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:

Four members of CPsquare, Bronwyn Stuckey, Jeffrey Keefer, Sue Wolff, and Sylvia Currie, are facilitating a session on SCoPE that begins this coming week: Managing Multimembership in Social Networks: Oct 27-Nov 9, 2008. This is done in conjunction with the a mini-conference as part of the Facilitating Online Communities course that is currently proceeding.

Multimembership refers to being a member of several social networking environments, communities, platforms, and technologies at once. You know, I blog here and Tweet there and participate in Facebook over there (among many others); but how do I manage all this? Considering how many peope involved in the CPsquare community face similar challenges, how about exploring the issue(s) with us?

We are thinking broadly about our topic, and want to reach as wide an audience as possible to get the most ideas out there from the many people who face the same challenges. If you are interested in being a part of this, or cannot attend yet still want to add your voice in some other manner, consider taking our quick and painless online survey so we can get some data to share with the participants when we begin our session.

After last January’s Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, Karen Guldberg and Jenny Mackness conducted in-depth interviews with almost half of the participants to try to understand what was going on in the workshop — with a view to describing what lessons could be applied elsewhere. They’ve presented their work at a conference and will soon be submitting it to a journal.

The Foundations Workshop is truly an ensemble, community production, so continuing in that spirit, if’ you’ve participated in the Foundations Workshop previously (or are a member of CPsquare), you’re invited to read and discuss their work during the coming week. And, after reading their working paper, please join us to talk with them in a teleconference next Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 20:00 GMT on the CPsquare phone bridge.

You may already have access to the discussion space (which contains the paper and a PowerPoint presentation that we’ll use on Thursday). If not, get in touch (mentioning which workshop you attended). It would be great to be able to reflect on their good work and help them take it further. The stated goals of their research are:

• to appreciate the learner perceptions and experience of the learning environment in terms of the domain, the community and practice; how did learners make use of the learning space offered by the workshop and co-create their learning through interactions with each other?
• to understand the interrelationship between communities of practice, advancing technologies, social and emotional dimensions and learning in this community

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.

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.”

This week we are having a great dissertation fest session, where CPsquare member and soon to be Lieutenant Major Pete Kilner, presented research that grew out of his work with CompanyCommand, a community of practice in the U.S. Army. It was really great to see how Pete combines a passion for his community, insights into the dynamics of distributed communities, and careful research. The topic of his dissertation was the connection between socially relevant representations (SRRs) and willingness to contribute to a community. An SRR is any representation that contributes social-context information that is not part of the domain-area information in question (Hoadley and Berman 1995; Hoadley 1999; Hoadley and Kirby 2004).

One of the stories that Pete told about himself is that some time ago he objected to putting effort into republishing bits of CompanyCommand conversations in a magazine. He shared an article from the November 2006 example of Army Magazine that contained online conversations with photos of community members in action. (Interestingly, the article did a great job of providing a lot of social context.) It turns out that exposing their community like that has been very helpful in developing awareness of and credibility for the community, not only with the community’s sponsors, but also with members as well. It gives community members a sense of the context around their community. No community of practice is an island, I guess. Charting the sea of the larger social context is really important.

An hour after I’d finished posting the audio recording of our opening session with Pete, I ran across a blog posting by Nancy White, “Bringing Guests into a Workshop, Community or Meeting“. It’s a great example of practice and reflection that’s happened in or around CPsquare, in community meetings or workshops, that was discussed in a “Help in Real Time” session and then turned into a useful artifact for others to use.