CPsquare

CPsquare quarterly Field Trip

A CPsquare Field trip to Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises on Monday, February 22, 2010 12:00 PST 20:00 GMT. Free. No RSVP. Just show up.

EW Tweets at 30K’!

Etienne Tweets at 30,000 feet. Nuff said.

The CPsquare Foundations Workshop redesign

The Foundations workshop has been running regularly since 1998. (We’re getting close to the 30th time!) Now Etienne, Bronwyn and I are giving it another facelift. It will only be 6 weeks long. It’s more concentrated. It’s scheduled to start March 22. Register now.

CPsquare gathering in Aalborg, Denmark on May 2nd 2010

Immediately before the 7th International Conference on Networked Learning (Aalborg, Denmark) 3rd & 4th May 2010, some of us will be gathering for a day of conversation. Want to join us?

“My practice” series at CPsquare

In a way, CPsquare has been a very outward-looking community, focused on the communities that members lead or support. We haven’t paid as much attention to the work that members themselves do. During the last several months we’ve had sessons with Sue Wolff, Jack Merklein, and Joitske Hulsebosch talking about their work in their settings. Quite fascinating stuff. (There is a kind of avalanche of announcements that “a community of practice has formed” out there on the Interent. I’ve captured a few of them in this mind-boggling list with the “copexample” tag.)

Current books

• Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media,
  by: Mizuko Ito, et al.
  (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) 419. pp Http://ISBN.nu/9780262013369. You can download the whole book in a PDF. An in-depth look at genres of participation – reporting on a huge ethnographic project.
• Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers http://businessmodelgeneration.com/ http://isbn.nu/9782839905800 The business models for independent communities of practice has been a theme in CPsquare’s Shadow the Leader series this year.
• Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities (Portland, OR: CPsquare, 2009). It was published on August 15, 2009 but our first group “plug” was last week, in a session with the SIKM Community. A really enjoyable experience. Maybe we should do more such.

Join CPsquare, SCOPE and friends in our next quarterly field trip, when we will visit the Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises community:

People gathered around http://open-sustainability.org/wiki/WSE

Our field trip starts here:

• Monday, February 22, 2010 12:00 PST 20:00 GMT (your time zone)
• Elluminate

Jenny Ambrozek will be our host.  In her invitation she said:

As creators we think Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises community is essential, based on hearing the need from practitioners at The Sustainable Enterpise Fieldbook launch events and exchanges in the Sustainable Enterprise Network.

However, currently WSE is a grand vision, a serious aspiration and the seed of a network (as captured in the network map, slide 27, of this “Collective Intelligence” presentation). Our learning so far is about:

• The practical realities of crowdsourcing, and the challenge of getting contributions and interest.
• Network thinking and approaches to convene, and interconnect, the stakeholder networks we’ve identified as essential to WSE’s success.
• sustainability. (For more context see slides from ODNetwork NY presentation.

The CPsquare / SCOPE field trips use an informal community comparison framework

C4P model as we’ve adapted it:

• Content: What explicit knowledge objects such as documents or video clips are created or shared in this community?
• Connections: What interpersonal contacts between community members (e.g., that facilitate relationship-building between community members) can you observe?
• Conversation: what face-to-face or online conversations are going on?
• Context: what context gives meaning to the content, connections and conversations in this community?
• Purpose: what is the reason for which the members come together in this community?

More about the C4P (see description and references)

Our visit page is on the CPsquare Wiki:

http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Visiting_Wikisourcing_Sustainable_Enterprises

It’s ironic that Alexander Osterwalder uses a “business model for a cow” as a playful exercise to get people thinking about the issues of how to design business models. We have been using Osterwalder’s business model canvas to think through the issues around  a learning community of expatriate Dutch dairy farmers. One of the issues that Josien Kapma is working on, and that we’re trying to understand with her in our “Shadow the Leader” series, is how a learning community can be sustainable financially.  It can take significant resources to support a community of practice, so financial and other resources can be a limiting factor in pursuing a learning agenda.

Using Osterwalder’s scheme has not led directly to a financial plan.  Instead, it has brought up a lot of issues about the social context of learning. During our monthly conversations we have come to see that these three issues interact with learning and financial sustainability in interesting ways:

• Increasing mobility (farmers born in The Netherlands, farming anywhere in the world) requires people to re-invent practices like farming and learning.
• The internet breaks old models for supporting knowledge brokering (it strips control that once was tied to physical books or agricultural extension services, for example).
• New environmental sustainability goals are quite ambitious, and make farming even more knowledge-intensive than it was before).

