CPsquare

The first two weeks of the book discussion group have already occurred, with much of the discussion focussing primarily on higher eduation. To expand our thinking about the issues in the texts we are using and the potential audience for discussion, two new discussion areas have been added as next steps:

1. My Favourite Chapter, a place to raise discussion around a chapter that really speaks to any of the book discussion participants, especially those that may be outside the set themes of the discussion.
2. CoPs and Technology, a location to discuss any issue in and around technology and how it relates with communities of practice.

We look forward to a few more weeks of stimulating discussion. It is never too late to join us for this!

CPsquare has been organizing informal gatherings since it came into existence: http://cpsquare.org/category/events/face-to-face/

In connection with the AoIR 9 and EPIC 2008 conferences (which are quite different but happen at exactly the same times), we expect to meet for a day of conversation somewhere in Copenhagen on Sunday, October 19 from early morning (9 am or so) to late afternoon, followed by dinner. We may ask for a financial contribution from participants, depending on where we meet and how many of us there are. Generally we use an “open space” format, adapted to meet the needs of an ongoing community (we do some planning in advance, but decide the details on the spot). We always try to share back what we talked about and learned, but it’s a very informal process.

There are a handful of CPsquare folks who are presenting papers, panels, round-tables, etc. at the AoIR 9 Conference. A future blog posting will list them.

CPsquare’s password protected Web Crossing space is at: http://conversations.cpsquare.org/P/CP2aoir08 . We’ll use it for:

• posting arrival & departure times in Copenhagen
• working out lodging plans (sharing rooms, staying nearby each other, figuring out directions)
• planning our time together (beginning Tuesday night October 14)
• figuring out where to meet on October 19

Our Web Crossing space is open to:

• all CPsquare members
• anyone who’s identified themselves or expressed interest in joining us. Send an email to John Smith or use the “Ask a question” form on the main CPsquare website: http://cpsquare.org/contact/ to get access if you don’t already have access.

We’ll use cp2aoir08 to tag resources, photos, tweets, etc.: http://delicious.com/tag/cp2aoir08

Opening

We’ve moved the CPsquare website and organized it to give people a better look into our community and to provide speaking roles to more people more easily. (Of course there had to be rehearsals and bumps along the way.) It’s a blog-oriented website now, so that current news is front and center:

http://cpsquare.org/

Here’s the RSS feed that you can subscribe to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Cpsquare

There is the “friends of CPsquare” email list for our newsletter, you can subscribe to every blog posting by email, and you can ask questions here:

http://cpsquare.org/contact/

We even have a Twitter feed! Have a look at Beth Kanter’s Twitter Primer.

Talking

Currently CPsquare is having a book club. The administrivia might mask the high quality of the stuff we’re reading:

• Vol 1, Chapter 6 - “Teaching with Technology: A Multifaceted Staff Development Strategy” by Tony Carr, Andrew Deacon, Glenda Cox and Andrew Morrison.
• Vol 1, Chapter 9 - “Reaching Beyond the ‘Boundaries’: Communities of Practice and Boundaries in Tertiary Education” by Gerlinde Koeglreiter, Ross Smith and Luba Torlina
• Vol 2, Chapter 4 - “Virtual Problem-based Learning Communities of Practice for Teachers and Academic Developers: An Irish Higher Education Perspective” by Roisin Donnelly

It’s only August and the Fall Research and Dissertation Fest at CPsquare has yet to be scheduled but is already looking really exciting with only two PhD dissertations. We invite presentations about completed research as well as research projects that are in progress.

• Pamela Stern — Serious games for first responders: improving design and usage with social learning theory
• Marc Coenders — Learning Architecture and design: an exploratory study of space and learning in work settings and close-to-practice learning

CPsquare’s Show and Tell — an irregular session about “the states of the art” — started with a video about Rio Tinto. We’re following that up with a topic that’s closer to home. Jenny Mackness and Karen Guldberg from the Foundations Workshop in January 2008 have done a series of in-depth interviews with people involved in the workshop as participants, mentors, and leaders. They’ve presented a paper at an academic conference and will be presenting in CPsquare at the beginning September 1st, covering themes such as emotion, connectivity, understanding norms, learning tensions/dualities, technology, and identity. We’ll read their paper, have some oneline discussion and top it off with a teleconference. Everyone who’s ever been a Foundations Worskshop is invited to join CPsquare members for a good think about these topics and how they can affect design for learning in many different settings.

