I look forward to finding ways to draw more people from the stream and into the deep end of learning, and to how that helps us understand and try to solve some of the many complex problems we face in our local-global lives.

Note: I invite you to review eLearning goals that the Tutor/Mentor Connection first posted in 2004 when we worked with IUPUI on our first on-line conference. I was never able to find funding, or partners, to fully develop this strategy.