Last Wednesday we met with Robert Tollen who was the community leader we shadowed the first year.  We ended up talking about managing community boundaries, about environmental disruptions, leadership responsibilities, and about specific technologies that work with an email list.  A few highlights:

• Tollen has consciously avoided tools like Facebook or Twitter that might be technically challenging for his elderly subscribers
• Volunteers retrieve information from the rather vast list archives to help individuals who ask for help
• Tollen himself uses 16 different email addresses: one to accumulate an archive of the list digests, another to accumulate searches, another for scheduled announcements, etc.
• It’s interesting to hear about the tools that Tollen has found to extend email functionality.  They are not necessarily “hot” but it’s fascinating to see how they are relevant and work in the context that he’s set up. Those tools have now been added to the CPsquare Email list wiki page.

At the end of our visit, Tollen reflected on the benefits of being listened to in the context of our shadow the leader series.  Another 1-minute snippet from the conversation reflects on how the leader benefits from the work of leading a community, too. Both of those comments suggest what our shadow the leader conversations have been like.

Next week we will catch up with Beth Kanter, who is the leader we shadowed in Year 2. She is now a visiting scholar at the Packard Foundation and has just moved to California which she’s been describing here: http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/vlog/ (packing the people, moving the car, checking the cello on the plane, etc.).

These are the cases presentations we have lined up so far, scheduled for Monday of each week via Elluminate. Check the SCoPE forum description for up-to-date times and locations of all live sessions.

• Paul Stacey and Andrew Marchand, The Learn Together Collaboratory (English)
• Diego Leal, Colombia Ministry of Education project (Spanish)
• Nick Lothian, Education Network Australia (English)
  

Here is the description from the forum:

When does it make sense to have a network of communities? How do you go about supporting a network of communities? These are questions many of us are grappling with and we are finding there are many issues and challenges to consider! This 3-week seminar will be combined with weekly live “case study” sessions where we will hear from community leaders in higher education. Together we will explore the aspects and issues that can lead to a need for a network of communities based on these study cases and the practices of the participants. This is an initial exploration around this topic and we will identify new tasks, opportunities, and actions that emerge from the seminar.

All SCoPE events are facilitated by volunteers in the community and are free and open to the public. Registration is not required and you are welcome to participate according to your own your time and interest. Latecomers, newcomers, and passersby are always welcomed. All discussions and presentations are archived for future reference.

Roy Greenhalgh: justifying the use of communities of practice and network analysis as approaches to study volunteer organizations

We know very little about the mutual support that exists between volunteers. Most scholars use the term support to mean management (Brudney and Williamson 2000; Hager and Brudney 2004). And management is usually restricted to three activities: recruitment, selection and retention. The last 30 years has seen the adoption of modern managerialism, which is odd considering that volunteers usually decide to gift their time and skills in an atmosphere supporting freewill rather than one of command and control. This doctoral study is using the twin lenses of Communities of Practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Lave 1992; Brown and Duguid 1996; Wenger 1998) and social network analysis (Wellman 1981; Hall and Wellman 1985; Wellman and Berkowitz 1988; Wellman and Wortley 1990; Scott 2000) to explore the micro support structures that are created, maintained and managed by the volunteers themselves.”

Roy will talk about his work and dissertation plans on Tuesday, May 26.

Marian Thier: Listening habits assessment instrument

Marian Thier is the founder of Expanding Thought. She has recently become interested in understanding people’s listening styles. A small research project has developed an instrument that assesses people’s listening behaviors as a function of habit more than conscious choice. If you are joining us for this session, you are invited to complete a ten-question survey that assesses which of four different listening habits you most commonly use during communication. It does not address how well or poorly you apply the habit. She’ll present the project and individual results on Wednesday, May 27.

Debra Beck: The Nonprofit Board as Community of Practice: An Exploratory Case Study

Debra Beck recently completed her EdD, at the University of Wyoming. This dissertation focused on describing how learning occurs in the routine activities of preparing for, and participating in, nonprofit board meetings. Evidence of a community of practice was found and linked to the qualities necessary to foster generative thinking and governing. A case study approach was selected to allow for immersion in the meeting environment and deep exploration of the experiences, roles and motivations of individual members. She’ll present her work on Thursday, May 28.

Mirjam Neelen: “Lurking: a Challenge or Another Way of Learning? A focus on Corporate CoPs.”

Mirjam Neelen, is working for a telecommunications company in Seattle and studying learning sciences at Open University, the Netherlands.