Greeting

Connected Futures. We did a lot of experimenting in the design and delivery of our new “Connected Futures” workshop last May. There were 10 of us involved as leaders and we had 18 people registered as participants. (Despite the extraordinarily high “teacher” / “student” ratio the 10 of us were completely exhausted at the end!). One remarkable little detail was a practice of keeping a Skype chat among those 10 people open for about 6 weeks running. Any time any of the 10 of us had an observation or a question, we turned to the chat. It makes for very interesting reading to see a minute-by-minute account of those exchanges.

Foundations of Communities of Practice Workshop. We’re going to offer the Foundations workshop again this fall starting on September 15th. Please let friends or colleagues know if you think they’d be interested.

Meeting

It looks like there is a group of CPsquare folks converging on the AoIR meeting in Copenhagen, spending the day together somewhere on Sunday October 19. In addition to meeting face-to-face, several of us are giving papers. I’m doing one with Patricia Arnold and Beverly Trayner that takes an autoethnographic approach to community and technology.

The International Communities and Technology conference is smack dab in the middle of Pennsylvania next year. It’s a high quality conference, so I’m sure there will be CPsquare representation.

Reading

Groundswell has an interesting typology of participation and related skills in using the Internet. It seems to me that it’s a story that could be told from a user or community’s perspective, but they mainly mostly talk about the issues from the perspective of marketing and businesses. But the book is recommended because they talk about the issues very well.

You’ve probably seen CommonCraft’s excellent videos on all things geeky. The other side of them is that they are thoughtful about how to organize their business effectively.

Imagine if you’d never seen a video screen without a mouse. You would think of the world quite differently.

There is still time for people to join us in our summer book discussion group. We are discussing Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators, edited by Chris Kimble, Paul Hildreth, and Isabelle Bourdon. The 2-volume set can be ordered via Amazon or directly from the publisher (at a great price).

The proposed dates and agenda for the discussion are:

• PLANNING: Up to July 27th - purchase and read/scan
• NEGOTIATING: Sunday July 27th - Sunday August 3rd - one week for voting on preferred chapters Here is a link to the table of contents for both volumes
• DISCUSSING: Monday August 4th (times to be negotiated) to plan and start a month of online discussions and events
• REFLECTING: September 1-7 - Writing up our community book review wiki

This is free for CPsquare members (member click here to go directly to the discussion), and is open to non-members for $50. If not a member, consider joining to attend this discussion for free.

Hope to see new and seasoned discussants alike at this summer discussion and learning experience!

The goal of CPsquare’s “shadow the leader” series is get close to the lived experience of leadership, beyond short-term, drive-by views or our models of what experience should be.  (It’s a members-only series of phone calls with “ground-support” in our online space.) We’ve done two series before, one with Robert Tollen and the other with Beth Kanter. In both cases it’s was interesting to see how the conversation evolved, how the leader’s thinking changed, and how those of us who participated made sense of what we heard.

This year’s leader is Davee Evans, who was an engineer at Apple Computer for a number of years, transitioned to design and usability, now is consulting with small companies around usability. His involvement with Wikipedia began with a 4 day rally to save a page about “Shambhala” from deletion. In retrospect, the page’s content was poor but the topic was worthy. Now, 1,000 edits, 500 comments on articles later, Davee is involved with a set of related pages. He’s deep into issues such as the different notions of “serfdom” in European and Asian societies.

Although participants in the process can be completely anonymous, Davee has found a convivial group with loosely shared values (around the process of improving an article) who have a mission or goal to produce a better, more neutral, and more all-encompassing encyclopedia. They depend on and cite scholarly sources that are peer reviewed, neutral, and credible. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.

Collectively, editors who hold those values hold “a vigil” around a topic, watch for changes that might go against their values. Davee monitors about 300 pages, checks them once or twice a day.

