Guest Blog: What the Hell is A Johari Window, and other Questions. featuring Lawrie Phipps and a little bit of Dave White.

Lawrie was on holiday when I posted this.  He got
up to donut-eating and other mischief.

This post began with Lawrie Phipps’ curiosity about an instrument called the Johari window.  It’s still mostly Lawrie’s words, with some of my (Donna’s) thoughts, and a bit here and there that is either an argument with or an agreement to something that Dave White said.

Fundamentally, we are wondering about the utility of the Johari window, and about how it might  be used to reflect and elicit feedback for individuals who see their practice as being more ‘resident’ as originally defined in the First Monday paper by Dave White and Alison Le Cornu, and more recently in the Visitors and Residents Info Kit at Jisc InfoNet.  

Readers may recall that I do go on a bit about the Visitors and Residents project.  I agree with Lawrie that the V&R model is increasingly considered a useful way of thinking about how we behave online. Recall that in its simplest form it posits that there is a continuum of users online exhibiting behaviours ranging from ‘visitor’ to ‘resident’.

I quote below from our InfoKit:

Visitors:  “When in Visitor mode, individuals decide on the task they wish to undertake. For example, discovering a particular piece of information online, completing the task and then going offline or moving on to another task...In Visitor mode individuals do not leave any social trace online.”  

Residents: “When in Resident mode the individual is going online to connect to, or to be with, other people. This mode is about social presence...Resident behaviour has a certain degree of social visibility: for example, posting to the wall in Facebook, tweeting, blogging, or posting comments on blogs. This type of online behaviour leaves a persistent social trace which could be within a closed group such as a cohort of students in a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)/Learning Management System (LMS) or on the open web.”

In Academia there are various forms of currency and value associated with practice, including publishing in peer reviewed journals, being invited to give keynotes, and a variety of metrics including those of research assessment frameworks and public engagement.  These more traditional practices are now accompanied by less well-established modes of scholarly communication and networking, via digital tools, practices, and places such as blogging and Twitter.  There is manifest  tension between the struggle to establish one’s scholarly bona-fides in traditional ways, and taking advantages of the benefits of new modes of credibility, many of which are expressed via the web, and are not universally recognized as either scholarly or valuable.  (Dave talks about shifting notions of credibility and academic currencies in the short film here.)

An emerging theme around discussions of value is the role of “presence,” especially in an academy which is being played out increasingly on a digital backdrop. Many individuals in education have changed the nature of their relationship with their host institutions or departments through stronger (and sometimes aggressive) online presences, and many others are seeking to develop in this area (Phipps, 2013). As an individual’s online catalogue of artefacts grows, such as blog posts, images and tweets, so does their network of readers, followers and where appropriate collaborators. As a direct result of their online presence the nature of building and maintaining relationships changes. In a post-digital academy, where presence may be seen as having value, understanding how an online persona is perceived is important, especially if one considers that opinions and judgments will be formed often with no direct interaction with the owner of the presence.

One method for exploring and mapping forms of presence is the Johari window.  This technique was developed by Luft and Ingham (1955) and is used to help individuals understand their relationship with self and others.

The window use four sections, shown below and in the original model it also used 57 adjectives that were used by an individual to describe themselves and by others to describe the individual.  

	Known to self	Not known to self	Adjectives used in the original model
Known to others	Open	Blind Spot	able ambivert accepting adaptable bold calm caring cheerful clever congenial complex confident dependable dignified energetic Extrovert friendly	giving happy helpful idealistic independent ingenious intelligent introvert kind knowledgeable logical loving mature modest nervous observant	optimistic organized patient powerful proud aggressive reflective relaxed religious responsive searching self-assertive self-conscious sensible sentimental shy	silly smart spontaneous sympathetic tense trustworthy warm wise
Not known to Others	Hidden	Unknown

Users of the window choose 7 or 8 of the adjectives to describe themselves. Colleagues or friends then also choose 7 or 8 to describe the user. The mapping and duplication will dictate the open, hidden and blind spot window size.  Therefore, terms that individuals come up with for themselves that are also chosen by colleagues would go in the “Open” section, which is for that area that is known to yourself and is known others. This includes behaviours, knowledge, skills, public history etc.  Terms selected by colleagues or friends but not by one’s self would go into the ‘Blind Spot’ section is that area that is known to others but not oneself. This might include very simple things, but may often bring deeper issues to the surface.  Terms picked only by the individual, but not by colleagues/friends go into the ‘Hidden’ section is that area which is known only to you.

The unknown area is that area that is neither know to yourself, or others. It may also be thought of as the area with potential.  It is left blank, to inspire discussion, encourage reflection.

The Johari window has uses in both individual development and team development.  In these contexts, many see the objective as being to enlarge the Open area.  The assumption here is that having a larger Open area means that  people know more about you, and you are self-aware, and that openness should make collaborating and effective team work easier.   This valorization of Openness asserts that teamwork requires self-disclosure, and personal give-and-take.  The more one shares about one’s self, the more the Hidden area shrinks.  In theory, more feedback can also decrease the Blind Spots.  The Johari window model posits that people with many characteristics listed in the Open area are easy to talk to, communicate effectively and may be good in group dynamics. The opposite would therefore be true of those with smaller windows.

