1) SCoPE seminar (online)

Online Conferences: Professional Development for a Networked Era, a 2-week online seminar at SCoPE, begins on Monday, April 11, 2011. During this event we will share experiences and advice on how to plan or participate effectively in an online professional development conference. Our facilitators, Lynn Anderson and Terry Anderson, have written a book based on their research and experiences. It will be of interest to anyone who has participated in an online conference of any kind, which is just about everybody! As with all SCoPE activities, you are welcome to participate according to your own time and interests, and there is no registration required. Just show up! Please join the dialogue; together we can improve the online conference experience.

We will kick off the seminar with a Web Conference in Elluminate – Monday, April 11, 10:00 PDT, 17:00 GMT

2) Gathering of Online Community Enthusiasts

The second event is the 3rd annual Gathering of Online Community Enthusiasts, (OCE2011) May 12, 2011 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The theme this year is planning excellent community events and will be a full day of talking about and experiencing various event formats, strategies, and technologies. There will be an opportunity to participate from a distance as well, so watch the OCE2011 space in SCoPE. If you plan to attend, RSVP here.

Shared Thinking: June 23-July 2, 2010
Facilitator: Nicholas Bowskill
How can we make group thinking visible? What is the value for learning, reflection, and community participation? During this 10-day seminar we will be introduced to the research and development work on the Shared Thinking project through University of Glasgow.

What is Shared Thinking?

• Shared Thinking as Group-Oriented Enquiry Based Learning
• Shared Thinking Research Website

SCoPE seminars are hosted by BCcampus and are free and open to the public. There is no need to register; just show up!

Executive Networks Global Talent Network Field Trip & Docent Tour with Lauren Klein

Executive Networks has peer memberships for senior HR and Learning executives from hundreds of global companies — including more than half of Fortune magazine’s Global Most Admired Companies. Members join because they need fast answers and proven solutions in today’s highly disruptive business environment. Executive Networks has 11 leading Human Resources peer networks.

http://executivenetworks.com/

More details here: http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Visting_EN_Global_Talent_Network

This SCoPE seminar begins Monday and will be of interest to CPsquare members!

Evaluation Practices for Informal/Self-Paced Adult Learning: April 13 – May 1, 2009

Facilitators:
William Owen, Director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, University of Northern British Columbia
Caren Levine, Consultant, Etheoreal, specializing in adult learning, communities of practice, and social media

Description:
Informal learning is a key part of our personal development. It is also becoming a larger part of our working lives. But in an era of increasing accountability, we begin to question the role of evaluation for informal / self-paced adult learning…

What are existing rationales for evaluation of informal / self-paced adult learning (for the learner and the provider/developer)? What accountability do we have to learners / providers/ funders? What’s different about evaluating informal learning vis a vis formal learning? What are emerging practices for evaluation informal / self-paced adult learning? What are some challenges in the field? What are the opportunities in the field?

During this 3-week online seminar, we will begin to address these and other questions as we informally learn about the role and practice of evaluation in informal learning.

About SCoPE:
SCoPE seminars are free and open to the public and are designed for busy people like you — no registration, no obligations to participate for the full length, and no homework. Read along via email, the web, or RSS. Seminars are moderated by volunteers in our community and are archived for future reference. To contribute to discussions and to customize your visits you’ll need to create an account on the site. It’s a quick process.

Here is a direct link to the forum with further details about this event:
http://scope.bccampus.ca/mod/forum/view.php?id=1691

Please spread the word!

In a few weeks we start a short online conference on “Wikis all around the world and all the way” (WAATWAAT, for short, so you can see the growing list of related resources here).  It starts on January 7th and is a case-based inquiry into how communities use wikis and how wikis fit into the larger context of community activities and other tools.  The schedule is still evolving.  It’s free to CPsquare members and $75 for guests.