After our first session, Davee thought that the CPsquare conversation, reflecting on an interesting year and a new avocation, was very enjoyable. Interesting to consider whether the wikipedians are a community and to bring out an insider’s view of how it works. In the longer term Davee is interested in policies and approaches to conflicts and how they promote or hinder a sense of community. You’re invited to join us in that inquiry, which applies to all communities of practice.

At the end of our first session (on July 9th) we reflected on our conversation: our collective note-taking in CPsquare teleconferences — occasionally with different versions of the same sentence — is a group process for converging on the truth — the sense of the group. (Similar to wikipedia articles converging on “the truth”?) We wondered what it means when everyone is absorbed in the thinking and stops taking notes, which does happen.

The update to our CPsquare website is now complete, and the website is now operational.

While this will allow for a great amount of flexibility and increased participation, it also means the RSS feeds are now working properly. There are two feeds that are operational–Entries and Comments. If you want to keep up with what is going on at CPsquare, consider subscribing to these so news, updates, and comments will be sent directly to your feed reading program.

Rather get notified by email? If so, you can sign up to receive posts via email by entering your email address in the “Post by email” box on the right of the homepage.

We look forward to being able to communicate more readily with members and potential members alike well into the future!

The new CPsquare website is ready to go live. Here’s a bit of our last minute punch list:

• Contact forms activated (after the switch)
  • General CPsquare contact and “Friends of CPsquare” email list
  • Foundations Workshop
  • Connected Futures Workshop
• Specific History pages have been converted to blog posts:
  • http://cpsquare.org/events/LBD/ is now http://cpsquare.org/2002/07/lisbon-dialog-2002/
  • http://cpsquare.org/events/MEL/is now http://cpsquare.org/2002/10/cop-thread-at-the-aace-e-learn-2002/
• Uploaded files need to be linked into all the postings and on the “resources” page
• Jeffrey nominates these plug-ins:
  • Flexible upload
  • Twitter tools
  • Subscribe to comments
• The blogroll needs to be corrected / updated

It’s amazing how much history and context is burried in a website.  Here are a few points about where we’ve been:

• We started out with a website hosted by the good folks at GV.net who served us well for 6 or 7 years.  Although they serve a rural client base very well with services like dial-up access, they were not prepared at this point to host a WordPress Blog.
• As the site on GV.net had grown over the years, it still had to be maintained by me using Dreamweaver.  Not easy to share responsibility with others in the community.
• During the transition to a new server and new ISP, I discovered many pages that I had forgotten.  Some, as you can see above, were important to bring forward as part of our history.  Others are left for the wayback machine.

And then there is the group effort to move onto a new site.  Thanks especially to Jeffrey Keefer and Barb McDonald for discussions and actual banging on the code.  We have a backlog of announcements to make, so there will be a lot more postings here on CPsquare’s front porch!

In January, 2008, CPsquare members and friends gathered for a unique online conference to explore practices afforded by several different online community platforms. Seven conference calls punctuated three weeks of asynchronous threaded discussion and sandbox visits to eight working online communities around the world. Conference organizers devised a touring method consistent with the technology stewardship practice of perspective-taking. Participants felt that the experience was worth repeating and sharing with a larger audience, so they surveyed participants to re-collect and consolidate what they learned. This report is the result. It describes the method of organizing the conference, the sustaining motivations driving participant roles, reflections of the conference organizer, and some of the memorable learning gained by the CPsquare community.

What’s the best platform on which communities of practice can gather? There are a lot of choices and the choices seem to be multiplying. We’ve been following Beth Kanter for almost a year, trying to understand the community that is loosely organized around the nptech tag as an example of a new kind of platform. Add Facebook, Twitter, and the other new entrants in the field and you have too many choices.

But more traditional platforms like Tomoye’s Echo, Q2learning’s eCommunity, or Web Crossing’s offerings are still home to many, many communities. (We couldn’t resist going to look at one community that uses 6 different open-source platforms for it’s “platform”.) And you actually have to pay to use them! Join us for a three-week conference looking at many different platforms (new and old) through the eyes of their communities.

Rather than asking which platform is “the best” we are asking, “what kinds of communities thrives on each of these quite different platforms?” We’re inviting community leaders, technology stewards, and software vendors to all spend three weeks together thinking about issues of common concern.

