Joyful Jubilant Learning

A Love Affair with Books 2007 Coming up next!

When I look back, I am so impressed again
with the life-giving power of literature.
If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of
myself in the world, I would do that again by reading,
just as I did when I was young.
~ Maya Angelou ~

Join us all through the month of March, and as Maya Angelou suggests, learn to be young again!

However, the part of her quote which most resonates with me when I consider the history of how Joyful Jubilant Learning came to be in the first place, is this gaining a sense of ourselves in a world that is not the world it was when we were young.

In the post right before this one, Steve Sherlock has shared with us a view of how much the world has changed, and of the new challenge - or opportunity - we have to be “in the know.” Thankfully, I do not see that books will be replaced in our hearts, minds, and souls any time soon;

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen,
is that you can take it to bed with you.
~ Daniel J. Boorstin ~ I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
~ Jorge Luis Borges ~

In referring to the Maya Angelou quote, I mention the history of Joyful Jubilant Learning because it was in the transformational conversation supporting another forum that this blog, and this very dynamic learning community came to be in the first place. It is with that memory, and that marvelously sweet sense of anticipation, that I have been counting the days to tomorrow when our very first JJL Love Affair with Books begins.

I invite and encourage you to support our reviewers, add your comments to our conversation, and experience for yourself another part of our community history here as it happens. Seize your opportunity to “gain a sense” of yourself, and the capacity you still have, in this world of our JJL community. Comment and Connect.

And yes, this is a two-fer, for our Love Affair is still very much about the books! Look to the left column for the books being featured, and then click here for the list of reviewers and review dates. You can still coach our budding reviewers with some suggestions in the comments here: What do you look for in a book review? I am sure they will appreciate your suggestions!

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision
and strengthens our most fatal tendency--
the belief that the here and now is all there is.
~ Allan Bloom  ~

Find more wonderful quotes on reading books here.

If you have not yet done so, pick up your RSS Feed here, or go to the top right corner of the blog to subscribe for emails.

Click here for the index of books being reviewed.

Reviewers: All your Guest Author invitations have been sent out! Please check your email spam filters if you have not yet seen it, or contact me via our community mailbox to resend to you.

/UPDATE/ Tim Milburn has created a small banner for each author to use (optionally!) in promoting his or her involvement and contribution to the 2007 Love Affair With Books. Simply right click on the image to save it. It is suitable to include on the sidebar of one's home blog and create a link back to JJL, specifically, to one's book review for this month.

Our hope is that this will be another way for you to continue the conversation and linklove between you and Joyful Jubilant Learning.

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Rosa Say is one of the founders of Joyful Jubilant Learning, and the author of Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii’s Universal values to the Art of Business. One of the values in her book is Ho‘okipa, the Hawaiian value of hospitality, and thus, she has chosen Danny Meyer’s new book Setting the Table, The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business for the review she will contribute to our Love Affair with Books: her review will be posted here on March 2nd.

BeyondBroadcasting 2007 - My Recap

  BeyondBroadcasting Mosaic 
  Originally uploaded by shersteve.

This is a mosaic of images taken during the Beyond Broadcasting conference held at MIT on Saturday 2/24/07.

Quite enlightening. Not as much "action" as in PodCamp due to the nature of the topics and discussions, the answers are not yet available.

What do I mean by that? Briefly, broadcast media is dying. Newspapers are dying. The current concepts of mass market advertising are dying a slow death. How do we become media literate? How do we remain so? How do we prepare our children to be media literate?

These are exciting times to live in. We (literally, this JJL group) are on the edge. Pushing the envelop. Striving to understand what it will take to succeed in this brave new world of social media.

What makes it so hard, I think, is we are simultaneously trying to do two things at once. One, we are attempting to figure out what it means to be democratic, respectful, engaged participants in this new social media world.  Two, we are trying to draw the map so others can come along and joins us. Each of these tasks are significant in and of themselves. But we are doing both at once. Hence the challenge to make sense of the gray areas, the unanswered questions, the uncharted waters. To be patient. To be prepared. To be life long learners.

