Month: September 2008

Afternoon Solutions, Part Four

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Notes from Table IV

What happens when we are unaware that a miscommunication has occurred? What are the consequences?  How can academia prepare students for the business world?

How can we make ourselves aware of our own blind spots?

Effective communication is co-communication-which is to say-a collaborative process. To that end, it is a possible solution to suggest that goals and assumptions be mutually determined at the start of an interaction.

In classes there can be a kind of short-stakes writing solution in which some time could be set aside for a team or group to get their thoughts goals and assumptions on paper.

There is a very large amount of collaboration that goes into teamwork and teamwork seems to be the foundation of business and academic work. i.e. committees, group projects, brainstorming sessions, design teams, etc…

Even Web Meeting and Wikipedia have real collaborative potential.

There is value in using writing and collaborative technologies as tools for the kind of self-awareness that can help diffuse miscommunication.

Writing is a primary solution, but might be difficult to encourage in the business world. Still, there are a few examples of ways in which one can introduce writing into business meetings (flip charts, lists of goals, etc) and several group members found that the business group saw its value in decision-making and even troubleshooting (identifying unforeseen conflicts and potential miscommunications).

**Ultimately, we believe emphasizing collaboration is an excellent approach to nurture effective communication (i.e. avoiding miscommunication). We also identified several tools to facilitate collaboration, for example, OSCA/Blackboard, WordPress, WebMeeting etc.**

Afternoon Solutions, Part Three

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Notes from Table III’s Afternoon Discussion

The question we will try to answer: Can we teach people to be good listeners?

How can we bring a greater awareness of listening? How do we listen intelligently? When you listen, you open yourself up to connection.

An important point is to give the opportunity of finding pleasure in listening.There is no right way to make students listen better; there are just too many variables.

•    The role of Emotion in communication
•    The sense of community and or identity in communication
•    The simple ability to understand
•    Bootstrap Learning Left Brain and Right Brain

As we become good listeners, we immerse ourselves in potentially difficult situations. We are immersing ourselves in the flood of information such as the Internet; the issues of filtering information.

You need a network of trusted people (community)

You need a number of communities and people depending on the needs to filter or to understand.

Can we educate the gut?

Continue reading “Afternoon Solutions, Part Three” →

Afternoon Solutions, Part Two

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Notes from Table II

Which of the world’s communication ills will we cure?

Writing by committee?

What can we do to facilitate the process of writing in groups or writing by committee?
Empathize with the target audiences?

There is a “Tyranny of the writer” in collaborative writing: use of ‘master’ doc that then is passed around to be edited→ the result is tinkering at the edges. The final outcome then falls on arbitrary responsibilities and the thinking process is short-changed.

Two Rules: Getting to the starting point and the core: what are we trying to accomplish in our communication?

There are similar examples working such as writing with a public safety committee and collaboratively writing service manuals for technicians, or a collaborative report from an online course.

There is the importance of facilitating people through the landscape:
• Seeing landscape, topics, audience
• Thinking in human terms of relating material to audience
• Brainstorming details for each topic
• Final stage = sequencing, this is often where logical problems arise

Continue reading “Afternoon Solutions, Part Two” →