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One of the sessions we had at the Setubal dialogue was on the question “Does Community need a place?”
Which actually leads onto the question what is a place. My answer at the moment is yes: and place is broadly defined.
I noticed this quote today:
Learning in Clubs that Meet in Physical Places
Educational psychologist Frank Smith made the observation that much-if not most-real learning happens in a “club.” He pointed out that when people get interested in something for their own reasons they gravitate towards and meet regularly with groups of fellow enthusiasts. What better place to learn than in a environment where the focus is on what you are interested in, the people share your enthusiasm, and the community is diverse in age, ability, experience, and in most cases culture. Clubs are unintimidating forums where people of all ages and abilities can develop social networks and learn in communal environments.
This is from an article about The Milken Educator Virtual Workspace quoting Frank Smith. (Another elusive name on the net, widely quoted, yet I can find no original material.)
Clubs? I had never thought of this context.
I remember Mark visiting a rock hunters club for the first time. He was welcomed, helped through the initial entry barriers so smoothly they almost were not there. The word community has slipped in here.
We had survived THEKA on Friday and Saturday. We got home late on Saturday to a Portuguese style banquet provided by Rogerio, our caterer. There was no doubt about it, we were both tired and stimulated. Sunday was a dialogue day. EQUAL, on Monday was a quite different enterprise. How did we end up with two such different events??
The Plan:
Drive to the Gulbenkian (a plush museum/events centre in Lisbon), and join with a morning session on Communities of Practice. In the afternoon, take part in a complex validation process for a workshop Bev had taught last year. If successful this was to be offered as one of the EQUAL products.
This was the first point of debate: Is this thing we were analysing a Product?
I still don’t quite understand the whole picture, but this I did get: EQUAL is about inclusion, and among other things, works assisting various communities (called NTN’s: national thematic networks) in their functioning. They range from ex prisoners, micro businesses for women, farmers, AIDS related and fishermen . . . .
Bev’s workshop was to answer the question “How can I better keep connected with the community in the online world?” and the answer was “Provide an introduction to web 2.0 and social software tools”. Blogs, wikis, RSS, Flickr etc. POLEN2.0 was the result.
Polen = pollen.
There are of course a range of other options that aspire to do this. What is special about EQUAL and Bev’s contribution is the deliberate attempt to pass ownership and power to the participants (in this case the leaders of some of the NTN’s). And to allow ownership of the community by the members.
Hence Etienne’s presentation in the morning.  A sign of the deliberate and active effort to promote a community of practice perspective. In my opinion, a powerful methodology in this context. I met some guys with strong passion and purpose – and with a good grasp of attitudes and orientations that help a community leader to succeed.
The validation process.
Simple really: there were several groups: Authors, Peers & Experts, participants, Administrators. Bev presented an overview of the workshop, several others spoke from their point of view, there were some searching questions . . .
Then we went into a huddle with our groups. We had a form to fill out, and then we came back together for some further dialogue.
Simple, yet profound. The EQUAL process did not quite fit this particular product, yet there was a recognition that with some adjustments, it had a useful role to play. I hope Bev gets a chance to go through this process once more at least. They described the product as a ‘living document’
Tea out later. 
Bev a lot more relaxed.
I think a Professional Leadership Community approach has a lot to offer. But what do we need leadership in teaching for?
Brian Lord and Barbara Miller have this to say:
At present, we do not know enough about teacher leadership to make bold claims for its effectiveness in helping reforms go to scale or improving student achievement. However, preliminary research findings point to one critical feature. Teacher leadership is often treated as a strictly instrumental strategy to increase the number of professional development providers – putting in place more people to provide more contact hours with classroom teachers. This approach offers limited promise of achieving reformers’ goals. Yet, when teachers leaders are part of a wider, systemic strategy, within a well-aligned constellation of district supports (e.g., assessment and accountability systems, programs for curriculum implementation), the potential for impact is greater. For this reason, we view teacher leadership less as a magic bullet for quickly solving the “numbers” problem and more as a critical feature in a coherent and focused set of district policies to address the substantive challenges of reform.
From: Teacher Leadership: An Appealing and Inescapable Force in School Reform? Brian Lord and Barbara Miller, Education Development Center, March 2000.
