First Margaret Riel and Paul Sparks at Pepperdine: http://mindmaps.wikispaces.com/c-12+Action+Research

Second is Kathy Millhauser at City University of Seattle: http://technologyforcommunities.com/2010/05/digital-habitats-for-project-teams/

Would love to see what you do with these ideas.

Appreciate the comment. Sounds like we’re looking at this in exactly the same way (which is certainly comforting for me).

I picked up Digital Habitats to evaluate as a textbook for a graduate course I teach at Northwestern; so I primarily had my teaching hat on when reading the chapter on orientations. I think your comparison to “knowing something about a sample” is spot-on. The course I teach is an something of an introduction to KM for non-KM business/nonprofit professionals, but we end up spending most of our time talking about observing and assessing; what’s going on here? We know we’ve been effective in using models or frameworks as aids in observing when the grad students come back to class and say, “you know, I just noticed something in my organization this week after our discussion in class…” and they go on to describe how they’ve fine-tuned their observation skills.

So I can definitely see real potential in using the orientations as a way to observe more effectively — and frankly, be very explicit about that objective. “Putting them to work,” as you suggest, might very well be an outcome of introducing them in the course. We often inspire new projects with organizational partners based on the concepts and ideas we first introduce in class.

Same goes for work I do as a practitioner. Certainly has me thinking.

Your praise of the orientations scheme in our book is very pleasing. Especially the part about ““what we are seeing” — in the sense of ethnographic observation….“.

Could you say more about that? I think it’s a very important point but to do us any good we need to really put these orientations to work. We need to talk about what we can see or how we can observe more systematically WITH them than without them.

I remember many years ago reading something John W. Tukey wrote about how as a chemist you needed to know something about a sample before you began to analyze it (e.g., whether it was a blood sample or not). He was saying that the same applies to data analysis: is a batch of data a time series or collected in some other way. I remember being quite discouraged by that statement. Thirty years later it seems very wise. If the community orientations we talk about in Digital Habitats help us observe more effectively or mis-perceive less frequently, they will have served their purpose.

But we need to put them to work to verify whether they help us focus or whether they hide important features of community life.