Wednesday, 4 February 2009
'New and extraordinary insights' at ELESIG
Rhonas Sharpe has made a couple of posts about ELESIG (one of the academic networks I manage the online space for) on her blog. She asked members what benefit they found from the experience of being a member of the community, and got some great answers:From Esyin Chew's "I have experienced something new and extraordinary insights that have challenged my preconceptions about digital literacy and learners' experience through ELESIG.”
to Jana Dlouha's "ELESIG is the working group with great potential for changes in higher (and other) education system as it works with learners' perspective - this is not as usual as it should be! Access to this research (and meta-research, researching the ways of research itself) is available through ELESIG work - often providing free methodological and other resources."
I'm pleased too that Amanda Jefferies was able to say that "The online NING network for ELESIG has been an excellent way to keep in touch 'virtually' with other researchers into the Student Experience and to be inspired by examples of innovative practice. "
More on Rhona's blogLabels: communities of practice, e-learning, elearning, elesig, HE, learner experience, onlne communities, Reach Further, research
posted by Helen Whitehead 12:45 PM
Monday, 9 June 2008
Best Practice: Summary: Distinguishing Learning Communities and Communities of Practice (CoP)
This is a summary by Lynn Tveskov of part of the recent discussion in the Best Practice Models community on Communities of Practice. From here this post is all Lynn's summary:
In the spirit of the practice we are setting up around public blogging about our discussion, I will put names to distinct ideas and comments in the summary. Contributors to the discussion were: Sylvia Currie, Alex Hardman, Jenny Mackness, Nana Matsunaga, Alberto Ramirez, Glynn Skerratt, Bronwyn Stuckey, Jack Tseng, Lynn Tveskov, Etienne Wenger, Helen Walmsley, Carole Weale, Helen Whitehead, Bill Williams, Rowin Young
Helen Whitehead put together this wonderful side-by-side comparison and I filled it in with content from the discussion.
Learning community
Community of Practice
The essential goal is to pursue some academic objective. (Alberto Ramirez)
CoP can pursue any kind of purpose. (Alberto Ramirez)
Learning agenda may be set.
Learning "evolves" and can be "accidental" (Nana Matsunaga)
All participants join at the same time
Participants join (and leave) at different times
Clear motivation to take part - it's part of their course
Voluntary: Have to be motivated by "what's in it for me"
Participants move (and can be guided through) community-building and group-forming activities (cf Salmon's 5-stage model)
Members of the community are at different stages, though the community can move as a whole through stages (but not the same ones as Salmon's model)
Can become a community of practice. You can try to set up the conditions for a community of practice to develop
Learning takes place but is more informal than in a course-based community
Tutor-led and facilitated; easier to facilitate.
May be facilitated but members have much more ownership. More challenging to facilitate
Likely to be more hierarchical in structure, which will influence relationships (Jenny Mackness)
In a community the core group or group of leaders will probably have a less hierarchical relationship with members.
(Jenny Mackness)
Responsible for one’s own learning
You take responsibility for more than your own learning in a community.
(Bronwyn Stuckey)
Formal learning at the core
Might include formal learning but it is not the core. (Bronwyn Stuckey)
Learners may or may not take on the role of practitioners.
Learning is closely associated with what you do/practice. It is more than an interest it is about enactment. Learning is grounded in real experience but the learners are in the role of the practitioner, behaving as a member of the profession they aspire to be part of. So more than examining at an authentic task - being in an authentic roleYou are learning it in order to enact it, apply it, refine what you do - not just know it. (Bronwyn Stuckey)
“…the "social body" of a classroom or a course. In this case, it does refer to an "institutional" structure, which…may or may not become a community of practice, or any kind of community at all.”
…if by "learning community" people simply mean that a group of students have peer-to-peer learning-related interactions. In this case, the community of practice concept is more a heuristic than a goal, and it seems definitely "easier" and also usually more realistic given the life trajectories of students.
(Etienne Wenger)
Development can be more organic or spontaneous, independent of organizational structure.
“Good CoPs develop from the ground up – if prospective participants simply *want* to be part of it and contribute to it then that’s of much higher value than a top-down approach trying to create a framework that the authors think might be attractive. Once started and growing, the natural evolution of the community will take care of overall direction and critical mass.” (Glynn Skerratt)
Learners negotiate the building of shared meaning.
