Mar
7
(2006)
Internalizing
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: personal, reflection, thoughts.
WARNING: Rambling, stream-of-consciousness, thinking-out-loud (hopefully not navel-gazing) ahead! Just trying to start framing some thoughts so I can make sense and move on.
It’s one of the weird paradoxes of the last few years for me - I’m much more involved with external (off campus) groups and online communities than I am with local ones. I’m more well-known off-campus than on. I’m more linked to individuals spread around the globe than those at my own institution.
The latest example of this was offered up inadvertently by someone returning from a recent trip abroad, which included a stop in Hong Kong. “D’Arcy, they know you in Hong Kong. They were asking if I know you since we’re both from the U of C.” (ps., howdy Nick!) Turns out I did vaguely know this person (and he knew me mostly because he walked by my “office” that is newly equipped with a nametag - I basically recognized him as having seen him several times, but struggle to put a name to the face), but the point is - I knew exactly who he was talking about, and could list off some cool stuff that Nick is doing. And I’ve never been to Hong Kong.
It seems like I’ve been more involved with projects in BC than in Alberta. In international projects, rather than local.
I’ve been feeling disconnected from the people who are physically around me, because it is so much easier to connect with likeminded individuals around the world - my global online community of practice. What does that say about the nature of communication and relationships?
I’ve also had to spend most of the last year or so on Big Projects - large multinational/multi-institutional endeavors that steer like oil tankers. External timelines, external demands, external users. What I think is needed is more time on smaller, nimble, adaptable projects that will make more of a difference in the trenches. I’m lucky in that I think I’ve been moved/moving in that direction, spending most of the last few months in Drupal and Moodle, thinking about how to integrate them into communities and workflows, rather than building New Applications Just Because Someone Said They Need It.
Stephen’s hiatus (whatever the cause) struck a nerve. I’ve gotten so wrapped up into this online stuff as part of my identity - my sense of self is being partially defined by what I (and others) are doing online. Is that wrong? Is that the way things are moving? It’s a bit disturbing. Why am I so comfortable just hanging everything out here? Is it as simple as some freaky narcisistic tendencies? I never thought I’d use that word wrt to myself, but this apparent need for external validation raises the question.
I’m going to have to put some thought into how to continue this in a more healthy way. Not even sure what that means, but something just doesn’t feel right. Have to track that down first…
Comments
15 Responses to “Internalizing”
I can empathise to an extent. What I would suggest though is if you do strengthen local relationships do not abandon your online one even a little bit. While you might be happy in your current position, if the time came to move on it would be your online reputation that would prove most fruitful.
Speaking as someone who is A) geographically remote to you and B) not even of the education community any more, I for one enjoy your online musings and I can’t see anything unhealthy in it. Perhaps of course I just have my compass out of whack though ;O)
I wrote a diatribe but I thought I would rearticulate, I don’t related well to people around me… I find people online, though geographically spread out, are more like minded than people geographically around me. So until I win that million dollar lottery ticket so I can move to be closer to people who are like me, online is the next best place. I have once again abandoned my blog, but I still feel like I can relate to you and a lot of the Drupal people than I can to people that I physically interact with daily. We should physically hang out more, but these days I am not even at the university much. Also, that whole C-Train thing brought this home, people that I interact with close to me could care less, but the online community came through, and since a friend in need is a friend indeed I know where and who my friends are.. my few cents. I have some thoughts about where this is going and we’re becoming much more connected, but perhaps we should be more selective in what we put online for everyone to see and what we keep confined to those that we hold closer to us, using certain features of say Drupal may make this possible… Much more so than just the private function that Wordpress provides.
I was dwelling upon what I just said and here’s what came up. Say that I visit you blog… Then I should be required to login to your site in order to view anything but content tagged as public. When I login I provide simply a url for my site with some sort of non-reuseable passphrase. The site calls my site and verifies that it’s me and logs me in. Then on your blogs there is a levels of trust function (say a number from 1-10) that you can mark my url with and that determines what I can see or not see.. Being a bit more selective about sharing information. Drupal can right now do something similar, but we need tools that make it simply to set up decentralized identity networks that rely on your blog to identify you online and then allow you to share your content with who you know rather than every single person who happens to visit your site… In some ways this fact makes everyone less of a stranger, which may not be such a bad thing, but it might have some limited consequences in terms of people that you don’t want gaining too much information about you.