So perhaps individuals who consider themselves at the residency end of the continuum may wish to use a process based on the Johari window as a reflective tool to understand how they are perceived by peers, how they are situated within the communities they value and areas they may wish to exploit. In a workshop context, they might also come up with additional adjectives relevant to online interactions, if they find the original list doesn't capture what they need to communicate.

I would additionally note, this model assumes benefits of openness which might bear some disentangling.  Anyone who is familiar with my Twitter presence and the content of my blog here knows that I agree with the positives around open practice on the web, but not everyone does, and there are disciplinary and individual difference of opinion about the utility and risks involved in resident-style online communication.  I have blogged before about the utility of mapping as a way of reflecting on practice. In a workshop context, people mapping their online practices with the help of a Johari window exercise could generate a potentially useful conversation about how people perceive the pros and cons of open practice on the web. Examining their personal practices via Johari mapping (and also via V&R mapping) can begin to reveal fears and ambitions individuals might have around non-traditional, web-based, resident modes of scholarly production.

References that are not online resources:

Luft, J.; Ingham, H. (1955). "The Johari window, a graphic model of interpersonal awareness". Proceedings of the western training laboratory in group development

Phipps, L,. (2013) Individual as Institution. Educational Developments 14:2

Webinars, Graduate Students, Visitors and Residents

So the Visitors and Residents research team (myself, Dave White, and Lynn S. Connaway) conducted a Jisc/OCLC webinar (with the generous and effective chairing of Lorcan Dempsey) yesterday.  The purpose was to introduce people to our InfoKit, and also to have a chance to talk a bit more about research results and practical implications for transforming HE (and other) approaches to digital tools and places.

In my part of the webinar I focused on graduate students, and the story that I think is emerging from our data about the potential impact that digital places and communities can have on the relative isolation of graduate students from their peers.  I'm reproducing part of what I said here, and a link to the webinar and full powerpoint are available here. (scroll to the bottom, thanks to the capable skills of our colleagues at Netskills for making this available).  I Storified the session here.  The GoogleDoc with links to project outputs, etc. is here. 

I started off talking about sources and authority, actually, going over some of the findings that we cover in the People Trust People , Convenient Doesn't Always Mean Simple, and Assessing Non-Traditional Sources part of the InfoKit.  These pieces are important background to thinking about the experience of graduate students, because they are at a moment of transition, from being those who are expected to learn about authoritative sources and use them effectively, to those who are expected to become and produce authoritative sources of information themselves, as practitioners in their fields.  

This transition used to take place almost entirely in physical places, in seminar rooms, laboratories, academic libraries, and at face-to-face conferences.  But the Internet is a now a place where things happen, things that used to only happen face to face.  A holistic picture of academic behavior, of information seeking behavior, therefore has to include these digital places, and should pay attention to resident practices as we define them in the Visitors and Residents project.

People use social media tools and spaces like Twitter and Facebook to connect.  This is not a surprising or new thing, but needs to be kept in mind, as it's a phenomenon that is certainly not going away.  We also need to collectively keep in mind that just because these digital places exist, not everyone is excited by Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.  Awareness of these social media environments and the communities within them is not dependent on a generational identity, but is about personal preferences and individual motivations to engage.  We cannot, should not assume monolithic attitudes towards these places and tools. Digital places like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter are not easily classed as only “entertainment” or “academic” in character or purpose, because of the wide range of activities that now occur in those spaces.  Knowing that someone goes to YouTube doesn’t tell you why they are there, or what they might do, or who they might seek out there.

So these graphs are interesting to me, because they seem to point to an opportunity to help graduate students.

I’ve put a red oval around the post-graduate/ grad student category, that we call Embedding.

Notice here the purple line for face to face contact, and notice in particular how low (comparatively) the mentions of face to face contact are for  grad students.  They are texting with people, making phone calls, and in particular emailing far more than engaging face to face.

Notice here who graduate students are in most contact with-professors, then peers.  For Professors, it’s the reverse order—they are in touch with peers and then with experts, mentors, and librarians at similarly low rates. Think about future of graduate students, of them as future (and current) practitioners in their fields.  Contact with professors makes sense, of course, but contact with peers seems crucial.  How else are they going to build their community, find their voice, engage in the back and forth of scholarly communication with their fellow practitioners?

The Blue line is FB, red is Twitter, purple line is Academic Libraries (physical spaces).  Graduate students narrow contact that they have with people, and are also physically isolated, working in the library, offices or labs.  I see this in the other ethnographic work that I do as well, the maps that graduate students, particularly in the sciences, produce of their learning landscapes are restricted to one or two places, in sharp contrast to the wide-ranging maps of undergraduates and professors.

But when we look at the places they do go, in addition to being present in academic libraries' physical spaces (we see a radical difference in the role of academic library spaces in our interviews with graduate students, compared to other educational stages), graduate students are present in significant rates on Facebook, and Twitter. 