I agree. Instrumental strategies in any enterprise involving people will do less than succeed. People are not merely productive units. It’s a complex equation: look after the people and a lot of organisational goals will come into line.
Professional learning communities. A rare thing!!
I’ve taken a bit of a break from the community aspect of my life. The change from the College to the University has accounted for most of this. However, things have moved on. First the West Coast visit and now next week we have our next session on community nurture/community development, and the first for 2007. Then Derek stopped in for a chat after dropping off the guest speakers at our e-portfolio seminar. His question: How can Moodle best support communities? He is using Moodle blogs, but they have no comments feature. We have Moodle 1.8 installed to we had another look, and yes, it’s true: no comments feature in a Moodle blog.
It took me a bit of time to remember, but this is actually by design, not accidental omission.
Martin Dougiamas talks about it in the moodle docs forum. This from an oft quoted May 2006 post:
Yes, there are no comments allowed for blog entries in (Moodle) 1.6. Let me explain why.
Firstly, I want blogs to be well-integrated in the Moodle experience. I do not want to just bolt on Simpblog or WordPress. Most standalone blogs have comments because there is no other way for readers to discuss things (one assumes they don’t have blogs). In Moodle though we already have lots of ways for discussions to happen, and everyone has a blog.
So what I’m trying to do is extract the part of of what makes Blogs unique (ongoing unstructured public reflection) and make that work well first, then carefully link it in with the other tools in Moodle. It’s much harder to take features away than add them carefully.
Firstly, there is a big conceptual overlap between a blog and a forum. See this listing of all the discussions you’ve started – it looks suspiciously like a blog. I am convinced that if we allow blogs to effectively be like user-centered forums that a lot of important discussion will float out the blogs (which are not course-based) and make “keeping up” with a particular course very difficult.
If you think keeping up with forums is hard now, imagine if every user has their own.
Secondly, if you want to use blogs to collect reflections from students and comment on them or grade them then we already have Assignments for that. If there is something missing about Assignments then perhaps we need a new assignment type, but anything you are assigning students to do for feedback is an assignment.
Overall, I view blogs as an external window to the course activities, a “skin” of not-private comments that you might monitor via RSS etc and use to access the forums and other activities within Moodle.
So my aim for 1.6 was simply to have a basic framework up that we can get used to and better see where we might go with the next level. If you want WordPress go and install it now, I’m not stopping you. 
So, there we have it: the reason why we have no comments is that it will not support the courses that are going on. Nothing about reflection and interaction with other students. I think Martin does not quite understand the essential difference between blogs and forums.
In at FLLinNZ we have had a short sharp discussion last year on communities and the best or at least not a bad support platform for a distributed voluntary association community. As far as Derek’s question goes: Moodle is not really designed with this in mind. You can of course try to do it, but it’s just a little more difficult. Moodle is designed as a Course Management System. Martin said this: “If you want WordPress go and install it now, I’m not stopping you.” – he could also have said “Moodle is open source, if you want comments, go and write the code – it’s just we won’t be incorporating into the main release . . .”
From the same forum:
It’s about ownership and location more than whether the communication is possible.
And:
To me, it makes more sense to notice how people use something and add functionality to enhance that, not restrict functionality to force your viewpoints of how people should be using something.
Today, someone posted their diffuculties with their homework assignment to their blog. Now, there is no way for anyone else to express they had similar difficulties or suggest a solution for that person. Currently, they have to leave the page and enter a discussion or forum. They can also post a seperate blog entry that can end up several posts away and gives no indication without reading the entire entry that the two are related. The current approach is so disconnecting and it cripples the entire social flow.
Besides, what makes a Blog different from a Forum is not commenting. Their difference is conceptual. Blogs are a place to publish and share personal thoughts, ideas and experiences. A Forum is a place for people to post content or topics of interest to start discussions. The technology behind them is exactly the same. They are both basically CMS. Commenting is just an added funtionality that lets other users interact with other users who read that post, making it SOCIAL SOFTWARE. Removing that functionality from either one decreases the value of each one equally. (Eric Fino)
This does not auger well in using Moodle for a community support platform.
I’ve written before about my conversations with another significant Moodle user, when I asked “Show me one Moodle site anywhere in the world where there is an active vibrant community happening . . .” We couldn’t find one, and even thought the discussion continued intermittently for several months – still no joy. Moodle supports some great discussions on SCoPE, but has yet to really move to being a community environment there. But at present it’s the best I can find.
