Narration and Narrative Form

8094090513_c2b1736d7e_o I received a Twitter alert overnight from Darrell Cobner (@CPAUWIC) https://twitter.com/CPAUWIC/status/381782446309916672 Darrell and I have been exchanging ideas about performance analysis as story telling and story sharing. (I posted some thoughts about this last week in What Counts?) I was interested to learn that Darrell was sharing some Harold Jarche insights from What’s Working and What’s Not Working in Online Training. Harold points out that “Today, content capture and creation tools let people tell their own stories and weave these together to share in their networks. It’s called ‘narrating your work'”. He adds that:

The public narration of what we do, attempt and learn on a daily basis not only helps us help others, but also puts us in a position to get help from peers. When your co-workers know what you’re working on and what problems you run into, they can offer their experience.

I liked the way Harold explained the flow of sharing through stories and his encouragement of collaboration. I try to monitor opportunities for online collaboration and cooperation. Darrell and Harold set me off thinking about narration and narrative form (I revisited some of the fifty-four posts on Clyde Street with a narrative tag). Back in 1988 Donald Polkinghorne produced the delightful book Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. In his preface to the book he observes that “practitioners work with narrative knowledge. They are concerned with people’s stories…” In Chapter Two he notes that “Narrative is the fundamental scheme for linking individual human actions and events into interrelated aspects of an understandable composite.” I think we have remarkable opportunities to develop a digital “understandable composite”. Our sense of the aesthetic enables each of us to share a narration in a narrative form. I wondered if in response to Darrell, I might nominate seven tools to support the public sharing that Harold identifies as an important component of a community of practice.

I think each one of these tools has enormous potential for the narration discussed by Darrell and Harold. The choice is personal and enables each of us to have our narrative form.

Hi<
As I was compiling the list I was think how our narration might be acknowledged by our communities of practice. In addition to the collaboration Harold identifies as important in these communities, I started to think about how a tool like Accredible might make this narration even more transparent by finding a way of peer valuing of experience.

Photo Credit

Henry Cabot Lodge speaking (Boston Public Library, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

1 COMMENT

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here