• 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.

• Alice MacGillivray: Perceptions and Uses of Boundaries by Respected Leaders — a Trans-disciplinary Inquiry – November 4
• Pamela Stern and Christopher Harz: Serious games for first responders — improving design and usage with social learning theory – November 6
• Melanie Brydges Down: Knowledge sharing in Standard AERO’s redesign group – November 11
• Andreas Lloyd: A system that Works for Me — an anthropological analysis of computer hackers’ shared use and development of the Ubuntu Linux system — November 13
• Lilia Efimova: Between passion and work– blogging practices of knowledge workers — December 2

How we do it: Overview of what these events are about, how they work, etc.

This is a snapshot of an internal wiki page that has developed over the years to guide this series

Context, assumptions

• The CPsquare community values rigorous research and ongoing practice. We have considerable depth on both sides and we seek to find ways in which one can inform the other.
• This series allows authors to hold dialog around their dissertations, theses and big research projects with the CPsquare community (which embraces academic researchers, thought leaders and practitioners in many community domains).
• For authors, presenting to CPsquare community, with members who are well versed in the theories, methodologies and practices around communities of practice can be very useful and gratifying. Especially if they are “solo” works, which can be often extremely isolating experiences for their authors. This fest offers a sympathetic social context in which to unpack some issues.
• For researchers and practitioners in CPsquare, having others share their research work extends our access to high-quality and in-depth efforts to understand what is CPsquare’s domain.

Activities and processes

• The Research and Dissertation Fest can include several different types of projects:
  • proposals - people looking to clarify their research proposal
  • work-in-progress - people part way through seeking assistance in some challenge
  • findings - people presenting what they have discovered and positioning it in the context of other’s completed research and understandings.

Organizing and supporting a presentation so that it meets everyone’s needs requires some careful design and skillful facilitation. Here is some process advice:

• Be careful to not try to present all of 4 years of work in 20 minutes. Choose a key theme or challenge.
• Before the event you should share a summary resource that gives the key issues of your research and makes it readily accessible to a busy audience (takes less than an hour to read).
• You may choose to share your entire dissertation which is posted in the CPsquare Knowledge Base
• Usually the online dialog begins a few days before the conference call for the presenter and community members to pose some questions that help unpack the context of the research.
• The presenter introduces the research in the conference call for no more than 15 to 25 minutes and the discussion is a free give-and-take around the issues that come up.
• Everyone is invited to explore questions asynchronously afterwards, as interest demands
• The presenter is invited to stay involved in the asynchronous conversation if it continues.
• Summaries are always appreciated and valued.

Also note:

Multimembership refers to being a member of several social networking environments, communities, platforms, and technologies at once. You know, I blog here and Tweet there and participate in Facebook over there (among many others); but how do I manage all this? Considering how many peope involved in the CPsquare community face similar challenges, how about exploring the issue(s) with us?

We are thinking broadly about our topic, and want to reach as wide an audience as possible to get the most ideas out there from the many people who face the same challenges. If you are interested in being a part of this, or cannot attend yet still want to add your voice in some other manner, consider taking our quick and painless online survey so we can get some data to share with the participants when we begin our session.

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.

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

1. My Favourite Chapter, a place to raise discussion around a chapter that really speaks to any of the book discussion participants, especially those that may be outside the set themes of the discussion.
2. CoPs and Technology, a location to discuss any issue in and around technology and how it relates with communities of practice.

We look forward to a few more weeks of stimulating discussion. It is never too late to join us for this!

In connection with the AoIR 9 and EPIC 2008 conferences (which are quite different but happen at exactly the same times), we expect to meet for a day of conversation somewhere in Copenhagen on Sunday, October 19 from early morning (9 am or so) to late afternoon, followed by dinner. We may ask for a financial contribution from participants, depending on where we meet and how many of us there are. Generally we use an “open space” format, adapted to meet the needs of an ongoing community (we do some planning in advance, but decide the details on the spot). We always try to share back what we talked about and learned, but it’s a very informal process.

There are a handful of CPsquare folks who are presenting papers, panels, round-tables, etc. at the AoIR 9 Conference. A future blog posting will list them.

CPsquare’s password protected Web Crossing space is at: http://conversations.cpsquare.org/P/CP2aoir08 . We’ll use it for:

• posting arrival & departure times in Copenhagen
• working out lodging plans (sharing rooms, staying nearby each other, figuring out directions)
• planning our time together (beginning Tuesday night October 14)
• figuring out where to meet on October 19

Our Web Crossing space is open to:

• all CPsquare members
• anyone who’s identified themselves or expressed interest in joining us. Send an email to John Smith or use the “Ask a question” form on the main CPsquare website: http://cpsquare.org/contact/ to get access if you don’t already have access.

We’ll use cp2aoir08 to tag resources, photos, tweets, etc.: http://delicious.com/tag/cp2aoir08

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.

The proposed dates and agenda for the discussion are:

• PLANNING: Up to July 27th - purchase and read/scan
• NEGOTIATING: Sunday July 27th - Sunday August 3rd - one week for voting on preferred chapters Here is a link to the table of contents for both volumes
• DISCUSSING: Monday August 4th (times to be negotiated) to plan and start a month of online discussions and events
• REFLECTING: September 1-7 - Writing up our community book review wiki

This is free for CPsquare members (member click here to go directly to the discussion), and is open to non-members for $50. If not a member, consider joining to attend this discussion for free.

Hope to see new and seasoned discussants alike at this summer discussion and learning experience!

This year’s leader is Davee Evans, who was an engineer at Apple Computer for a number of years, transitioned to design and usability, now is consulting with small companies around usability. His involvement with Wikipedia began with a 4 day rally to save a page about “Shambhala” from deletion. In retrospect, the page’s content was poor but the topic was worthy. Now, 1,000 edits, 500 comments on articles later, Davee is involved with a set of related pages. He’s deep into issues such as the different notions of “serfdom” in European and Asian societies.

Although participants in the process can be completely anonymous, Davee has found a convivial group with loosely shared values (around the process of improving an article) who have a mission or goal to produce a better, more neutral, and more all-encompassing encyclopedia. They depend on and cite scholarly sources that are peer reviewed, neutral, and credible. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.

Collectively, editors who hold those values hold “a vigil” around a topic, watch for changes that might go against their values. Davee monitors about 300 pages, checks them once or twice a day.

After our first session, Davee thought that the CPsquare conversation, reflecting on an interesting year and a new avocation, was very enjoyable. Interesting to consider whether the wikipedians are a community and to bring out an insider’s view of how it works. In the longer term Davee is interested in policies and approaches to conflicts and how they promote or hinder a sense of community. You’re invited to join us in that inquiry, which applies to all communities of practice.

At the end of our first session (on July 9th) we reflected on our conversation: our collective note-taking in CPsquare teleconferences — occasionally with different versions of the same sentence — is a group process for converging on the truth — the sense of the group. (Similar to wikipedia articles converging on “the truth”?) We wondered what it means when everyone is absorbed in the thinking and stops taking notes, which does happen.