Virtual has been the catalyst for me in my real space … starting a couple of years ago I jumped into the blogging waters head first — stopped writing so much in my leather journal, stopped hiding my work in closed places, and stopped asking my students to have conversations in the dark corners of the University’s LMS. Some strange things happened, people started asking me questions — they called, they invited me, they wanted to hear what I had to say … everywhere but at PSU. Weird. I then set out to see if I could apply some of the same effort I was throwing at my blog world … and it worked. I started just going out and meeting with people on campus, getting invovled with various groups (actually asking to be on a committee here and there), hunting out smart people and talking to them about all these amazing ideas you all throw around everyday, and introducing people to the stuff we are all so jacked about.
Working hard online feels easier to me … but at the end of the day it isn’t all that hard to walk across campus and talk to a new friend. I guess all I am saying is that in real life we are just people who may or may not like real live social interaction, but the only way to be recognized for who you really are is to show up as you. Does that make any sense at all? I don’t blog nearly as much as I could/should, but I am talking to more people at the moment. It is strange … blogging made me get out and announce to people what I thinking about and it has now given me the opportunity locally to defend and expand on that. Kinda cool … and oh, DO NOT drop the H-Bomb on us … just balance the real and whatever the hell this other place is.
Scary, I think you were channeling my own thoughts over the past year…having come to a similar recognition that my external network relatiionships energize and vitalize my own much more than my local ones.
I just accept it, and deal with local relationships with a different set of expectations- there are many local colleagues I enjoy working with and spending time with, but it is just.. different. And it pays the bills. I just consider the local stuff the price to pay to be able to tap into the external.
Thats said, Cole’s experience above is very encouraging… it’s the time lag, the differential speed of movement that we deal with. I was championing, pleading withg people to take up blogging 3 years ago, preaching about RSS, and then moved on. Now the requests, interest for these are finally bubbling up.
Yup, bomb’s are a droppin’ so keep your helmet on.
Thanks all. No thoughts of dropping my own H-bomb. I’m just struggling to understand how/why my online and offline “worlds” are diverging. I find my online connections much more rewarding than the vast majority of my offline ones (excepting family, and my small circle of offline friends). It just feels like I’m putting all of this energy into the online stuff (and finding it so much more rewarding/engaging/challenging) than the offline stuff (the “real world” that pays the bills etc…) Maybe they can be separate things, and I should stop trying to keep them overlapped? But then I worry that I’m going to spread myself so thin that I’m not really contributing to either. Don’t think I’m making sense here. Just feeling a bit stretched and disconnected (or is that overconnected?)
I was thinking about this post this morning (best thinking happens in the shower for some reason) and realized the title I chose was absolutely perfect. What I’m going to do is try to re-internalize much of my thinking - without stopping blogging, or commenting, or anything, but changing the nature of what I post. Subtly, perhaps, but maybe if I approach this stuff from more of a publishing perspective than an online telencephalon, I might have more success reconciling the online/offline stuff…
if the touch you need isn’t suffering (family, primarily), then what’s at the core of your discomfort? it could simply be change you’re unaccustomed to. metaphysically speaking, i don’t think there are important differences between the “reality” of meatspace and virtual relationships.
Hmm, I think I would think about just measuring how many posts per week I am puttin on the blog. And i would set myself a limit of how many posts i would throw out to the world per week. That way I can stay in control. That’s what I am actually doing in my blog. Name it “the weekly micro-hiatus” or something like that.
It worked very well for me over the last two years. Burn out is not an option to even think about. Because this would mean in the worst case going on “hiatus-mode” for ever.
It’s like with all stuff (e.g. drinking too much water per day can kill you) - an overdose of anything is never good for one’s own health. And at the same time “micro-hiatus” every week improves quality, because you think twice if and what you post in the blog.
Identities are clearly mixing more and more from my point of view. So online-identities and their reputation are in a way connected to the real person, but the reputation only connects for people which are online, too.
I sometimes asked myself the question what traces would be left, if some huge magnetic storm would wipe out all the harddrives on earth. Without electricity and without all the digital content (webpages, web-applications, and so on) developed there would not remain much left. Good to know that real people and real friends would not be wiped out.
We are living in an extremely interesting time since the first home computers hit the stage. What’s still amazing about this is the speed this all develops forward.
There have been a couple of times in the past year where I’ve had that burned out feeling. Usually it happens when I’m not getting enough sleep (often due to staying up late reading blogs and posting to my own). It can get to be a self-perpetuating cycle with me, so I’ve tried to learn to spot it early and adjust before it becomes a problem.
