I borrowed the term ‘feldgang’ from Otto Scharmer. What he refers to on a literal level is simply a Sunday walk in the family farm pastures and fields with no intent other than to woolgather (That is an etymological gem we won’t explore here for the moment.) Figuratively, it can mean any “field”. For example, your field can be a website. That is how I am using that metaphorically in this post.

The field in this case is being made real by a tool, Webrecorder. With that tool you can record your footsteps, blazing a trail of sorts, in your own way. Folks can follow your trail even looking at the same videos and sound recordings and hyperlinks that you did. What use is this?

It all started with a plea for attention from my compadre, Kevin Hodgson.

Ah. Neat curated archives. Bookmarking. Watching this: https://t.co/zpjtk97NGC Creativity meets the Decentralized Web .. #el30

— KevinHodgson (@dogtrax) December 20, 2018

This is a call to attend. Attend what? At a bare minimum Kevin asks us to check this out. You might be interested. In an attention ecology like Twitter, this is big ask. It means to drop what you are doing and do this. What I want to know is this? What do different folks consider reciprocation. In other words what is my duty here when my friend asks folks in a particular context to explore.

What I did is below? I think this combination of Webrecorder + Screencasting allows for a more careful reciprocal exercise. This is what it means to walk in the pastures of attention. At least, this is what it means to me. I would love to do something similar for a smaller pasture (a blog post with links) or something larger (Tweetdeck) that has different purposes to the feldgang.

For now, this is what I did in response to an ‘ask’ for attention, my feldgang.

So, I have set up the metes and bounds of the feldgang above. Below, I screencast my walk in the fields, some pasture, some hedgerow, some woods. Think of it as a director’s cut to the webrecording above.

And the coolest think of all is that you can upload the screencast to Vialogues for further analysis.  A group of teachers could get together, choose a common text, create a webrecording, do a screencast, and the analyze the video as a quick and dirty action research project.  I advocate for these kinds of collaboration because they lead to an appreciation of how we direct each other to attend in different ways for different purposes.  Perhaps that could be a filter to getting us all to think more deeply about what we ask of others online.  I think this is classic solidarity building and understanding of knowledge as a commons.