Yesterday I posted on how to make your career dreams come true. One of my dreams is to work with people from around the world to explore the concept of social artistry and how we can use the skills of the social artist at work and for learning.  So I'm going to make it happen. . . 

Announcing: The Virtual Knowledge Cafe on Social Artistry

Brent MacKinnon and I are organizing a 9-week Knowledge Cafe that we plan to run online, starting February 20, 2012. 

It's open to anyone who's interested in learning with us about the skills and talents of social artists and who wants to explore how social artistry might fit into their professional practice.

We'll be adapting David Gurteen's Knowledge Cafe model and Bo Gyllenpalm’s Virtual Knowledge Cafe as a learning framework.

A few things you should know:

• There will be no instructors, no learning objectives and no formal curriculum. The group will work together to decide on the topics we want to explore, based on our interests and passions. Each of us will take the lead in directing the learning through the questions we ask and the knowledge and resources we share. If you are looking for a formal course in social artistry, we are NOT the group for you. 

• We are building this plane while it's flying. We will be providing an online "home" for the Cafe and some basic structural framework, but the content and practices we develop will evolve as we go through the process. We think this is an exciting, interesting way to learn about a topic like this, but it can also be a little challenging for people who are used to more "polished" products and structured learning. If you participate in the Cafe, be ready for some messiness. 

• We have no idea of the outcomes for the Cafe. We're hoping that the Cafe can be the start of a Community of Practice for people who are interested in social artistry. We're thinking there's a possibility that through the Cafe we might identify some cool projects or ideas to work on together. But we really have no way of knowing what will result from the Cafe. And we're OK with that. If you join us, you will need to be OK with that too. 

This is an experiment in using some of the tools and techniques of social artistry to learn about social artistry. As with all experiments, it has the potential to be a rousing success or an abysmal failure. But either way, we will learn something from it. 

If you're interested, check out our course invitation here and sign up here. 

Here's to learning together!