A while ago, I actually took a complete break from blogging for a week so I could get caught up on my marking and my sleep. I also took a nearly complete break from reading most blogs, news sites and other sites I got via RSS feeds. I actually stopped using my bloglines account for a week, set up a netvibes page with 5 sites that I could not live without, and that was all the feed consumption I allowed myself for the week. When I was done, I cleared away everything that was waiting in my bloglines account without reading it, and started fresh. It worked - I was caught up on most of my marking and all my sleep after the week.
And my five blogs I couldn’t live without? Alec Couros (http://educationaltechnology.ca/couros), Dean Shareski (http://shareski.blogspot.com), Alan Levine (http://cogdogblog.com), Brian Lamb (http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian) and yours. I decided to go with an all Canadian theme - Alan, you have honourary citizenship, right?
I love my online existence. It helps me cope with my local one. Locally, only a handful of people “get it.” I’m more well-known outside of my institution than within it. Every day, I get phone calls and emails from people asking for advice about something, asking for suggestions for how to manage blogging or podcasting or screencasting. A lot of people, and most sadly, my immediate supervisors, think what I do is unimportant. What I say online is not any different from what I’m saying in meetings or to people in passing locally, but the reaction online is dramatically different. Locally, when I suggest podcasting lectures, my own CIO says, “Why would anyone do that?” Or my supervisor looks at me like I have two heads when I suggest we set up blog software for the campus.
Sure, they pretty much let me do what I want, but they don’t “really” support me in the sense that they believe that what I’m doing is making a contribution. For that kind of support, I read the blogs.
I’m not sure this is burnout I’m feeling. It’s more a troubling disconnection between what I do online vs. the “real world”.
Case in point. Online, I’m involved with podcasting. I’ve written about it. I’ve published my own. I “manage” the iPodder.org directory for education. I’ve been interviewed on national TV, in a national magazine, and local press. But, the U of C just announced a Big Podcasting Initiative where they will be doing The Most Innovative iPod-based eLearning In Canada - and the first I hear of our own podcasting initiative is by being emailed a link to the press release announcing it to the world. I wasn’t asked at all about any part of it. I had no role whatsoever in the project. My year and a half of playing with it (since back when it actually was a new thing) was completely dismissed by the “real world” that pays my bills.
It’s also not about credit. I don’t give 2 shits if they don’t give any credit - that’s not why I do this. It’s about being left out of the process, which is something that can’t happen in my online communities.
I absolutely enjoy my online connections more, and value y’all more than I can say. I just pisses me off (perhaps without justification) when the “real world” refuses to “get it”. I’ve got all kinds of energy to do stuff, but this kind of BS really sucks the wind out of my sails.
I’m not meaning to bitch and moan about it, it’s just difficult at the moment to figure out how to make these obviously disconnected areas work together. I could also just say “screw it” and spend all of my time online. But the bank would eventually get around to taking my house away…
The numpties that surround us in the real world rarely “get it”. A clue is something that has to be repeatedly bashed into their heads before they get it. Part of the joy of the online world is you *choose* to make those connections where in real life, other than obvious exceptions such as spouse, they are thrust on you and you have to make the best of a bad hand most of the time.
Don’t let the b@57@rds grind you down is the best advice I can manage. Also don’t be so sure about the whole bank taking your house away, can’t talk for the education aspect of what you do but there are opportunities in the blog/podcasting aspect!
now i see. as forward as alberta can be, remember that you’re practically on the bleeding edge of things. if it wasn’t for the specialized pockets you have access to on the net, you might feel completely alienated. keep marketing yourself and don’t be afraid to toot your horn a bit. make sure your localspace is aware of you if you think their recognition or awareness is important.
d - it’s totally not about recognition. it’s about essentially not existing in the “real world” for whatever reason, vs. whatever I do online. dunno - maybe this is more a gripe with dysfunctional instutions than with online/offline dichotomies…
Hi Darcy, me too. But this year (this time in a new job) I’m making a very big effort to interact locally. I’m offering sh!t loads of workshops. 1 workshop for each thing… egroups one day, blogging the next, wikis etc etc. I’m hoping that I will build a critical mass locally, that will eventually discover me online, then the two converge local, international…
What interested me ost about your post however is the “what motivates me?” question. Why are the rewards online so rewarding, especially when they pitch us into local battles that can be very harmful.
I think the point about our online networks being more valuable than our locally closed ones is important. But I don’t think the support of the online network, in times of desperate need (such as losing your job for blogging) in any way measures up to the support that is needed…
What is it that motivates us to be open and spread out?