Several months ago, a group of CPsquare members proposed to share a question they had been struggling with and to lead a conversation about it. We invited people to join us in the inquiry The Learning Facilitator’s Role: How Is It Changing?After a rich discussion, several people culled from the accumulated text and produced this:
This is a free, open event so pass along the invitation!
For this field trip we have a special group of participants. Graduate students enrolled in Simon Fraser University’s Educational Technology and Learning Design program are learning about communities of practice and the online spaces to support them. Alyssa Wise, professor in the Faculty of Education is using the Digital Habitats book to guide this process.
Full details, including an archive of the session, will be posted on the CPsquare Wiki.
The Learning Facilitator’s Role: How is it changing?
Background: From 2006 to 2011, we three facilitators with backgrounds in human services, public policy development, and higher education worked virtually to design, support, evaluate, and improve both short-term purposeful dialogues and blended learning communities in education. Because we appreciate each other’s practice strengths and wish to continue learning from each other, the three of us—Brenda Kaulback, Lisa Levinson, and Doris Reeves-Lipscomb — began an appreciative look-back at our work during the previous six years. The review, coupled with our enrollment in the Change MOOC led by Stephen Downes and George Siemens, made us wonder about the changing role of the learning facilitator.
Issues: The incoming tide of online work in open networks such as MOOCs (massive, open, online courses) presents challenges and opportunities to the facilitator who supports online learning in communities. These new learning models exhibit a more individual approach with greater self-direction and personal networks and less focus on joint meaning-making and support than previous, more community-based models. This shift raises questions about the role of the facilitator, since these new models do not present the same focus on community building which is more central to the earlier approaches. In the dark hours of night, we have even asked ourselves:
Is the facilitator of online learning communities becoming a dinosaur?
Despite our sometimes gloomy nocturnal outlook, daylight brings a renewed interest to understand the changing role of the online learning facilitator better. We invite you to inquire with us on such questions as:
Has your scope of work moved from cultivating walled gardens to supporting do-it-yourself landscapes?
Are you spending less time on convergent activities which create a sense of belonging, a sharing of common interests, and forging of mutual norms and more time on divergent activities in which individuals control their own learning choices, build their own personal networks and land for short periods of time in ad hoc gatherings?
Do you see these new developments as creating possibilities for your role or as putting you out of business?
We invite you* to join us in this asynchronous inquiry into the changing role of the online learning facilitator. Discussion will begin at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, November 7 and conclude at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, November 8.
* Everyone who is a member of CPsquare, has ever been a member, has participated in a workshop or has participated in a CPsquare event is invited. You need to use your user-name and password on http://conversations.cpsquare.org. To verify that you remember both and request a reminder at the beginning of the event, click here. (Page has additional details, such as steps for getting reminders when the conversation gets going.)
Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner chapter on Leadership
Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner recently released a very useful summary and contribution to the practice of community leadership with “Leadership groups; distributed leadership in social learning“. In that first chapter they promise to publish others over time, so well worth subscribing if you haven’t already.
Jenny Mackness has offered a reflection and summary about the power of the videos that Silk is studying in MILSPACE (familiar to many of us as Company Command). She notes:
“The stories can be highly emotive and elicit deeply reflective thinking. This requires careful, sensitive and experienced management by the interviewer. Trust and positive relationships are essential to the story collection process and it is understood that the videos are ‘owned’ by the interviewees. No videos are published without the consent of the interviewee, although they are carefully screened for any potential security issues.”
And Silk not only shared his action research project, but he walked the talk by inviting partners and mentors to our webinar, including Pete Kilner and Tony Burgess. Pete Kilner, didn’t say much that day because he was home with a cold. He’d presented his dissertation in CPsquare’s R&D series back in 2007 on “The effects of socially relevant representations in content on members’ identities of participation and willingness to contribute in distributed communities of practice.” During the webinar, Tony Burgess contributed a lot of history and insight (he also presented his dissertation “Understanding the core group in a distributed community of practice” in 2007). Because Silk, Burgess and several others were in the same room during the webinar it was interesting to listen to some social interactions at West Point: how they used titles like “Major” or “Dean” or “Mr.” and the way they so scrupulously acknowledged each other’s leadership and contributions. It felt like we got a glimpse into Silk’s research project and into his community and its finely honed norms.
Who am I, what is my role?
After the question of how to support communities of practice and social learning interactions, one of the most difficult but persistent questions that comes up in CPsquare run along the following lines:
If learning and communities are fundamentally self-organizing, what, if anything, can I do to help? And, how do insights into social learning affect my work or the value that I seek to bring to communities or organizations? And, how do I explain my job to others?