What make this all so exciting for me is that WE (JJL) are together in this going forward. We are not alone. There are many others attempting the same thing. It will be a fun ride!

Steve Sherlock is your collaboration teammate who believes commencement begins everyday.

Updated: This is one post collecting of all my writing on the conference. It also includes information on how to tap into what other conference attendees are writing about if you want to learn more about the discussions at the conference.

Rapid Fire Learning | February 2007

February is a short month, but it's been chock full of learning for me.  How about you?

Here are five things I learned this month:

1. You can get free online access to SAGE journals until the end of the month! I have used SAGE products for years and the journal articles include a wide range of topics. Hurry; only 5 days left.

 

2. Everyone looks for a little something different in a book review. However, one universal truth is that you have to act fast if you want to be a featured reviewer during A JJL Love Affair with Books coming throughout March.

 

3. Relationship Bloggers will soon have their own conference and networking event, SOBCon07. Chicago is the place - May  11-12 are the dates - for interactive presentations on publishing, design and branding, tools, analytics, social networking, marketing, coaching and all forms of relationship geekery.

 

4. bubbl.us offers a useful, free mind-mapping tool that can quickly become addictive. I have only used it for personal brainstorming so far, and I look forward to using it for collaboration. [Shout out to Steve for the tip.]

 

5. A single person, a small group, even an online learning community, can initiate actions that ripple through their environment. I've learned this before, but reminders of the big impact of small actions were everywhere this month. The gift of a single red rose; scraping ice from a stranger's windshield; reaching out to a friend who was traveling during the year-end holidays; leaving a comment for the first time on a favorite blog.

Rosa started Rapid Fire Learning last month and you can expect it continue at JJL into the future.

Please share your own RFL in comments below, or post about 5 things you learned this February on your blog (and remember to trackback to this post!).

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Blaine Collins is the author of the Stronger Teams Blog, a place to explore useful ideas and strategies for improving teamwork, collaboration and team leadership in professional organizations. Blaine will contribute to JJL Love Affair with Books by reviewing Marcus Buckingham's newest book, Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance on March 31.

3 Spots Left; Make one yours!

What book are you reading right now?

Does it deserve to be shared with the rest of the Joyful Jubilant Learning community by merit of the learning joy it is giving you?

Please consider doing so!

We have 3 spots left for book reviewers in the March line-up of our JJL Love Affair with Books: March 23, March 24, and March 30. If you’d like to sign up for one of them, claim your book!

As Greg says here, “step into the ether of the moment.”

“I wonder if we have lost sight of the fact that the process of 'learning' often brings us into a face to face confrontation with our issues and challenges.

When that happens we have two choices, step into the ether of the moment or turn away.

Unfortunately, when we turn away from an issue we might not realize - sometimes we are also turning away from our future and our future potential.”

—Greg Balanko-Dickson, in this JJL conversation.

If this is the first you are hearing of the JJL Love Affair with Books;

1. Read the history of our forum here.
2. Read what some community members look for in book reviews.
3. And then sign up for one of those three spots here!

If you build a strong network, its effects will ripple

Penelope Trunk offers 4 New Ideas for Becoming More Effective at Work.

The second idea is particularly relevant for JJ Learners, who exemplify the opposite of "sloppy networking":

Sloppy networking leads to sloppy results. The founders of the professional networking site LinkedIn tell people in no uncertain terms that building a network has to be about people you know well. Yet every day thousands of LinkedIn users invite near-strangers into their network.

Newsflash: People you don’t know cannot vouch for you. People you have not connected with in an authentic way will not be move to help you when you need it. It doesn’t matter how full your LinkedIn account is, or how heavy your Rolodex is, if you haven’t really connected with these people, it’s not a network.

The opposite is true as well. If you build a strong network, its effects will ripple. Josh Boltuch, Elliott Breece and Elias Roman spent their last semester at Brown University launching Amie Street, a new model for selling music online. They had no marketing budget to get the word out, but they did have their network.

“We sent a few hundred emails to friends and family.” The crux of the marketing pitch? “We told everyone that a requirement for being our friend is to sign up for our site.” A few weeks later, without saying anything to the founders, someone told Mike Arrington about Amie Street.