Online, or virtual, communities have become an important method of KM to leverage an organization’s intellectual capital by enhancing knowledge exchange and that way, support continuous organizational learning (Anthony, Rosman, Eze, & Gan, 2009). Although there is no solid understanding of why, in many cases an online community only has an active core group of posters and a much bigger group of people who read messages of others but not or rarely post (Kahnwald, unpublished paper). This phenomenon is called lurking. There are many different approaches to lurking. Some see lurkers as free-riders (Kollock & Smith, 1996) that limit the organizational intellectual capital, while others see them as peripheral legitimate participants (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In addition, Kahnwald (unpublished paper) describes lurking as another form of learning.

She’ll present her work on Tuesday, June 2.

Akila Sarirete: Knowledge management within CoPs

Akila Sarirete is reporting on work on the knowledge creation process applying the SECI model of Nonaka (Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization) in CoPs, using force field analysis. Akila will present her work on Thursday, June 4.

Alice MacGillivray: Use of the C4P Model in a CoP study: Good practice building better theory

In 2004, when Alice MacGillivray and John Smith presented at an AACE E-Learn conference in DC, we heard [then Major] Pete Kilner share his thoughts about a model implicitly used to help the CompanyCommand community thrive. Pete referred to it as the C4P Model: context, connection, conversation and content around purpose. It was one of those models that could be easily sketched on a napkin, was intuitively appealing, and was grounded in Pete’s extensive experience. The model had not been published in peer-reviewed literature.

Later, when I had the privilege of researching counter-terrorism communities of practice in Canada, I built the C4P model into the analysis of data as part of the larger study. The results support the value of the model.

She’ll present her work on Tuesday, June 9.

They began as a way to go beyond the learning we do inside CPsquare.  Sometimes a member finished a big piece of work and presented it to the whole community or consulted with the community at some critical juncture.  Gradually we formalized the process and it has served us well for sharing work that’s been done by CPsquare members and others.

At this point it’s something we do regularly.  We developed a set of notes on how to do it internally and now it’s shared on the CPsquare wiki as a page on our Research and Dissertation Fests.

* If you were ever a member of CPsquare you will have edit privileges
** Permission for workshop spaces based on registration and participation in the corresponding workshop.

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!

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:

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!

One of my motives behind setting up a wiki for CPsquare that’s outside Web Crossing is that I think it’s high time for us to share more of what we learn. (There’s a lot of learning to be done in the process of sharing and it’s a way for CPsquare as a community to serve a larger learning agenda.) Wikis seem to be a natural tool for that purpose because they lend themselves to sharing the workload.

An example of sharing what we learned that was itself a real learning process was how Sue Wolff led an innovative effort to report on the “Long Life the Platform” Conference about a year ago. During the conference we tried to gather comments in a Web Crossing wiki, but did not get many contributions. Then Sue set up a SurveyMonkey questionnaire to get additional comments (by allowing people to append a comment to a page). She then summarized and compressed the whole thing here:

http://cpsquare.org/2008/04/report-on-the-long-live-the-platform-conference/

I was impressed at the recent Recent Changes Camp how ingrained the whole idea of “reporting out via the conference wiki” can be for a wiki-oriented community:

http://2009rcc.org/wagn/Session_Notes

As an experiment I’ve put together a different kind of report (aiming for the easiest possible but still useful report that we might publish as a minimum) on our public Wiki:

http://cpsquare.org/wiki/WAATWAAT_Conference

(It demonstrates the use of a screen-capture and of an RSS feed Widget, by the way.)

Also, I’m proposing that we put ALL CPsquare help files out in public — often they’re most needed when you can’t get “inside” or are lost…

http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Category:Members_Help (This obviously has a long way to go, but, as Ward Cunningham said recently, “For a community, ‘incomplete’ is good news!”)

I’ve added a widget extension, so that we can include slides, videos, and RSS feeds in CPquare’s wiki. Just to demonstrate the use of the video widget, I’ve inserted some of those CommonCraft videos in these articles:

• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Blogging_tools
• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Wiki_tools
• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/RSS
• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Microblogs

We want you to request an account on the wiki. It’s set up to require people to identify themselves in advance so that we won’t have a SPAM-removal burden later on.

Won’t you join us in the continuing discussion within CPsquare? The ongoing conversation about who we are and what we’re doing as a community is important.  Alternatively, or in addition, jump in and contribute to our Wiki right now!

We expect to consolidate CPsquare resources from far and wide on this wiki. CPsquare members, current and past, as well as friends of CPsquare and others who are involved in the subject of communities of practice are invited to request an account. (Edit privileges will be limited in advance to assure a quality resource, but accounts will be freely given to those who want to contribute.)