A group of us are organizing an intensive conversation on the subject during the first week of November. Anybody who has ever been a member of CPsquare or participated in a CPsquare event is invited to a free two-day immersion in this important question.
Foundations of Communities of Practice
We are offering the Foundations Workshop again beginning October 22. If you know of someone who’d be interested, please let them know that it’s time to register!
This week Jonathan Silk, a US Army Officer stationed at the United States Military Academy at West point, NY, shared his digital story telling practice with the CPsquare community. For this digital storytelling work he won the 2012 Pepperdine Award for outstanding work in community development.
Storytelling is used in many organisations as a knowledge management strategy. Through storytelling tacit knowledge is elicited and shared for the benefit of the whole organization. Jonathan has shared his own story in a blog post ‘Why I tick when I run’.
The key point that came out of Jonathan’s CPsquare presentation and the discussion, was that although storytelling is a powerful tool for binding a community, it needs to be managed carefully in terms of the technology, in terms of the stories and commitment to gathering those stories, and in terms of learning from the stories.
The technology
The MILSPACE community uses an ordinary video camera. Videos are edited on a Mac with Final Cut Pro . The Army has a designated person to do this editing and to date has over 1500 video stories of 3-5 minutes in length.
The main issue for the MILSPACE community has been to make the videos easily accessible to community members, easy to search, and easy to comment on and discuss. JCarousel is used to support this and recent work has focused on tags and video titles. Appropriate titles have been found to be very influential on the number of times a video is viewed (see Jonathan’s report for further details).
Managing story collection
The MILSPACE community has over 20,900 members and focuses on the leadership development of cadets, lieutenants and captains in the US Army. Stories are collected in the field. A dedicated team went out to locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan to create the videos. Leaders were almost universally keen to be interviewed and understand that sharing their stories and learning adds value to the whole community.
Video interviews can be conducted with a single leader or with a group and are usually around a given topic, e.g. eight leaders have given video interviews on the topic of ‘Your first 30 days in a country’.
The stories can be highly emotive and elicit deeply reflective thinking. This requires careful, sensitive and experienced management by the interviewer. Trust and positive relationships are essential to the story collection process and it is understood that the videos are ‘owned’ by the interviewees. No videos are published without the consent of the interviewee, although they are carefully screened for any potential security issues.
Learning from the video stories
The collection of over a 1,500 videos does not necessarily mean that they are used effectively for learning. The MILSPACE community is currently exploring means of increasing discussion around the videos. Recent work has involved developing a more structured approach to the management of discussion around the videos, through establishing groups of topic leaders (peer panels) who make personal contact with interviewees and seed discussion and comments around the videos to build learning relationships. This is work in progress.
Final thoughts
It is not difficult to understand what a powerful effect video stories could have on the learning of a community, particularly one such as the US Army where as Jonathan Silk has put it the cycle between action and reflection is so fast and chaotic that it’s difficult to capture the learning.
This potential has been recognized and supported by the hierarchy in the US Army, which has devoted technology and manpower to the process.
Perhaps the most difficult part of the process and potentially the most interesting is yet to be fully developed, and that is an exploration of just how do video stories add value to a community of practice. This is a process that has recently been highlighted by Wenger et al in their publication
I found Jonathan Silk’s presentation very interesting and valuable, because it helped to clarify the issues surrounding the collection and management of video stories. It will be interesting to see how the work develops.
Next week, Jonathan Silk, the recipient of the 2012 Pepperdine Aware for his Action Research project in the the Pepperdine M.A.L.T program, will present his research in CPsquare’s R&D Series. We’ll have a synchronous conversation as well as an asynchronous discussion. Noah Sparks, one of the recipients of the award in 2011, will host. Here is some introductory material provided by Jonathan for the asynchronous discussion. (Be forewarned: this is very rich stuff, so you might want to allocate a bit of time to browse through it!)
Building an On-Line Community of Practice with Digital Storytelling (Leadercast)
I conducted my research on the MILSPACE On-Line Community of Practice and focused on integrating Leadercast videos into the main discussion forums to increase interaction and discussion between the interviewees and the viewers
What is a Leadercast?
A Leadercast is a digital video interview ( a form of digital storytelling) with an Army Platoon Leader (Lieutenant) or Company Commander (Captain) who shares their leadership experiences serving in combat. The video interview is then posted in the MILSPACE on-line Community of Practice for other members to view and interact with the interviewee further if they desire. Here is a short example:
The MILSPACE Community of Practice is a dispersed, on-line, virtual Community of Practice dedicated to the professional development of U.S. Army junior officers (Lieutenants and Captains) as well as West Point Cadets, Reserve Officer Training Corps Cadets , and Officer Candidates. The center accomplishes this by enabling experiences of peer-to-peer learning through connection and conversation of Army officers and cadets.
