CPsquare

The Fall 2008 Research and Dissertation Fest lineup includes 5 presentations (one more is in the “possible” category).

• Alice MacGillivray: Perceptions and Uses of Boundaries by Respected Leaders — a Trans-disciplinary Inquiry – November 4
• Pamela Stern and Christopher Harz: Serious games for first responders — improving design and usage with social learning theory – November 6
• Melanie Brydges Down: Knowledge sharing in Standard AERO’s redesign group – November 11
• Andreas Lloyd: A system that Works for Me — an anthropological analysis of computer hackers’ shared use and development of the Ubuntu Linux system — November 13
• Lilia Efimova: Between passion and work– blogging practices of knowledge workers — December 2

How we do it: Overview of what these events are about, how they work, etc.

This is a snapshot of an internal wiki page that has developed over the years to guide this series

Context, assumptions

• The CPsquare community values rigorous research and ongoing practice. We have considerable depth on both sides and we seek to find ways in which one can inform the other.
• This series allows authors to hold dialog around their dissertations, theses and big research projects with the CPsquare community (which embraces academic researchers, thought leaders and practitioners in many community domains).
• For authors, presenting to CPsquare community, with members who are well versed in the theories, methodologies and practices around communities of practice can be very useful and gratifying. Especially if they are “solo” works, which can be often extremely isolating experiences for their authors. This fest offers a sympathetic social context in which to unpack some issues.
• For researchers and practitioners in CPsquare, having others share their research work extends our access to high-quality and in-depth efforts to understand what is CPsquare’s domain.

Activities and processes

• The Research and Dissertation Fest can include several different types of projects:
  • proposals - people looking to clarify their research proposal
  • work-in-progress - people part way through seeking assistance in some challenge
  • findings - people presenting what they have discovered and positioning it in the context of other’s completed research and understandings.

Organizing and supporting a presentation so that it meets everyone’s needs requires some careful design and skillful facilitation. Here is some process advice:

• Be careful to not try to present all of 4 years of work in 20 minutes. Choose a key theme or challenge.
• Before the event you should share a summary resource that gives the key issues of your research and makes it readily accessible to a busy audience (takes less than an hour to read).
• You may choose to share your entire dissertation which is posted in the CPsquare Knowledge Base
• Usually the online dialog begins a few days before the conference call for the presenter and community members to pose some questions that help unpack the context of the research.
• The presenter introduces the research in the conference call for no more than 15 to 25 minutes and the discussion is a free give-and-take around the issues that come up.
• Everyone is invited to explore questions asynchronously afterwards, as interest demands
• The presenter is invited to stay involved in the asynchronous conversation if it continues.
• Summaries are always appreciated and valued.

Also note:

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!

This edition of a newsletter sent to Alumni and Friends of CPsquare 3 or 4 times a year is another grab-bag of resources and tidbits about communities of practice. And it’s also a reminder about two upcoming workshops, one in English and the other in German (beginning January 29 and April 30, respectively). I’d planned to publish it through the “friends of CPsquare” email list, but have found maddening technical problems with the list, so I’m resorting to alternative means.

ARTICLES

When people identify websites, pages or postings about the subject, many of us will tag them as such and you can see what’s been tagged recently by “everybody” by checking one of these two links:

http://del.icio.us/tag/communitiesofpractice

http://del.icio.us/tag/communities_of_practice

A less current but perhaps more considred collection of resources is taking form here in a wiki with bibliographic resources on the subject. YOU are invited to contribute: http://cofpractice-biblio.wikispaces.com/ The hope is that it have the bulk of the most important resources and critical notes about the nature and importance of each resource.

BLOGS

A very diverse collection of ideas and reports can be had by looking at blogs by members of the CPsquare community. You will always find something surprising and often find things that are really interesting:

  http://www.cpsquare.org/member_blogs.htm

The story about how this aggregation of blogs came to be is reported on my blog:

http://www.learningalliances.net//2006-08/a-feed-of-blogs

CPsquare organized a really great dialog in Florence, Italy last Fall. We had the fifth floor of a palazzo to ourselves for 3 days of great convesations and good food. Before and after the dialog we used a blog to support our self-organization and reporting processes:

http://pratodialogue.wordpress.com/

Beverly Trayner and I published an article about the idea of using technology to change the way we meet face-to-face (from a communities of practice point of view) in an ACM publication:

http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=best_practices&article=34-1

A similar experiment where Nancy White used a blog to record a speaking tour in Australia is another interesting example of “exposing the practice” using technology. It contains handouts, pictures of food along the way, and even audience feedback:

http://australianoctober.blogspot.com

Etienne, Nancy White and I continue to plug away at our “technology for communities of Practice” report. It has turned out to be about how communities manage their infrastructure, particularly focused around the role of a technology steward. Here’s a definition and some comments:

http://www.learningalliances.net/2006-12/definition-of-technology-steward

GLOBALIZATION

Much further afield, you might enjoy this article in The New Yorker about an Australian sociologist’s efforts to help reframe the war in Iraq. A lot of interesting ideas about social interaction and learning:

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/061218fa_fact2

At the other extreme from a communities of practice approach, consider the news about TutorVista, which offers unlimited tutoring in dozens of different subjects or for dozens of different tests:

http://www.tutorvista.com/press/mediacover.php

WORKSHOPS

The next offering of the Foundations workshop is scheduled to begin in ONE WEEK, on January 29th. If you know someone who’s interested, please let them know:

http://www.cpsquare.org/edu/foundations/

There’s a rather massive effort to present the workshop in German starting April 30th. If you or someone you know is interested, drop me a line:

http://www.cpsquare.org/edu/german/

Here are notes that Bronwyn put together after the first of a monthly series of Skypecasts sponsored by the Education Practice Group:

Our first gathering was small but a strong in the exchange of ideas and experiences. In the circle were John (USA), Etienne (USA), Sus (Den), Tony (Sth A), Heidi (USA), Shirley (UK) and Bron (Aus) and Heron (USA) with apologies from Jacquie (Aus) and Nick (HK). We met in the Skypecast and in a group Skype chat and the 90 miutes had flown before we even knew it. So this new way of being together is off and running!!! We discussed a number of community issues surrounding CoPs and accreditation and recognition:

• What’s in it for me and what’s in it for us?
• Carrots for luring and motivating people?
• What does CoP engagement looks like in a portfolio?
• Why would people need to prove their engagement?
• Recognition for individuals in and beyond the community?
• Recognition and profile of the community?
• Is it about the community giving recognition to members or supporting them to recognise
  it out for themselves or both?