It has also been interesting to see some of the analogies between a community startup and its Silicon Valley cousin.

Are you involved in conducting online interviews for your community research? This 2-week seminar at SCoPE, facilitated by Janet Salmons, will be of interest to you. Here is an excerpt from the description:

We are accustomed to live social interaction on the Internet. Text or chat have become a part of everyday culture. We use video calls to stay in touch with distant friends and family members, attend online meetings or webinars; we jump into Second Life for fun or learning. We may know how to use synchronous tools, but do we know how to use them for scholarly research?

While social conversation and research interviews share some characteristics, the purpose, protocol, and context are quite different. This SCoPE seminar will explore key e-research steps needed for educators, graduate students, and community leaders to use synchronous tools for scholarly interviews. In addition to asynchronous discussions, two synchronous events in week two will demonstrate the use of Elluminate and Vidyo for online interviews.

The seminar will draw on Janet’s new book on the subject, Online Interviews in Real Time.

SCoPE seminars are monthly topics facilitated by volunteers in the community. They are free and open to the public and there is no registration required. To contribute to discussions and to customize your visits you will need to create an account (quick process!) Please pass along this flyer to your colleagues or point them to the seminar forum at SCoPE.

Hope to see you there!

Save the date for a CPsquare dialog on May 2, 2010 – right before the Networked Learning Conference in Aalborg, Denmark. Apart from the date, we don’t have much decided, but CPsquare has a long tradition of holding dialogs where rich conversations with a practice focus can take place. In Copenhagen last November, after the AiR Conference, the group included Gitti Jordan, (now) professor Shirley Williams, as well as people who’d never been involved in the conversation before.   A couple of photos and highlights suggest how rich these dialogs can be – although each one is different from the others.

In addition to hearing a lot of stories about the history of the Institute for Research on Learning and where some of the ideas about communities of practice came from, we had open-ended and lightly organized dialog.

Several people presented their work.  In some cases it was useful to me because I’d heard it before (for example, I finally really got it that Susanne Justesen’s work on diversity using a community of practice framework is really a big deal).   On the other hand it was the first time we connected with Andreas Lloyd, who subsequently presented his thesis on the Ubuntu open source project as a community of practice to CPsquare in our Research and Dissertation fest.

As the date gets closer, we’ll convene a group online to work out logistics and frame the conversation.

Fall 2009 R & D Fest

The Fall 2009 Research and Dissertation fest includes nine presentations.  They will cover theory, implementation and evaluation in settings as diverse as healthcare, higher education, and development and countries including Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the US. Our sessions are somewhat informal and open to non-members for a nominal fee.

Healthcare

• Sue Huckson: Research and leadership around emergency health care in Australia 12/10/2009?
• Jim Palmer Qualities of Personal Interaction: the Promotion of Research Utilisation for Quality Improvement in the US Health Care Sector 12/9/2009

Education

• Cynthia Jimes: The Role of Communities in the Sustainability of open educational resources in South Africa 12/11/2009
• Bettina Arnum Boyle: Online Tables & Table Cloths: Facilitating Space for Online Learning & Collaboration. 12/7/2009
• Jacquie McDonald: Implementing and Sustaining Faculty Learning Communities/Communities of Practice at Australian Universities 11/24/2009?

Evaluation

• Judy Zorfass: Trace analysis in the evaluation of a system of social service communities of practice 12/4/2009
• Naava Frank: The experience of being evaluated from a community leader’s perspective 11/30/2009
• Joitske Hulsebosch: Monitoring and Evaluation of Knowledge Management Strategies in the Development Context 12/2/2009

Social learning theory

• Etienne Wenger: Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept 11/23/2009

The schedule is still open to change.  Sessions will combine a synchronous and asynchronous component.  Register now if you are not a member of CPsquare.

Our next Virtual Field Trip is scheduled for November 16, 2009 20:00 GMT. This excursion will be to Cloudworks, an evolving, dynamic community for learning design developed and hosted by the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University. Grainne Conole, Professor of e-learning at OU, will be our tour guide. We are organzing the background information and details of the trip on the CPsquare wiki.