CPsquare workshops

We’re just wrapping up the 2nd offering of the Connected Futures workshop.  The basic model of readings (from Wenger, White and Smith’s “Digital Habitats” book that’s still “forthcoming”), practice using new tools, reflection on one’s own community and one’s own experience of using the tools, with case studies and field trips thrown in seems to be very effective, though time-intensive.  It pushes us all out of our comfort zones and makes us appreciate the support we can get from (as well as give to) others.  We’ll be offering it again in April or May.  The workshop description is here.

The next offering of our “Foundations of Communities of Practice” workshop begins online on January 19, 2009.  If you know anyone who’d be interested, please steer them toward us.

It really is all connected

The WAATWAAT conference is an outgrowth of last year’s Long Live the Platform Conference.  It incorporates and builds on our practice of going on “field trips” that has evolved in the Foundations Workshop.  But it also reflects the conversations we’re having in this year’s “Shadow the Leader” series with wikipedia editor davee evans.

Last year’s visits with Beth Kantor and the community around the “NPtech” tag continues to provoke experimentation and further learning.  We’ve found, for example, that tagging is a technology that is best introduced early in the Connected Futures workshop.  Every CPsquare event now has a tag so that people outside the community or not attending can see what we find to be useful, if they are interested.  Here’s a very practical and useful book about the design of tagging systems:

Gene Smith, Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web (New York: Macmillan Computer Pub, 2007) http://isbn.nu/0321529170

In connection with the “nptech” tag, have a look at an excellent reflective and critical piece about the nptech community, the difference the tag has made, and its evolution here.  And don’t miss this marvelous visualization tool.

Hackers’ communities as communities of practice

I’ve thought of our research and dissertation fest is one of those CPsquare events where you kind of “have to be there.”  Talking with someone who’s spent years studying a community is compelling and rewarding.  But it turns out that insights from those conversations pop up months and years later and sometimes after the CPsquare conversation you have to go hunker down alone to study what’s been presented.  I actually printed out and read Andreas Lloyd’s thesis (“A system that works for me – an anthropological analysis of computer hackers’ shared use and development of the Ubuntu Linux System”) a few weeks ago.  Lloyd spent 6 months from April to November 2006, studying the social dynamics of the Ubuntu Linux developers’ on-line community.  You can download it here.

More or less at the same time I ran across a book full of good stories (even though it’s more on a “sociology level” than the usual “community of practice” level) about hackers that’s really fascinating:

Tim Jordan, Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism. Polity (2008), Paperback, 200 pages http://isbn.nu/9780745639727

A provocative book

Lest you think all we talk about in CPsquare is about technology, here’s a book that’s just come out that’s extraordinarily rich on many different levels.  (Interestingly it’s written by another IRL alum, like Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger, Mimi Ito and Gitti Jordan, to name four others that I’ve been reading or bumped into personally in the last 2 months.)

Charlotte Linde, Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)  http://isbn.nu/9780195140293

Having fallen in love with so many of the communities that I’ve visited, helped, coached or supported over the years, I really like how she frames her relationship with her subject:

“A final epistemological note: the reader may note my admiration and affection for the people we worked with, and for MidWest itself, and may conclude that I have fallen into the anthropological trap of falling in love with one’s subjects. I agree that I am guilty of that. However, I can note that it has been at least eight years since I worked with them: the blindness of first love has had time to wear off. Also, I have studied other corporations where my most positive emotion was an appreciation for the difficulty of the challenges their members faced but not an admiration for the companies themselves. So I suppose I am arguing that MidWest was truly admirable–the reader may believe me or chalk it up to a protracted infatuation. I can only hope that my admiration has improved rather than contaminated the analyses I present.” p 37

Growing CPsquare

Finally, I’m working on building appropriate organizational infrastructure for the CPsquare community.  That involves updating the list of members blogs on the CPsquare website as well as moving the “friends of CPsquare” email list to a new platform (soon).

John
*
* John D. Smith ~ Voice: 503.963.8229 ~ Skype: smithjd
* Portland, Oregon, USA  http://www.learningAlliances.net
“It is not happiness that makes us grateful but gratefulness that makes us happy.” – Br. David Steindl-Rast