Want to know more? Then you will have
to listen to the dialog (link below) but here are some great links that were posted
while we spoke…

Shirley offered this paper on eportfolios (part of her great expertise) http://www.learningcitizen.net/articles/ePortfoliosRevolutio.shtml

Heidi suggested we take a look at OpenACS? As a more dynamic and open source tool that comes out of an MIT group. http://openacs.org/ irc://irc.freenode.net/#openacs

Tony reminded us about all the great work being done at Sakai http://www.sakaiproject.org

Heron shared this link is to a 3-hour interview with Ray Kurzweil. Who in his opinion is one of the great thinkers/futurists/inventers/etc. alive today… focussing on the impact of technology on human civilization over the next 30-40 years. http://www.booktv.org/feature/index.asp?segid=7515&schedID=457

Here’s the link to the audio recording of the conversation in an MP3: We hope to get this thing happening in podcast to a wider network as well. Now it’s up to you…

What shall we talk about in our next meeting on January 3rd - first Wed of the year (well in the USA). You don’t have to be a member of CPsquare to participate. Just show up!

Over the past several weeks we’ve gathered feeds from all of the blogs kept by CPsquare members that we know of — and have made an effort to track the rest of them down. Those that we found now appear in one feed that makes for very fascinating reading!

The following page has a link to the combined feed, to an OPML file that you can insert into your feed reader, and it has an HTML version with the headlines from the 17 different blogs that we’ve identified so far:

http://www.cpsquare.org/member_blogs.htm <== no longer valid, as we’ve put links to individual blogs on the CPsquare’s front page

So the question comes up: is this the periphery or the center of CPsquare? Something to think about!

Although the cases that have been presented in CPsquare over the past three years have been extremely diverse, useful and interesting, I’ve felt some dissatisfaction. Several of the large research efforts that have been presented have somehow abstracted and summarized things so that I’ve felt like we were missing some of the messiness and passion of actual community life. (Life INSIDE CPsquare provides a nice chaotic contrast to neat summaries, I have to say! I think we could go deeper and have a fuller and more sustained relationship with the practice of community leadership.

With that in mind we’ve set up a series of visits with the leader of a health-related support community that’s been active since 1994. The community has a web site and an email list and is interesting in that it welcomes patient, family members, and health professionals to join. I met the community’s leader at an iCohere conference last fall and was impressed with the insightful things he had to say, even though he has not been involved in the meta-conversations about communities of practice at all.

So this will be an experiment with “sustained virtual accompaniment of a community leader” over the course of an entire year. We’ll have minimal online set-up and fallow-up, mainly meeting with him on the phone on the second Wednesday of each month. I expect that we will learn a lot about the ambiguities, ups and downs and simplicities of community leadership.

In September 2003 a group of academics and practitioners from around the world met in Amsterdam to discuss ‘phase change’ in a community of practice. Online participation preceded and followed the face-to-face meeting, providing different opportunities for exploring the issues and gathering insights. The Amsterdam Dialogue built on earlier work in 2002 – the original Setúbal Dialogue. Some participants were involved from the start; others have joined along the way; all share commitment to developing their professional practice and understanding the dynamics of community and knowledge development.

At various times in our journey we have thought about working together to create a final document, even a book, about what we learned from the experience. In fact we speculated that producing a concrete outcome is both a sign of maturity (which we aspire to) and an incentive to further development. However, as with many good ideas in distributed communities this has not (yet) come to fruition. In the meantime it would be a pity not to share some of our notes, reflections and work-in-progress and so here they are. The intention of each paper was to write a summary of the sub-topics that were part of the online and face-to-face workshop at the conference at Amsterdam. Each person, or group of people, interpreted this task in a different way so our shared learning is offered here in different forms. Each chapter remains loyal to the interpretation of the members who wrote it rather than to any overriding genre for the document as a whole. This offering represents an eclectic exposition, ranging from poems and diagrams from flip-charts to more formal and analytical papers situated within theoretical frameworks. Each section represents an experiment with genres and approaches, and provides a springboard for ongoing discussion and further research.

Download the 38 page report: Notes on Phase Change in a Community of Practice

Starting on December 16th, we’re launching a new monthly series at CPsquare named “The Practice Field.” It will focus on the various practices that thrive around CPsquare (or in the field generally) but which are not the subject of the kind of research presentations we have in the highly successful Research Forum that Etienne leads.

The Practice Field format will be reminiscent of the Research Forum. It will include an online presentation that shares a tool, tells a story, and then explores related questions. Then we have a teleconference, usually toward the beginning of the month. The teleconference is recorded and anybody who missed it can listen to it. That discussion is followed by some online discussion for a week or more after that. Each Practice Field session has an interlocutor who is a “friend of practice” and volunteers to helps make sure that the richness of practice makes it into our conversations.

We’re starting with a study by Marco Bettoni of CPsquare itself. In January we will focus on a community of school heads in The Netherlands.