CPsquare

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.

This paper is an example of one of the activities that seems to always be going on behind the scenes at CPsquare — writing up and sharing our experience, in this case at the Webist Conference.

Participation in international virtual learning communities; A social learning perspective by Beverly Trayner, John D. Smith, and Marco Bettoni

Keywords: international virtual learning communities, international online communities, identity of participation, communities of practice, social learning perspective, e-learning, technology wishes

Abstract: A promise of new web-based technologies is that they provide learning opportunities for people distributed across the globe but who can participate across time and space in the same virtual learning community. How do they do it? In this paper we report on some of the experiences of a virtual learning community which has members from twenty-five countries across different time-zones and who communicate in English. Through a communities of practice perspective we focus on the social nature of learning and describe some of the challenges and design issues raised in this community as it explores and develops practices for learning in an international online environment. While our focus is on social practices, and on developing an identity of participation in relation to those practices, we also make some wishes for web-based technologies that would better support these practices in an international virtual learning community.

Join us for conversations with Steve Denning (http://www.stevedenning.com/), CPsquare members and guests about Steve’s most recent book, “The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling.” The book has many useful and interesting ideas for people working in the communities of practice area. The CPsquare community has a tradition of reading books together, combining online discussion and telephone calls over a short and intense period of time.

DATES: July 17 to August 4.

Phone calls and themes:

• Mon July 17 - Opening questions and scope: Narrative and Leadership
• Thu July 20 - Values and intentions
• Fri July 28 - Communities and collaboration
• Thu August 3 - Knowledge: stories that are characteristic of CoPs

THEMES:

• Mon July 17 - Opening questions and scope: Steve will tell the story of how he discovered the power of storytelling in organizations, and use it to introduce the eight major narrative patterns in his book, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, with particular reference to the meaning of leadership and springboard stories. He will introduce the five main dimensions of a story, and review how they relate to the eight narrative patterns of high value business narratives. (The conversation will refer particularly to Chapters 1 and 3 of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling)
• Thu July 20 - Values and intentions (behind & communicated by stories): The conversation will focus on chapter 6 of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling. It will discuss the four different varieties of organizations values and review the role that narratives can play in transmitting and enhancing values.
• Fri July 28 - Communities and collaboration: The conversation will focus mainly on chapter 7 of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling. It will review the similarities and differences of workgroups, teams, communities and networks. It will review twelve narrative methods for generating communities and high performance teams. It will discuss how communities thrive on values, rather than rules.
• Thu August 3 - Knowledge - stories that are characteristic of CoPs: The conversation will focus mainly on chapter 8 of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling. It will review the nature of stories that transmit knowledge, as well as the challenges in successfully implementing knowledge management programs.

COST:

• Free to CPsquare members
• $30 for others (see Guest policy below)

VOLUNTEERS CAN BRING A GUEST

• An intensive event like this requires much concerted effort (see task list below)
• Each person who volunteers (whether they are a CPsquare member or a paying guest) can invite one other guest who participates for free

TASKS for which you can volunteer

(sign-up sheet opens the week before the event)

• Facilitate one of the 4 phone calls
• Produce summary notes for one of the 4 phone calls
• Facilitate one of the 4 online discussion themes
• Produce a summary of one of the 4 online discussion themes

WHO’S INVITED:

CPsquare members, friends and guests

If you’re joining us, please order the book now: It’s not much fun if people try to participate in the discussion without having the book handy. (In fact, it’s best if you’ve finished reading it by the time the discussion starts!)

HOW TO REGISTER:

If you are NOT a CPsquare member you can still register for this event.

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.

Keeping track of memory, forgetting and learning in communities of practice

Context: In June 2002, twenty-five people who at some stage had met online in the
Foundations of Communities of Practice Workshop gathered at a beautiful location
in Portugal with a loose agenda to share their work, ideas and practices about
communities of practice. Many of the conversations that took place led to some
long-term relationships, collective learning agendas and new practices. One of
the practices that developed out of this Set

“Weaving Together Online and Face-To-Face Learning: A Design From A Communities Of Practice Perspective” by John D. Smith and Beverly Trayner come out of our collaboration in and around CPsquare and was presented at the AACE E-Learn 2005 Conference in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Abstract: Weaving together online and face-to-face learning improves the quality of working in both media. Based on the observations of nine different experiments that went through a similar process of weaving together these two media we share our observations of outcomes and an evolving design framework from a community of practice perspective. Arguing that weaving participation using different media in succession is different from blended or hybrid learning, we suggest that careful design of an online ramp-up can make a face-to-face event more potent, and the subsequent online collaboration more productive. Key elements of this design process are inclusion, interaction, and social structure designed for the negotiation of meaning. We offer heuristics that help trace the threads from first online contact to the development of productive relationships at later phases in an emerging community of practice.

Download the paper

Although there are many innovations and design elements that work really well in the Foundations of Communities of Practice Workshop, we try new ideas and experiments every time it runs. One element that has been more or less constant since the workshop first ran in 1998 is to have guests join the workshop for a visit that lasts a day or two, allowing workshop participants to get acquainted with practitioners from the larger field of communities of practice.

In the spirit of the workshop, we gathered previous guest speakers and participants for a short conference consisting of phone calls and online discussions to consider whether and how the guests visits might be improved. There were 19 of us who participated: BJ Berquist, Barb McDonald, Bronwyn Stuckey, Cyprien Lomas, Doris Reeves-Lipscomb, Etienne Wenger, Grace Judson, Jerry Yoshitomi, Jeff Stemke, John Parboosingh, John Smith, Joshua Plaskoff, Kelly Edmonds, Kerstin Lambert, Lesley Shneier, Nancy White, Stephane Acel, Tom Ruhl, and Verna Allee.

We discussed how social interactions that had been important to use personally as vehicles for our own learning and participation in communities of practice. There was a strong consensus that a guest visit was a really important element of the workshop — not a guest lecture, but a visit with a more senior colleague who might just as well bring an issue they’re working on, share a case they found interesting, or generally “talk shop.” We eventually articulated the following goals for the guest visits; participants could get:

• Information from the guest speaker’s specialty or point of view;
• experience and understanding of engaging with the guest;
• experience with organizing a “visit at a distance”;
• a window opened into the broader community of people who deal with communities of practice in various sectors .

We decided that it was important to treat a guest as much as possible as though they are entering a community as well, so it would be good to give them a sense of context as well — who’s in the community and what we’ve been talking about. To be better hosts, we’re thinking we should provide:

• A one-page summary of the Domain Inquiry week discussions (if it’s available yet);
• a one-page summary about the projects that are going on during the guest visit;
• a table summarizing who’s in the workshop (and a clearer idea of who the participants are who are serving as hosts)
• a guarantee that guests are welcome to rove around the whole workshop but not required in any way to do so

We discussed the issue of participant workload: since the workshop leaders, facilitators, and mentors are all passionately involved in the topic of communities of practice, it’s tempting to keep adding to the Foundations Workshop. We actually decided that “less is more” and that we would have one fewer guest, allowing more time to get organized to host the two guests in the schedule and putting more emphasis on being good hosts.

Of course there is something wonderful about just staying in touch with the network that exists around the Foundations Workshop; it’s even better to get together and do some good design work as well!