Organizing Dialogue, Experience and Knowledge for Complex Problem-Solving

Latest: Practice How You’ll Play: Lessons from the Era of Neil Armstrong

by • August 26th, 2012

Dad watched the time as we drove some winding high mountain highway in the Colorado Rockies. He had purchased a black-and-white television that could be powered from the cigarette lighter to bring along just for this trip. As the target time approached, he pulled onto the shoulder, and sent my brother and I to wag […]

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Latest: Practice How You’ll Play: Lessons from the Era of Neil Armstrong

by • August 26th, 2012

Dad watched the time as we drove some winding high mountain highway in the Colorado Rockies. He had purchased a black-and-white television that could be powered from the cigarette lighter to bring along just for this trip. As the target time approached, he pulled onto the shoulder, and sent my brother and I to wag down passers-by and invite them to watch the moon walk with us.

Or maybe it was the moon launch. I don’t remember clearly. The picture was grainy, only a few cars drove by and none of the drivers thought it was important to stop. (I can’t recall if there were any passengers; I don’t recall any consultations.) I think we weirded them out. I know that I felt a little embarrassed, what were we doing, this strange behavior out of the norm of everything I’d ever seen?

I was six years old, just trying to grasp what was happening and why it mattered so much.

How did they get the camera there?! That required foresight, pre-planning and imagination: visionary (imagining things in the category of “we don’t know what we don’t know”) and apocalyptic (“things could go bad”). I feel a sense of nostalgia for that kind of epic

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Latest: sharp curves and time-out-of-time (TOOT!)

by • August 14th, 2012

Sometimes, sharp conversational curves feel like precipitous cliffs. There is what I do, sometimes, which is to say something spontaneously about something that is going on within the context of a group that is within the realm of things most people have been trained not to say. This is more than a sharp curve, and it calls upon whoever is involved to exercise a deeper level of social resilience. Mental agility has to be combined with emotional savvy, too.

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Latest: A Deaf CERT to Serve DC

by • June 29th, 2012

In two weeks, a training for Deaf individuals to create or join a Community Emergency Response Team will occur at Gallaudet University in the District of Colombia. There are still some slots available for deaf and hard-of-hearing people associated with Gallaudet or in the larger DC Deaf community. Sign-up now through the Preparedness for All webblog: Gallaudet Hosts CERT training.

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Latest: Communication Theory about Simultaneous Interpretation (New Online Course)

by • June 10th, 2012

Stephanie Jo Kent, Certified Interpreter, Master of Education, is the founder and director of the Learning Lab for Resiliency.

This introductory level course in communication theory is specially designed for professional simultaneous interpreters and those who use interpreting services. The main goal of this pilot course is to open a conversation among interpreters and users of interpreting services about simultaneous interpretation involving any language combinations. The course will be conducted primarily in English, with captioning of American Sign Language as needed and automated translation when useful.

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Latest: Deep Economy: Leveraging Emergencies

by • April 15th, 2012

Emergency Response Training for Community Volunteers in the District of Colombia

This blog entry is a report in the style of ethnographic action research. It is ethnographic in the sense that it presents a descriptive and non-evaluative account of observed human interaction. It is action research in the sense that it singles out particular features of the observed human interaction as having high potential for enhancing […]

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Latest: The time-structure of hope

by • March 12th, 2012

This quote summarizes my critique of the traditional/professional model of (conference) simultaneous interpretation, and illustrates why community-based simultaneous interpretation is a crucial resource for social resilience.
“Computer games use the binary pattern: wrong or right, stop or go. Folktales use the triad pattern: the third try, the beginning of plurality. The third attempt is the moment […]

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Latest: Emergency Warning and Community Response: The Edge of Technology and Culture

by • January 27th, 2012

First Responders do reach out to the Deaf community

It was a tiny pop quiz in the midst of a comprehensive examination.
During last November’s nationwide test of FEMA’s public warning system, an action research study (#DEMX) was conducted to assess the communication potential of social media. The goal was to find a way to bridge the longstanding divide between “people of the eye” who […]

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Latest: Can Twitter help build programs not prisons?

by • November 27th, 2011

"No one gets rich on their own."

Kalle Lasn, one of the creators of the Occupy Wall Street meme (and founder of the Canadian magazine, Adbusters) has described the police raid to clear Zuccotti Park as “the latest in a series of crisis-driven opportunities.” In his interview with Mattathias Schwartz, Lasn asserts, “World wars, revolutions—from time to time, big things actually happen . . . When the moment is right, all it takes is a spark.” Lasn is calling the evictions the end of Phase I and is now calling for Phase II… What if the focus group dimension of Twitter described by Adam Green could be extended as a platform for aggregating collective intelligence? #KeepSpreadingTheMeme

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Latest: Emergency Communication and the Deaf

by • November 9th, 2011

Does the Deaf Community need sign language interpretation for emergencies?

“In all of the years of researching and taking courses / training in crisis communications – one group has not been mentioned as much as others.  This audience group is the deaf community.  How do we go about in making sure that this audience group gets the same information about an […]

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