CPsquare

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.

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.

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!

A resource that’s been developed in CPsquare would be more useful and could get help from the whole world is a catalog of books, articles and other resources about communities of practice. Version one of the “public” wiki is now open for use and contributions here:

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.

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.

“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

The connection between the Foundations Workshop and CPsquare has always been close in the sense that people who’ve participated in the workshop seem to end up being major contributors to (and beneficiaries from) CPsquare and we’ve often sought to recruit guest speakers from the CPsquare membership, but the connection hasn’t always been obvious or direct. During the past year it’s seemed important to strengthen the connections in ways to support both spheres of activity.

Almost a year ago Joitske Hulsebosch, Ancella Livers, and Meena Surie Wilson did a project in the February 2005 workshop where, building upon a previous project, they querried workshop participants and CPsquare members for stories about cross-cultural issues in communities of practice. The result was a fascinating report called Cultural Crossings. Unfortunately it’s taken a whole year to make sure that everyone involved agreed with the authors that it was OK for their stories to be shared. In the meantime, the first author, Joitske Hulsebosh has blogged about the project and the guidelines and it’s obvious that they could be useful to a wider audience.

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

Etienne Wenger’s proposal “Learning for a small planet; a research agenda” is available on Etienne’s website. About 60 members of CPsquare and their guests are discussing the document for the next 5 weeks.