Tue, Apr 10, 2007
"Learning Community" Words #
DeborahMeehan led the LeadershipLearningCommunity's board through a quick exercise today that was partially inspired by GailTaylor's "love" experiment. She read us a quote from last year's Creating Space conference, then asked us to write down five words we think of when we hear the words "LearningCommunity." We each wrote our word phrases on Post-It notes, then proceeded to cluster our words on a large surface. (M6L)
There were 12 of us participating, which resulted in a total of 62 word phrases. (I split two Post-It notes into two word phrases. One was separated by a slash, the other by "and.") Out of those 62 word phrases, 10 were used more than once. They were (in order of frequency): (M6N)
- diversity (M6O)
- synergy (M6P)
- relationship (M6Q)
- sharing (M6R)
- community (M6S)
- connectedness (M6T)
- generative (M6U)
- non-judgemental (M6V)
- openness (M6W)
- wisdom (M6X)
You can see a cloud visualization of the words we chose. (M6Y)
Some observations: (M6Z)
- Only one person (me) wrote, "learning." Only two people wrote "community." That could have been because people assumed that they could not use those two words. (M70)
- No one wrote "teaching." (M71)
- The value of the clustering versus the cloud visualization is interesting. The clustering exercise (which is similar to an AffinityDiagram in the usability world) is an exercise in semantic convergence. All the cloud view does is match words, character-by-character. Both tell you different things. Both are valuable. (M72)
If we were to do this exercise again, it would be interesting to do 10 rather than five words. I think there would be more overlap in that case, although the beauty of this exercise is, one never knows. And it would be interesting to do this exercise again with the same group of people six months from now to see if the results are different. (M73)
/collaboration | Posted at 8:15pm
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