The event is organized by CPsquare members and is open to guests who register here. (CPsquare members who are presenting or facilitating can bring a guest for free.)

Every month for the last year, CPsquare members have gathered together to talk with Robert Tollen, the leader of a distributed health support community named MPD-Support-L. It’s like “Grand Rounds” in that world-class diagnosticians show up on the call, but the conversations benefit everyone, not just the patient, who is remarkably healthy.

I heard about Robert Tollen through a friend whose father-in-law had been helped by the MPD-support-L list before he died from one of the several rare blood diseases known as myeloproliferative disorders. Although Tollen wasn’t sure what exactly what we wanted or why, he generously agreed to participate. In the end he said that the monthly telephone conference calls were a “terrific experience” for him and they certainly were for us, too. At first he thought he wouldn’t have anything to say, but it turned out that he had a lot to say, like most good leaders of successful communities.

I thought of the “Grand Rounds” format because many of the conversations in CPsquare are inherently problem-oriented. They focus on challenging situations that demand immediate, short-term help, where a community is being launched, is experiencing growing pains, or is dealing with new technologies. And after several years in existence, CPsquare needed to focus on a healthy community – and in greater depth - as its life played out over a longer period of time. It’s interesting to note that Sir William Osler, considered by many to be the father of modern medicine, invented “Grand Rounds” at Johns Hopkins and lent his name (“Osler-Vaquez disease”) to polycythemia vera, one of the several myeloproliferative diseases.

It’s hard to say everything we learned from the experience. (It’s not hard to see why “Grand Rounds” is described as an important ritual of medical education.) First of all, there’s something very useful about being in regular contact with someone like Robert Tollen, who is so generous of his time in helping people cope with a disease that’s complex and sometimes life-threatening. Second, it’s remarkable how deeply involved a community leader can be in the domain issues of a community of practice: I remember noticing in one of our conversations how very many topics led right back to the scientific intricacies of diagnosis and treatment. Third, it’s remarkable how many little technical pieces work together to support the MPD-Support community.

The MPD-Support list has about 2500 subscribers and is open to patients, family members, and health professionals: http://members.aol.com/mpdsupport/ . It’s been running since 1994 and has members from 41 different countries. A priest in his 30’s who had one of the MPD diseases used the list to find that more advanced medical care for the disease was available in Italy, compared to where he lived in Australia, so he got a job in the Vatican. A 16-year old girl in the UK heard about the choices that others who had taken a hard look at their situations had made. And in the thousands of messages over the years, Tollen balances the various needs that people have to talk about vitamins, herbs, home remedies, and other alternatives while staunchly supporting a scientific approach to medicine that Osler would certainly applaud. It turns out that Tollen receives and circulates information about scientific discoveries related to MPD before it comes to the attention of all but the most specialized hematologists around the world.

There are many facets to any given community. Each participant in the calls seemed to bring out another one: Joitske Hulsebosch from The Netherlands, with an international development perspective; Sherry Spence, an epidemiologist from Colorado; Derek Chirnside, an instructional innovator from New Zealand; Etienne Wenger, a writer of books on communities of practice who asks very good questions; Sandra Walden Pearson, a social change agent from Australia. There were many others, whose names escape me, who helped reveal a very rich world inhabited by a retired man in Florida who’s figured out what works for his community.

Although an email list has been the backbone for the MPD-Support community since it graduated from a distribution list 12 years ago, Tollen uses a surprising array of auxiliary tools to support his community. In an “always on” Web 2.0 world of Frappr maps, it turns out there are a lot of email-based tools to send reminders (www.memotome.com), alerts (e.g., Google), etc. A real-life community is likely to depend on many different tools.

Where does an active support list like Tollen’s lead? Suddenly Tollen is speaking to physicians and researchers at a conference, he’s compiling a list of 400 frequently asked questions, he’s conducting the most detailed survey of people who suffer from the MPD diseases, and for the first time he may just be giving voice to a community with an “orphan disease,” which fortunately makes for a very interesting dozen episodes of CPsquare’s “Grand Rounds.”