We need to think about implications of online resident practices for grad students.   Their social media presence might be an opportunity for them to facilitate contact in the isolating environment of graduate school .  This is something we need to look at further—what is happening as they transition from student to practitioner in their field?  How are their experiences in physical spaces like libraries related to the academic work they do in digital places like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, etc.?  Where are they resident, where are they visitors?  If resident practices are those that facilitate the finding of voice, and the production of scholarship (in a variety of modes), what can it look like in grad school?

The Cartography of Learning

So, I've been thinking about mapping, not just because I have these maps I collected at UCL in March, but also because I've been thinking more about the utility of processes such as the V&R mapping that we have been using in our research.  What Dave White has said to me is that mapping exercises like V&R give us processes to offer people, but no answers, that in fact people use the processes to find their own answers.  It's not our job as researchers to provide answers, in this framing, but to ask effective questions that prompt people to find their own way.  As usual, my first instinct was to be annoyed by this. My annoyance stems now from thinking that Dave is probably correct.

I am often asked for Answers when I give talks about what is going on with faculty and students and libraries and education generally.  While it's tempting to try to provide Answers,  I think that I'm much better at coming up with more questions.  And ultimately, that might be more useful, as I think I'm probably not the one who should be Answering.

Cognitive mapping exercises at UNCC and UCL reveal people's learning landscapes.  Thinking about cognitive mapping in the larger context of mapping exercises  made me consider the possibility of a discussion around the cartography of learning, that is, all the different ways we try to capture and visualize what people are doing when they are learning.  We are mapping (or having people map for themselves) what they perceive to be there, and in the mapping we receive a revelation, not something predictable, or predicting.  We also do not have a precise rendering of actual practices, but an interpretation of practice.  How can we use the maps to build more deeply observed pictures of behavior?  How do we deal with the fact that maps are only ever representations of a lived reality?

If the Google Earth of Bloomsbury looks like this:

And the Google Map looks like this:

And the Tube map, itself a concept map of sorts, looks like this:

Then we have a map like this one I collected in March:

For this first year archaeology student, UCL is a series of spaces isolated from each other, but connected by the fact that he needs to do things, different academic tasks,  in each space (my favorite is the professor's office in the lower left, filled with clutter except for a small clearing in which professor and students can sit to talk).  I can see that these spaces are connected, but he does not represent them that way.

This PhD student has drawn lines indicating how connected her spaces are, the ones in Bloomsbury, and the ones that are not.  She annotated the map with notes about the technology and particulars of the work she does in each space, which places have particular resources (content and people) she cannot get anywhere else, and marks cafes with the cups of tea or coffee that she goes there for.  She has glossed her own map--I can bring my own spin to things (and I will), but there is already interpretation here.

Cognitive maps, the V&R maps, these are all contributing to a kind of cartography of practice.  In the case of the cognitive maps I've been collecting from faculty and students, the mapping is an emic process, where the the practitioners themselves represent their own practices as best they can.

 In V&R mapping workshops,  people map their own practices, but they are also asked to think about the practices of others.  We've done that in the V&R research project as well,  for example in this map, where we took practices invoked by the interviewee and plotted it in the V&R continuua:

map by Dave White and Erin Hood.

Here we engaged in the mapping of the traces of practices of others as an analytical tool, engaging in an etic process, imposing our interpretation of meaning from the outside looking in.

They map, we map, and possible meanings and definite questions can emerge from the process of mapping.

I have been working my way through Latour's Reassembling the Social with a Twitter group of colleagues, and am only part way through.  Latour invokes the "cartographies of the social" (p.34) when discussing the need for researchers to pay attention to actual practices, to the lay of the networks in play, and to de-emphasize the interpretive leap while still in the process of figuring out what it is we are looking at.  I am also struck by Latour's insistence that the best social science cannot privilege the perspective of the researcher, but must be embedded in the meanings and practices generated by the people being studied.  This, to me, is a plea for anthropology, but also for the sort of  lack of privileging that mapping exercises like these can inspire--these maps get their meaning from the intentions of the people drawing them as much if not more than from the interpretations we researchers later layer onto them.

Anthropologists are not always fantastic at not-privileging their interpretations of meaning, and I've been helped in this regard by the neo-Boasian appeal of Bunzl.  I frequently talk about being a sort of "native ethnographer," as an academic studying academia, but Bunzl's critique of the necessity of outsider status to anthropology is making me rethink that.  Our position as "outside" or "inside" is not as important as paying attention to what is present, and describing it as thoroughly and thoughtfully as possible.  It is not that interpretation is impossible, but that what we think things mean can and should be informed by a variety of perspectives, including that of the people among whom we are doing our work.  

What is important about the maps, and I think about research generally, is the process, the questions and the discussions they inspire, not the end result.  Thoughts about meaning should emerge from the discussion, from the process, and should never be framed as The Answer.




References:

Bunzl, Matti (2004), Boas, Foucault, and the “Native Anthropologist”: Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 106: 435–442. 

Latour, Bruno (2007) Reassembling the Social:  An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford (Oxford University Press). Page numbers refer to Kindle edition.

Images:
Google Maps, Google Earth screen shots
Tube map is a crop of:  http://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/large-print-tube-map.pdf