CPsquare

There is nothing like a project to focus community effort.  The leaders of the “Connected Futures” workshop are in more or less constant touch planning version 3.  This post is a little out-take from our conversations as as we get ready to launch.

The initial idea of the workshop was introduced by email, and followed by several conference calls, using a phone bridge and Skype chat for note taking. A wiki was used to develop material and regular calls used to keep up to date with development. Throughout both of the previous runs of the course a Skype chat was kept open for the facilitators.

The first run of the workshop, had a “home base” in Web Crossing, with other technologies introduced during the five weeks. The second run used a Google Group as the home base.  This time we’re using a beautiful implementation of Drupal designed by Howard Rheingold and friends.  Although the home base matters, all the other technologies that are used during the workshop matter as well because:

1. Choosing and using technology is a primary topic of the workshop
2. The workshop leaders seek to present the workshop in a transparent way, where the practice of organizing and presenting is open
3. Workshop participants are themselves invited to introduce technologies to the group — and explain the logic of adding a specific tool

Each home base choice and the additional technologies that were introduced open new possibilities and create some frustrations for everyone (participants as well as workshop leaders), including dilemmas about where to post things, the chance of missing what was considered important, and monitoring each other’s “presence” in the workshop.

We keep re-writing the workshop description as we think through the details, building on our experience from last time.  Beverly Trayner inserted an off-hand comment in a draft of the Participant’s Handbook, “Of course, it’s the reason that we choose the tools we use in the workshop that’s really interesting.”  Or was that Nancy White?  This is not a scholarly environment where you get to keep track of who contributed what.

We don’t know or can’t say all the reasons for picking a tool — each of the workshop leaders probably has different reasons because each brings a different perspective. And each offering is an experiment — an instance of practice that hopefully gets better and better.

One reason that the tools we use for this workshop seems problematic and keeps changing is that there is an inherent tension in the workshop because of our practice orientation:

• The tools we choose have to work for workshop participants, to help us work and learn together creatively for 5 weeks;
• but they also are for illustration and experimentation — they are supposed to illustrate what you can do at home and how you might think about the choices you  continually make on behalf of your community;
• and finally we are constantly picking up new tools or using them in new ways (e.g., copying interesting uses from the communities we are involved in)!

Nevertheless, here are some top-of-mind criteria for the tools we are using in this workshop:

• Collectively they serve different purposes and they are varied enough for us to do those various tasks together.  We try to demonstrate the various things that communities frequently do together using the different tools that are available.
• They are common tools, not too exotic.  We have a bias toward open source or readily available tools.
• They work together more or less, although they were not “designed together.”  Dealing with the reality of separately designed tools is something community leaders and technology stewards have to deal with every day.  We illustrate diverse possibilities but also have critical conversations about the challenges that these tools raise for communities and their leaders.
• We’re not using too many tools: as practitioners we want to share everything, but previous workshops suggest that enough experience with each tool and with the issues that come up when they are combined is more useful than a shallow survey of everything that’s out there.

And  here are the tools we’re using this time through:

At a recent conference here in Portland, Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, commented that “saying ‘It’s not done‘ is good news for a community.” Particularly in an organizational context, that can be hard to take. But there’s a lot of wisdom in Ward’s comment: it’s one of those “glass half empty” kinds of things. And as we all know, keeping a community alive and moving forward can be discouraging if we forget how much has been accomplished incrementally, one conversation at a time. I’ve always thought that “keeping it going” is a very worthy goal for leaders of communities of practice. It’s actually a big deal when you think about it. This collection of notes from CPsquare and the communities of practice part of the world is all about “keeping it going.”

Five CPsquare members (Bev Trayner, Bronwyn Stuckey, Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, Shirley Williams, and I) are offering the “Connected Futures” workshop again, starting on April 20. We’ve offered it twice before and want to make it be more eye-opening and useful for community leaders who are seeking to help their communities leverage all the technology resources that are out there. I’ve just added some participants comments to the description page.   Nancy White, has just written a marvelous description of an urban ornithology community using one of the tools we present in the workshop on her blog.

The venerable Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop ran this past winter (with a rather small group). The workshop itself still keeps growing and evolving and creating a deep impression on participants after 10 years. Three of the prospective presentations for CPsquare’s “research and dissertation fest” this Spring are directly related to the foundations workshop.

CPsquare had a conference on all things wiki this January. Some of the materials from that session are on CPsquare’s new (public) MediaWiki. The wiki is quite incomplete (even the SPAM prevention and registration procedures are frustratingly incomplete), but it is starting to have some valuable material on it. Shawn Callahan mentioned recently that a corporate team he was working with was worried about the incompleteness of wikis. They were immensely relieved when they realized that incompleteness was handleable in the sense that you could classify pages as “incomplete” or as “more complete than not” as we’ve done with the tools pages here.

This year’s “shadow the leader” series is in its 9th month. We are talking with a wikipedia editor who has a life in the real world. It’s been a fascinating story about attention, political conflict, apprenticeship, morphing conversations, and not giving up. Just paying attention to the ongoing ups and downs of practice has that feeling of inconclusive insight, but it also underscores Gardner Campbell’s comment that “Wikis only work in practice, not in theory.”

So I guess that the world of wikis, like the world of communities of practice, is beavering away in the background. In fact “Wiki” just had it’s 14th birthday! Have a look at all the Tweets about it.

There’s a lot of unfinished business, but the glass is more than half full!

We’re pleased to announce that CPsquare members are offering “Connected futures: New social strategies and tools for communities of practice” — a five week workshop for community managers, designers and conveners to explore social strategies and  tools to support them (referred to by some as Web2.0) for the second time.  It starts November 10, 2008.  We anticipate offering it twice a year. This workshop is a hands-on, practice-shifting, dive into using new technologies to meet community needs. At the end of this workshop, participants can expect to:

• Become more confident in managing and combining tools to support a community’s orientation and ongoing activities
• Develop a deeper understanding of how new tools enable one another, are adopted and supported in communities
• Have productive and lasting social connections with other participants, leaders and community conveners.

New technology stewards are especially encouraged to join us. The workshop includes virtual field trips to successful communities and deep dives into the use of new tools. We will explore many freely available technologies, including web conferencing, teleconferences, blogging, RSS syndication, microblogging, social bookmarking and tagging, wikis, mashups, and social networking.  Each aspect has the support of experts and leaders in areas such as organizational, educational, government and enterprise communities. Participants will work through a process of thinking through new social strategies and technologies to support the ongoing life of their respective communities of practice. Participants will also receive an advance electronic copy (PDF) of parts of the forthcoming book “Digital habitats: stewarding technology for Communities” (Wenger, White, and Smith 2008).

More information about the workshop is here:

http://cpsquare.org/edu/cp2tech/

Registration page is here:

http://admin.cpsquare.org/Default.aspx?pageId=72847

It’s true that we’re forcing it into the calendar, offering it without a lot of advance notice, but we’re trying to build on the experience of the first offering in the Spring of 2008.   We’ve decided that we can’t really claim to offer a “practice-altering” workshop unless the presenters collectively practice offering it — at least twice  year.

One thing we’re exploring this time is how different Web 2.0 tools build on each other.  That matters in a workshop setting, but it also shows up in the trajectories of individuals and communities.  Another is how to use a new “Action Notebook” chapter in “Digital Futures” in a workshop context.

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!