When: Monday, November 16, 2009 12:00 PDT 20:00 GMT (your time zone)

Where: SCoPE Community Enthusiasts Elluminate Room

Although we try to make the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop as much not like school as we can, it always seems like some participants refer to it as “a class” and indeed it does have to have some elements of a class.  Like a beginning and an end.

We do try to embed real community-development features into both the beginning and the end of the workshop.  At the beginning of the workshop we invest a good bit of time exposing what a great resource the workshop participants are for our collective learning.  At the end we talk about how the inquiry could continue individually and collectively through participation in CPsquare events.

But we’ve found that when people arrive too late for the beginning of the workshop, their experience really is compromised.  So it’s OK for people to start one or two days late, but if they miss that deadline, they have to wait for the beginning of the next workshop.  That compromised experience is evidence for our claim that the Foundations Workshop is as much about an experience of participation as it is a conversation about the nature of participation and it’s impact on learning.

Unfortunately today I discovered that a setting on our administrative server was set so that it looked like registration was closed three days before the beginning of the workshop, not two days afterward.  It’s now fixed and registration is open for another four days.

During the next year, CPsquare will be shadowing Josien Kapma, a Dutch dairy farmer living in Portugal.

Trained as a Water Management Engineer (MSc.) Kapma earned a postdoctoral diploma in Development Management.  She’s the mother of 3 children and an active member of KM4Dev and CPsquare.  In CPsquare, she’s participated in the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, in the Connected Futures workshop, and been a mentor in the Foundations Workshop as well.

We’ll be shadowing her work as a leader of “Melken Over De Grens” or “Milking on the border” — http://www.melkenoverdegrens.nl.  It’s a global community for expatriate Dutch dairy farmers that’s developing its learning agenda and trying to find its legs at the same time (in terms of organization, business model, funding, and learning activities).

Join us once a month to reflect on the birthing and development process for this community.  We will consider questions such as:

• In what ways is diversity and a global diaspora a resource for a community? In what ways are those characteristics a challenge?
• What individual and group interests are served by the community? How are they balanced?  What leadership is needed and can leaders be compensated for their work, apart from learning as a leadership benefit?
• What activities make sense and what publications are useful in the development process?

In considering whether to take the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, a PhD student in the healthcare field wrote asking whether the workshop would be useful to her, given what she was doing:

I am going to examine what [communities of practice are already there in an academic health care setting] …. or as I suspect the lack of of them… and hopefully determine what those challenges [to their development] are, using an institutional ethnography approach.

I wrote back that …

Detecting silence or absence is huge, and they are only visible with careful ethnographic observation informed by theory. Last week the keynote at the http://epic2009.com conference was Gillian Tett, an anthropologist who ended up working for the Financial Times and noticed that there was an awful lot of silence around the global debt markets in 2007, despite the fact that they were much larger than the equity markets. There were a lot of reasons to not pay much attention to the debt markets at that time. Careful ethnography that paid off in the most unlikely setting.

I can’t resist asking whether you’ve bumped into Charlotte Linde, Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) http://isbn.nu/9780195140293 … a fellow-alum of the Institute for Research on Learning with Etienne. She’s using a vast ethnographic study of an insurance company, she sets up a powerful analytical framework and one of her chapters is about silence and “stories that are not told”… Well worth the read.

Contact with Etienne is an important part of the workshop experience. He’s great to talk to — and he has a great way of sharing access to current practice in many different settings. But it’s also really important to participate in a wider conversation of people who are exploring and applying these ideas in all kinds of settings. The practice of cultivating communities takes more than research.

While I’m at it, I’m hoping you’ve connected with this group (or at least read their stuff). Fung Kee Fung, Goubanova and Crossly are 3 of the authors who’ve all done the Foundations workshop (at one time or another):

http://www.implementationscience.com/imedia/1788022150101911_article.pdf

A final thought: if part of what you’re looking for is absence of communities of practice (partly with a view of suggesting change to enhance learning in a complex system), you need to develop a pretty sensitive eye for the diverse kinds of communities that are fully functional out there. This workshop can’t be the last word on that subject, but it does bust some of the stereotypes that many of us adopted from reading about the “Turbodudes at Shell” in Cultivating Communities of Practice.