CPsquare

One of the persistent questions we get from people who are thinking of doing the Foundations Workshop is about “how much time it takes to participate?” I think there are two approaches to the question, so I’m proposing a straight answer and a deeper answer.

The straight answer is that, generally, the more time people spend on it, the more satisfied they seem to be with the whole experience. Since participation and involvement is completely voluntary, the actual amount of time seems to vary a lot — from a couple hours a week up to 10-15 hours per week. (Occasionally there’s someone who just moves into the site and decides its their new home, so they’ve even spent more time than that…

We do try to model a number of stratagems to accommodate the participation of busy people in a community — like making audio recordings of the several synchronous events (available along with chat transcripts that give a sense of what was discussed). For some people, what takes a lot of time is becoming familiar with the technology (mainly a web conferencing platform) so the total amount of time depends on people’s background and familiarity with the technology.

The deeper answer has to do with the nature of communities of practice themselves. To the extent that the workshop really is similar to a community of practice, the time it takes is difficult measure. When the workshop is running, I find that conversations from it are running in my head almost all the time. Would that count? We try to encourage participants to bring their existing community projects to the workshop so that it becomes more ambiguous whether time is “for their project” or “for the workshop.” To the extent that participants accomplish real work in the workshop, the time is “free,” right?

Another aspect of the deeper answer is that people’s practice of participation changes over the course of seven weeks, so that we all become much more skillful at squeezing in 2 minutes here and 5 there to check-in and add a comment or kibitz or keep a conversation going. Those activities and competence at that practice are important and change the way we spend our time in many areas, although they certainly make time-keeping messy.

Of course, we have to admit that everyone involved in the workshop is pretty enthusiastic about the subject and about the way we are exploring it together, so we may be guilty of modeling a general behavior of spending too much time and we are disciplined in other areas, but not in tracking time the time it takes to participate. You will have to be the judge of that, I guess.

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

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.

Workshop alumni write back

One great thing about sending out the occasional newsletter to workshop alumni is that they write back. Sue Huckson, Program Manager at the National Institute of Clinical Studies, in Melbourne, Australia, writes:

Our work is getting more and more international recognition, not only for the application of CoP’s in healthcare but its application to support evidence implementation to improve patient care. We are currently reviewing a paper for publication - so hopefully that will be out soon.

The future for us will be interesting, NICS is joining the National Health Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Australia’s leading research agency. I think it displays a policy committment from a national perspective to support an evidence implementation agenda with many potential opportunities for NICS. The NHMRC have a strong focus on the implementation of clinical practice guidelines which has become a core activity of the Emergency Care CoP.

This edition of a newsletter sent to Alumni and Friends of CPsquare 3 or 4 times a year is another grab-bag of resources and tidbits about communities of practice. And it’s also a reminder about two upcoming workshops, one in English and the other in German (beginning January 29 and April 30, respectively). I’d planned to publish it through the “friends of CPsquare” email list, but have found maddening technical problems with the list, so I’m resorting to alternative means.

ARTICLES

When people identify websites, pages or postings about the subject, many of us will tag them as such and you can see what’s been tagged recently by “everybody” by checking one of these two links:

http://del.icio.us/tag/communitiesofpractice

http://del.icio.us/tag/communities_of_practice

A less current but perhaps more considred collection of resources is taking form here in a wiki with bibliographic resources on the subject. YOU are invited to contribute: 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.

BLOGS

A very diverse collection of ideas and reports can be had by looking at blogs by members of the CPsquare community. You will always find something surprising and often find things that are really interesting:

  http://www.cpsquare.org/member_blogs.htm

The story about how this aggregation of blogs came to be is reported on my blog:

http://www.learningalliances.net//2006-08/a-feed-of-blogs

CPsquare organized a really great dialog in Florence, Italy last Fall. We had the fifth floor of a palazzo to ourselves for 3 days of great convesations and good food. Before and after the dialog we used a blog to support our self-organization and reporting processes:

http://pratodialogue.wordpress.com/

Beverly Trayner and I published an article about the idea of using technology to change the way we meet face-to-face (from a communities of practice point of view) in an ACM publication:

http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=best_practices&article=34-1

A similar experiment where Nancy White used a blog to record a speaking tour in Australia is another interesting example of “exposing the practice” using technology. It contains handouts, pictures of food along the way, and even audience feedback:

http://australianoctober.blogspot.com

Etienne, Nancy White and I continue to plug away at our “technology for communities of Practice” report. It has turned out to be about how communities manage their infrastructure, particularly focused around the role of a technology steward. Here’s a definition and some comments:

http://www.learningalliances.net/2006-12/definition-of-technology-steward

GLOBALIZATION

Much further afield, you might enjoy this article in The New Yorker about an Australian sociologist’s efforts to help reframe the war in Iraq. A lot of interesting ideas about social interaction and learning:

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/061218fa_fact2

At the other extreme from a communities of practice approach, consider the news about TutorVista, which offers unlimited tutoring in dozens of different subjects or for dozens of different tests:

http://www.tutorvista.com/press/mediacover.php

WORKSHOPS

The next offering of the Foundations workshop is scheduled to begin in ONE WEEK, on January 29th. If you know someone who’s interested, please let them know:

http://www.cpsquare.org/edu/foundations/

There’s a rather massive effort to present the workshop in German starting April 30th. If you or someone you know is interested, drop me a line:

http://www.cpsquare.org/edu/german/

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.

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!

The June 2002 Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop included eight students from Royal Roads University. Here’s an article about it in the RRU newsletter: KM 650.

The issues and possibilities that come up in collaboration between a university and a community (such as the one we simulate in the worskhop or such as the one that has actually grown up around the Foundations workshop) are complex and quite interesting. Alice MacGillivray and I worked on a paper about the subject but haven’t yet finished it (or found the right place to publish it!) …

Each workshop includes guest speakers who share their knowledge and experience — philosophical stance and survival tips. This gem from Matthew Simpson caught my eye:

Cultural Diversity.

The biggest challenge we face is time zones and language. I don’t think these two things make the lion’s share of cultural diversity.

Quite simply, I have never encountered a ‘cultural’ difference that acted as an obstacle. Instead, the more diversity a community has, as long as members are sensitive to the communication loop and willing to ensure that it is closed, the better.

But that’s a mighty big IF. Often people do not tolerate communication gaps, and instead, interpret malicious intention or some other personal shortfall of the ‘other.’ When people do this, it’s important to find ways to deconstruct the basic beliefs that contribute to that bias. (as if that was easy to do)

In a nut shell, if people know how to listen, how to communicate, how to tolerate confusion and the act of clarifying misunderstandings… If they resist the temptation to attribute malicious intention… And if they all can speak the same language and transcend time zones… Cultural factors really add spice to community. The more diversity the better.

Two papers at the First International Conference on Communities and Technologies drew upon experiences in the Foundations Workshop:

• Adding Connectivity and Losing Context with ICT: Contrasting Learning Situations from a Community of Practice Perspective by Patricia Arnold and John D. Smith
• Babel in the international caf