Arrington has one of the strongest networks in startup America. Getting your startup on his blog TechCrunch is like getting your book on Oprah. And there was Amie Street, right there on Mike’s blog one day.

The next day, Amie Street had thousands of registered users.
What can we learn from this? That solid networks make solid results.
The Amie Street founders had a network that cared deeply for them – their friends and family. Mike Arrington’s network is truly dedicated to helping him find the best new startups. Amie Street is a success today because it started with a truly meaningful network.

JJ Learners practice the art of authentic networking through several activities, including:

• posting and commenting on JJL,
• reading and supporting each other's blogs,
• participating in learning forums such as A Love Affair with Books, and
• attending  face-to-face events such SOBCon07.

 

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Blaine Collins is the author of the Stronger Teams Blog, a place to explore useful ideas and strategies for improving teamwork, collaboration and team leadership in professional organizations. Blaine will contribute to JJL Love Affair with Books by reviewing Marcus Buckingham's newest book, Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance on March 31.

Wiki Cookbook Exercise

Continuing to explore wiki and its uses, I find this interesting exercise to get comfortable using a wiki.

Thanks to Beth Kanter at Beth's blog for highlighting this.

In-Person Learning: An Invitation to SOBCon07

If we have learned much through the sharing of facts, ideas, thoughts and feelings on JJL and other blogs (and I would answer that myself with a resounding "yes!"), imagine the learning that would take place if all the bloggers actually got together face-to-face.

I, along with several other bloggers, had dreamed of this for many months, and a few weeks back we decided to make it a reality.   

So, it gives me great pleasure to announce to the JJL community  "SOBCon07 - Taking Your Blogging To The Next Level"

This exciting event will take place on May 11 and 12, 2007, at the Chicago O'Hare Sofitel Hotel.  It is designed specifically for relationship bloggers like ourselves who want to take our blogging and our learning to the next level. Here is a list of the events and speakers:

Community, Friday, May 11, 2007, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM

• Christine Kane, popular guitarist, singer, blogger LIVE
• Open Mic Night Cocktail Party – Live community event (multiple microphones) Take the conversation out of the comment box!

Speakers, Saturday, May 12, 2007, 8:00 AM – 4:30 PM

• Phil Gerbyshak, Make It Great! Relationship Geek
• Liz Strauss, Successful-Blog SOB and BAD Blogger
• David Armano, Logic+Emotion
• Terry Starbucker, Ramblings from a Glass Half Full ; Rodney Rumford, PodBlaze; Ben Yoskovitz, Instigator Blog 
• Mike Sansone, Converstations & Iowa Marketing Bloggers
• Chris Cree, Success CREEations; Scott Rafer, MyBlogLog; Janice Myint Technorati
• Wendy Piersall, eMomsAtHome

There will be interactive presentations on publishing, design and branding, tools, analytics, social networking, marketing, and coaching -- all from the perspectives of the relationship blogger and the audience.

Only 250 attendees will be accepted, and we hope YOU can be one of them.

Come learn with us in Chicago - visit our registration site for more details. I look forward to seeing you!

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Terry Starbucker is an operations executive for a service company who lives in Connecticut, loves business trips to the Rocky Mountain west,  and posts his musings and observations about "the optimistic side of the daily grind" in Ramblings from a Glass Half Full.

Sharing a common language/vocabulary is essential for learning

Recent reading has me thinking about how important a common language is for collaborative learning. By "common language" I mean a shared vocabulary and consistency of terminology (not English, Spanish, etc.) As I see it, much collaborative learning derives from individuals absorbing and building upon the thoughts, ideas, arguments and lessons of others. Common language is essential to this endeavor, lest we find ourselves talking past one another.

In Now Discover Your Strengths,  Marcus Buckingham devotes an early chapter to describing "themes," which he then builds upon through the rest of the book. Buckingham explains that establishing a common language around the relatively new concept of the strengths movement is an essential first step.