The MILSPACE Community of Practice has several forums dedicated to over 20,900 members but the scope of this action research project will be the Platoon Leader, Company Command, and Leadercast forums. The Platoon Leader and Company Command forums are the main discussion areas for Lieutenants and Captains respectively. These forums exist to connect Lieutenants and Captains (Also referred to as company grade officers) – past, present and future in professional discussion to foster professional development and organizational learning among cadets and company grade officers. These officers are both male and female and located all over the world at various Army installations. Members get on-line and engage in the forums from these different locations. Some are deployed in Afghanistan in combat, others are located in Germany and South Korea conducting training for their respective missions, and still others are in the United States training in preparation for deployment to Afghanistan or Kuwait. The West Point and Reserve Officer Training Corp cadets are college students in undergrad programs to be commissioned as Army Officers, and the Officer Candidates are in the Army Officer Candidate School going through training to be commissioned as Army Officers as well.
The Leadercast forum has over 1,500 video interviews conducted with platoon leaders and company commanders of all branches sharing experiences they have had in combat. These videos have the potential to be the catalyst to great discussions where knowledge from the interviewees (Platoon Leader or Company Commander with combat experience) can be transferred to the viewers (recipient). Recipients can catalog the knowledge from discussions and recall it at a later time and then apply it to a relevant situation.
Sharing My Practice
Every year the MILSPACE Community of Practice hosts the “On Fire Rendezvous” which is an annual in person meeting of the community leaders. The purpose of the Rendezvous is to bring together the entire team of topic leads and support group in a face-to-face session. Every year there are changes in topic leads and support group members. Here is a blog post about the Rendezvous that occurred last April: http://jonathansilk-maltwarrior-ar.blogspot.com/2012/04/milspace-community-of-practice-on-fire.html I would also like to share some of the artifacts from the community. Every month the community publishes an article in Army Magazine. The article is the highlights from one of the discussions held the previous month. Here are links to some select article I thought the community would find interesting:
The Crush of Requirements from Higher Headquarters
In a lecture about her recent book, Jean Lave talks about learning as a process of apprenticeship, not only to a master practitioner, as a graduate student, but also as “apprentices to our own practice.” The idea is that we do things first and only then begin to understand what it is we are doing. That’s exactly the opposite of the “train-then-do” model that prevails in education. Recently, during our 10th Shadow the Leader session with Marc Coenders, we noticed how the Shadow the Leader series at CPsquare shows a “do-it-then-train” aspect. We’re coming up on the end of the sixth year-long series and paused in a reflective moment to articulate what it is that we’re doing. Here’s the current account:
Shadow the leader is important when an individual (such as Marc Coenders) is regarded as both speaking for a community’s practice (such as CPsquare’s, which has to to with enhancing learning through the formation of new relationships and social spaces) and is exploring a challenge of some sort (such as the formation of a new consultancy such as Campus-X) that acts as a lens on what was previously understood about “the practice” (such as the practice of law or medicine or meditation or organization development). That new challenge might include:
a new setting or context that exposes existing practice to different conditions, technologies or people whose needs and assumptions are different from a previous norm
a previously unexamined aspect of practice, where context or a technology or some other condition requires upending or some kind of re-balancing of the elements of a practice so that what used to seem unimportant is now essential and vice versa.
a change in practice that involves giving up or killing off a previous version of the practice that was legitimate and successful (it may have served us well, so it’s hard to give up)
Or maybe the practice itself is poorly understood for some reason, such as its newness. How many of us can do our jobs in the same way as we did even 5 years ago?
This has to do with the fact that in real life, our personal or professional practice is never static. It’s always evolving, always responding to new circumstances and to different needs. In a community it’s always subject to a certain amount of debate. Every practitioner is themselves on a trajectory of evolution and discovery.
Therefore the frequently asked questions or summaries of “best practice” are inherently retrospective and may be out of date. They probably miss critical detail. They shared based on possibly unexpressed assumptions about the audience, their understanding or intentions or competence.
Shadow the Leader as a practice, however, is saying, “well, we’re going to include a self-apprenticeship aspect in our practice, as a regular thing, as it’s happening, over an extended period of time, in our community context.” Over time is critical because a practice is never fully visible at any one moment. As it’s happening is important because our practice is only visible as we pay attention to it over time. The community context is important for this self-apprenticeship so that our practice is visible or examined both through the eyes of the practitioner him or herself and through the eyes of competent witnesses who understand and may have a stake in the evolution of the common practice.