Members negotiate not only shared meaning, but also the structure of participation (Alberto Ramirez)
Other Points
- Not all learning communities or courses can or should be communities of practice.
- Community of practice perspectives can usefully inform the design of traditional courses and learning communities, perhaps even leading to change in a system or institutional culture.
Bronwyn Stuckey
Would we want all courses to be communities? I don't think so. I know when I worked in learning development with people preparing regulatory accounting courses - they were about learning the laws and knowing them inside out and passing the regulatory tests...the application was held until later when you were in practice - and then could join a community. This was a necessity in this particular course.
Alex Hardman
There is a time and a place for community within learning and a time and a place for hiding yourself away and reading the texts.
Jenny Mackness
[A teacher] can espouse to the values of a community of practice. Thinking of a course as a community of practice will influence the way in which the course is designed and how it will be taught.
Etienne Wenger
It is often the case that the membership from the outside that students bring to the classroom will make it difficult to create a community inside the classroom without acknowledging and honoring the conflicts in identity and practice that this creates for students.
At the same time, I think it is also useful to hold these perspectives as distinct so as to be clear that you can hold one without committing to the others. So you may use a "community heuristic" in your design without having to worry about whether students are "really" becoming a community. Or you may see that a strongly instructor-led learning event actually opens students to the realities of a target community in an experiential way. Different combinations are possible, and valid if applied for the right purpose.
Labels: communities of practice, CoPs, elearning, learning communities, online communities
posted by Helen Whitehead 8:26 AM
Sunday, 1 June 2008
Work Literacy
Tony Karrer and Michele Martin have just announced the launch of Work Literacy - a network of individuals, companies and organizations who are interested in learning, defining, mentoring, teaching and consulting on the frameworks, skills, methods and tools of modern knowledge work.
Their goal, they say, is to "create a vibrant network of individuals, companies and organizations interested in participating in a variety of ways: learners, testers, experts, teachers, coaches, and I'm sure many others. The network is intentionally defined in a way that will allow it to emerge over time, but there are some very interesting people involved already."Labels: communities of practice, elearning, knowledge work, networks, social media, workliteracy
posted by Helen Whitehead 2:43 PM
Monday, 12 May 2008
Technology stewardship
A post from 2006 in Learning Alliances defines the concept of "technology stewardship"
"Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs. Stewardship typically includes selecting and configuring technology, as well as supporting its use in the practice of the community."
I guess that's certainly what I am - a technology steward - but if the phraseology hasn't caught on in the time since Dec 2006, then it obviously doesn't mean as much to the IT and community-using population in general. Neither has "e-moderator" caught on outside the UK, although it's a very similar role - while the e-moderator doesn't necessarily select and configure the technology, many do have this function and expertise, and I suspect they are of more use to a community if they do.Labels: communities of practice, e-facilitation, e-moderating, emoderating, online communities, online community, technology-stewardship
posted by Helen Whitehead 10:28 AM
Monday, 21 April 2008
Analysing communities for the key participants
There are all sorts of reasons why one wants to analyse an online community - finding out who are the busiest and most informative posters is one possible requirement. I just spotted an old article from New Scientist (well, July 2007) that describes how researchers at Cornell University, New York, and Microsoft Research in Washington State have developed a way to analyse postings and the relationships between them to find out who are the movers and shakers in a community. Of course as they studied Usenet groups, it isn't exactly cutting edge research, but it reminds me that there are many methods for analysing interactions, and i really should bring more of them together in a blog post some day.
Research as far back as usenet analyses let alone more recently has shown that the activities of certain influential people are key to the success or otherwise of a community. Anyone who has lost a community due to a strong individual or group stifling or driving off others, knows it can work both ways. Any community manager worth their salt will have developed ways to deal with such people.Labels: communities of practice, e-moderating, e-moderation, emoderating, online communities, online community
posted by Helen Whitehead 5:18 PM
Thursday, 6 September 2007
Lessons for ELKS from ALT-C...
