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!

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.

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!

CPsquare has begun an occasional series that we’re calling our “Dissertation Fests” where members who have recently completed their dissertations present their work for synchronous and asynchronous discussion. At this point it looks like we could have two or three sessions every three or four months. The first to present in this series are Janet Salmons and Chris Johnson.

• Janet Salmons, Ph.D. Dissertation title: “Taxonomy of Collaborative E-Learning.” A qualitative study using in-depth interviews that were conducted online with twelve research participants from five countries. Her Ph.D is in Interdisciplinary Studies with a concentration in Educational Leadership/ Systems and a specialization in Collaborative E-Learning, from Union Institute and University.
• Christopher M. Johnson, Ph.D. Dissertation title: “Establishing an Online Community of Practice for Instructors of English as a Foreign Language.” This case study examined an online group’s degree and presence of CoP characteristics, as gleaned from CoP theory. The study analyzed the group’s synchronous and asynchronous communication to determine what areas received the most and least “airplay”, and how they changed over time. One topic for discussion is how this type of analysis can be used (e.g., comparison to another type of online group, maturity stage of a CoP, “health” of a CoP, etc.). His Ph.D. is Computing Technology in Education from Nova Southeastern University.