The third revolutionary tool is a common language to describe your talents. We need a new language to help explain the strengths we see in ourselves and others. This language must be precise; it must be able to describe the subtle ways in which one person differs from another. It must be positive; it must help us explain strength, not frailty. And it must be common; it must be a language in which we are all fluent so that not matter who we are or where we are from, we all know exactly what is meant...

By precisely defining his terminology, Buckingham ensures the reader has a reasonable chance of understanding the nuance of the message that follows. Beyond the book, the author provides a starting point for future communication with readers who may submit questions or comments, audiences at speaking engagements and the media.

The flatter the world becomes, the wider the potential circle becomes of those with whom we may communicate and collaborate, which in turn, increases the need for common vocabulary.

Unfortunately, there are many examples of language used so imprecisely that it obscures rather than enlightens the subject. We often recognized murky language as soon as we use it, as Peter Rip does here: 

I was stretched with my partners.  We were thrashing.  We knew we had something Big, but somehow it was the Business We Dare Not Name. Technology, Platform, Application, Solution -- these are all gobblegook businesspeak that don't define anything concrete.

Peter was quick to point out that his efforts were lacking definition, yet such businesspeak is fairly common in daily conversation. I believe that people react to vague language in a couple of ways, neither of which spurs understanding or learning. First, we may think that we (the listener) are ignorant, either not knowing anything about the subject or too dense to comprehend it. Second, often more accurately, we may think the speaker either cannot communicate well or does not have anything meaningful to say.

In either case, a better solution is to strive to use concrete language that is commonly understood by the audience, whether employees, teammates, clients or the general public.  When collaboration is essential, take the time to define terms - establish a common language.

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Blaine Collins is the author of the Stronger Teams Blog, a place to explore useful ideas and strategies for improving teamwork, collaboration and team leadership in professional organizations. Blaine will contribute to JJL Love Affair with Books by reviewing Marcus Buckingham's newest book, Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance on March 31.

Reasons to read

From Charlene Li's blog: How I use Google Docs & Spreadsheets

It struck me today that I'm a frequent user of Google Docs & Spreadsheets and I've encountered enough skepticism about the products that I thought I'd post on how this product has impacted my work and personal life.

If you're like me, you often find yourself emailing around Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Yes, we have Sharepoint in the office which is supposed to keep us from doing this, but what about those circumstances when you have to share documents outside of the organization? So here are a few examples of how I've used Google Docs & Spreadsheets (note that for privacy and confidentiality reason, I'm not at liberty to share most of them)

Read the full posting by Charlene for all the details she does share.

A Guide to Writing Well

On Lifehack.org, Kyle Pott points us to a wonderful writer’s resource put together by Joshua Sowin of Fire & Knowledge. Introducing his resource, Sowin explains,

“This guide was mainly distilled from On Writing Well by William Zinsser and The Elements of Style by Strunk and White … My memory being stubborn and lazy, I compiled this so I could easily refresh myself on writing well.”

A Guide for Writing Well, at Fire & Knowledge

Well, there is nothing lazy about what Joshua Sowin has done for us with his compilation; this is a must for your del.icio.us tagging with writing how-to. As Kyle put it,

The article traverses industries, so whether you’re a novelist or a business analyst, there is some quality information to be gained from the article. The content is very detailed and provides many tips to help you improve your writing.

Kyle’s commentary on Lifehack.org

A bonus: When you click through Sowin’s presentation, you will also be experiencing great use of the blogging platform in his skilled application and use of it. Be sure to navigate back to the home page of Fire & Knowledge to see how he has set this up as one of his “Latest Essays” and to look at the overall layout and his skillful use of quotes as epigraphs to his essays.

Back to his A Guide for Writing Well, this section could be used as daily affirmative reading every morning by every blogger: How do I get better at writing?

August 2007 Update: Joanna Young has written a new article for JJL that brings this discussion back to mind, called, Unlearn the rules to write with confidence.

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Post Author; Rosa Say of Managing with Aloha Coaching.

I love to write, and I would dearly love to do it more, adding hours to my days for the practice I know I need in better learning both the skill and art of it. With writing, more practice is divine, and not work at all.