I'm the convenor of the ELKS community of practice - that's E-Learning and Knowledge Sharing- and it's a community of expertise in e-learning in HE, which is run for the UN's GAID (Global Alliance for ICT in Development) initiative by BDRA out of the University of Leicester. It has several other institutional founders around the world (4 continents in fact!), and with an Australian Omnium web interface. So there were several people and sessions at ALT which were of interest to me wearing this hat, particularly as one of the strands was e-learning and internationalism.
In a session yesterday afternoon Alannah Fitzgerald spoke about social computing and the sustainable support of learning communities. The community she spoke about met the needs of a very specific niche group - volunteers and workers in micro-credit and micro-lending organisations based on Professor Mohammed Yunus' Grameen Bank model. I guess an international version of the credit unions we have in the UK.
They've created a network of resources etc. aggregating information about successful projects for others to learn, including real and fictional case studies, guiding questions and reflective practice. Really helping to empower individuals and their communities and I'd love to have her talk about to the ELKS community.
I hadn't heard of the software she mentioned to aggregate metatags from the social network - SUPRGLU, must check it out. A feed aggregator for blogs relevant to ELKS would be a great idea for our community.
Karen Robinson discussed her study about how cultural and linguistic backgrounds of students affected their use of e-learning and whether technology could support them better. Her story of the student pasting other people's contributions and his own into a translator before he could post on the forum alerted me to that possible issue in ELKS discussions being entirely in English (though I am thinking of adding Spanish to the mix in some way).
Also, the use of discussion boards requires a higher level of English than listening to lectures and writing essays: and there can be cultural differences in how a forum (for example) actually looks (colour of the background!), let alone the culture of behaving in the online space.
Tore Hoel also had a message for me - "Syndication and aggregation work better that overarching frameworks or platforms." In other words, people don't necessarily want an all-singing all-dancing community that is a new, separate and time-consuming place they have to go and visit - even unique content isn't necessarily appropriate - it may be better to provide an aggregate of information that is appropriate to our project in the ways that members already like to interact.
This morning I heard Marc Dupuis talking about a European virtual campus - lots to learn here about working together, and if within Europe is difficult - going global is even harder! "European collaboration is difficult," he stated - and I have to admit from my experience of EU projects I concur. Copyright and intellectual property are of particular importance across institutions and nations - must get that issue clear for ELKS. Linguistic differences cannot be underestimated. I wonder if lessons from a European project like this can be extrapolated to global collaborative projects?
Chris Douce of the Open University talked about the plethora of standards across Europe for e-learning - so what will the situation be like when you add in the rest of the world? How difficult might it be for us to provide universal simple learning such as online tutoring skills courses or learning objects?
Paul Bacsich reminded us that teaching may be in English but "secret learning" may well be in the students' native language(s) - Arabic in the case of the Arab Open University. He also gave us compelling reasons not to have more than 9 chapters in a report - sage advice!
As next year's ALT theme is about the digital divide, I think it's probably a cue to offer a short paper about ELKS, if we're still going at that point!Labels: ALT-C2007, altc2007, communities of practice, conference, e-learning, ELKS, global, internationalism, UN, UN-GAID
posted by Helen Whitehead 5:06 PM
Thursday, 19 July 2007
Blogs vs communities of practice
A community of practice defines itself along three dimensions:
- What it is about - its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members
- How it functions - mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity
- What capability it has produced - the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time? (Wenger 1998)
I've been reading an interesting post from back in 2004 comparing blogs and online communities of practice.
In summary:
What blogs provide that other web-based collaboration tools do not:
- Blogs are more respectful of their authors and of their audience
- Blogs are better connecting tools.
What Communities of Practice provide that a network of bloggers cannot:
- Communities are better social structures for problem-solving, knowledge stewarding and innovation
- Communities of practice are better social structures for learning
How blogs and CoPs live together?
- Blogger networks generate communities of practice (and communities of practice generate projects)
- Communities of Practice can use blogs to communicate with the outside world.
I wonder how that discussion would be updated now? Certainly you wouldn't talk about "weblogs" now! I might have a think about this and post my thoughts at a later date.Labels: blog network, blogging, blogs, communities of practice, emoderating, online community
posted by Helen Whitehead 9:06 AM
