Sense Making, by Brenda Dervin

My mental processes for figuring out what the article was about. What was your meta-cognitive process?  What is she trying to teach? : Although I went through a box of Kleenex to wipe the tears rendered by the article's humbling use of vocabulary and meaning packed sentences, I did manage to make sense of sense making. I came to an understanding having related the content to my current position as an administrator and continuous work with our district and community around communication. To that end, I have already regurgitated the mantra of discontinuity and the driving questions of what do they want, what do they get, and what do they think about that. Obstacles of distrust, information gaps, actor based systems, human nature that is fickle and uncooperative, and the existence of the space time continuum ultimately lead to a place where human systems are studied from the observer perspective, i.e., that which is most direct, and that systems use that direct information to respond to users.

My favorite statement came from the final page (81), "Information is not seen as something that describes a given reality in ab absolute and potentially accurate way, which can't be transmitted from source to receiver through channels, which can be counted by external standards and pigeon-holed for all time. Rather, information is constructed. That act of constructing and the act of using that which is constructed is a qualitative act."

BOOM! Drop the mic. My annotation next to the passage was, "Emails and Texting!" We have come to over-rely on hollow sources of information and we need to stop. I want to take Brenda Dervin out for an adult beverage for that one!