What is your practice and how are you an apprentice to it? Shadow the Leader is an example of our self-apprenticeship as we seek to help individuals and organizations develop new social structures that support learning.
16 August, 2012 (19:35) | Events, stackathons | By: John David Smith
Our Ning Stackathon has been leisurely but thorough, as was originally envisioned. We are in no rush and so far the process of looking at Ning-supported communities has explored the context and configuration issues very carefully. Meanwhile, the list of candidate communities has ballooned.
Here is a summary of one community that incorporates discussions on Web Crossing and the community leader’s responses to a custom worksheet developed for the Stackathon and a Google Docs version of Digital Habitat’s Chapter 10 about “FQ em rede – Comunidade Web 2.0 de Física e Química” which is a Ning-based community.
The community has some 700 registered, Portuguese-speaking members, half of whom are teachers and the other half high school students. Its goal is to support secondary chemistry and physics students outside of school. Formal schooling is clearly in the background as a motivator for participation and the academic calendar drives community activity (if you look at the community in August, you’ll see a sign that says, in English, “Gone to the beach”). Some support from the Portuguese Ministry of Education for virtual events or for serving up videos has helped extend the activities on offer.
Community is led Vera Monteiro, helped by a leadership team that has turned over each academic year since it was formed in January 2011. During 2011-12 there were four teachers and four students involved. The leadership team meets outside of the Ning Platform (on Skype and chat). Teachers and guest scientists have volunteered their time to help students or to make presentations.
The Ning site is the community’s main place to gather and most members don’t know each other outside of the Ning meeting place. An essential advantage of the Ning platform is that it was easy to get going and is easy to change. Originally it was free, but it’s been worthwhile to continue with a paid (Pro) account. Still, the platform’s low cost enables a community to function on a completely volunteer basis. The site offers videos, photos, pages, notes, a wiki (not used much), and a rudimentary file manager. Integration with Facebook and Twitter are advantages.
At the same time, the Ning platform has its limitations: improving (simplifying) navigation, sophisticated text editing (formulas, subscripts and superscripts), and content curation (pulling contributions out of groups that are to be closed) are all obstacles that the community organizer can’t solve by herself. Finding a competent technologist to support a community that has no formal or ongoing institutional support has been difficult. The vision goes further than the platform currently allows (they would like to support students as they work on homework in real time).
Hackathons are the current equivalent of a barn-raising, where people get together and work really hard for a short period of time on a fun project that somehow contributes to the common good. We’ve used barn-raising as examples of the kind of personal, skin-in-the-game generosity that’s involved in communities of practice.
We’re inventing a new portmanteau. A Stackathon is working party that’s slower-paced than a hackathon and more reflective. It gathers useful examples of something with a lot of sense-making built into the process. Therefore a stackathon is not like the current craze for content curation. Read on for details about CPsquare’s first Stackathon.
During this stackathon we’ll gather profiles and portraits of as many living Ning-based or Ning-supported communities as possible. We’ve started developing a list of interesting examples. As we stack these communities one on top of another, we expect to discover new hacks that could make any of them more effective, sustainable, and fun. (And those hacks are probably relevant to simpler or more elaborate platforms than Ning, too!)
We will try to be somewhat systematic in describing how Ning is configured for each community and how it fits in the community’s digital habitat. We’ll pay attention to the ongoing role of leadership, facilitation, and technology stewardship. That means understanding what the community is about, what kinds of activities are typical, and what other tools a community uses in each community. Understanding that would give us a better idea of how and when to recommend Ning. Our stack will also suggest many possible methods that one community could borrow from another (including the use of auxiliary tools, plug-ins, themes, membership restrictions, etc., etc.).
During the stackathon (which will run for a whole year, from March 2012 to April 2013) we’ll have discussions in CPsquare’s Web Crossing site (password required: it’s for CPsquare members and people registered for the Stackathon), we’ll collect ideas in various Google Docs, we may have teleconferences, and we will collect some of our insights on CPsquare’s Media Wiki site. It all depends on what people want to do and are willing to do.
You can participate in the stackathon by joining CPsquare or by registering for the Stackathon here (costs $10). Any Stackathon registrant who contributes a full community portrait gets their registration fee refunded and they receive a CPsquare membership during the last 6-months of the Ning Stackathon.
CPsquare is like a town square, a place where people gather to connect and learn together. We are from corporate, private, non-profit, and academic organizations; we hail from many nations across the globe; we are involved in consulting, research, and direct support of communities of practice; and we join together to create our own community of practice. We are a non-profit organization, registered as a 501(c)(6) organization in the US.
Our Wiki
Our Wiki gathers resources of many kinds about communities of practice for use by all.
Conversations
Our password-protected conversation space is for members, event participants, and guests.
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