I work with Tim Greig most Tuesdays and Thursday. Through his MLIS course he has come up with some quite interesting reading. Last week he has gave me a copy of Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century by Henry James and others.
The readers digest summary is found in six blog posts in Henry’s blog.
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/10/confronting_the_challenges_of.html
Henry James is a prolific blogger in the field of gaming and media.
Derek Wemnoth has blogged about this, but I cannot actually fnd the post on his blog at the moment.
Why this came up was thinkng about more learner centered courses. My presenting question is this: “What skills do we need to be part of a participatory type course where most of the learning is supposed to be around a personal learning trajectory?”
His definition of Participatory Culture
 For the moment, let’s define participatory culture as one:
- With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
- With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
- With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
- Where members believe that their contributions matter
- Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).
Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.
I think in our most particpant centred courses w come across evey one of these bullet points as challenges. It’s partly a mindset issue. Technology at the stage we are at at the moment often is a barrier (in what it doesn’t do or does poorly, or in it’s ease of use or otherwise, or it’s inflexibility . . .). And so is the problem of constraints in a formal bounded taught course. And the Assessment issue. Just for starters.
The main course I have in mind is TT701: teaching meets technology. This is a level seven course, and aspires to provide opportunity for a personal learning pathway. We’ve just finished for the second time. Now we are wondering how we can improve and what we can learn
More from Learning Ecology, Communities, and Networks: Extending the classroom (eLearnspace) What is needed?
What is needed? We need to bring elements into the learning experience that allow for extension beyond classrooms…and integration with “real life”
We need to be able to “tap into” a means of staying current within our fields. Courses can’t serve this function when information is rapidly expanding.
We need to create a knowledge construct that is adaptive, self-sufficient, and permanent (at least until the learner not longer needs it).
And this:
In order for learning institutions to be relevant in an era of life-long learning, they must move past the concept of start/stop learning. Learning is fluid. It impacts other areas of work and life. It’s ongoing.
Courses are start/stop. As stated previously, a course is an artificial construct, erected at the start of the term, that assumes to provide learners with the information and knowledge they need…and is torn down twelve weeks later. A learner who has a knowledge need six months later doesn’t have access to the environment where he/she initially learned. After four years, the entire environment (i.e. the program) that awarded the degree is gone (inaccessible by the learner). A learner certainly still has the ability to contact Instructors after the program is finished, but the richness of the learning environment has largely faded. In this situation, not only the knowledge specific construct (course), but the entire ecology (program) is gone.
A better, more permanent, option is required. I note that this is the same question that many of the papers at CPE addressed, the question of contexts for lifelong learning. Also: the picture presented in this quote of learning in time limited course structures is exactly what some people want. They want to be told exactly what to learn.
Still being very interested in this topic. The chance to present at a conference where there is some understanding of CoP’s was too good an opportunity to miss. CPE 2006. Continuing Professional Education Conference. There were really three threads: recertification requirements, keeping up with developments in a profession and adult education.
I totally omitted the slide show on community. Put in some more slides on blogs. But it was still too much, and we spent most time discussing the role of blogs as a new medium. Dialogue on blogs continued at most breaks over the next two days.
The Applied e-Teaching and Support qual that was developed at the College last year aspires to build a community approach to the learning process. We ran a pilot last year, with some success, althought we certainly learned a lot.
Here are a few blogs that have posted on this issue.
Mathemagenic Blog (Lilia Efimova)
http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/17.html#a805
http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/12.html#a794
Her references are to George Siemen’s comments in elearnspace on an “Ecology of learning“.
Lilia’s view is often not positive:
Why communities are not good? Communities are nightmares for novices: lack of clear roles or structures, overflow of information, discussions that you join in a middle, strange language…
Why courses are good? Good course instructors take into account learners needs and level of being (choosing to be) self-directed and provide guidance that makes our path through learning exciting and efficient. Courses provide context that makes us more ‘disciplined’ then we would be by ourselves: pushing to learn things we would never consider important, doing assignments to articulate silent ideas or connect loose ends, initiating brainstormings that should lead to some tangible results and not only random thoughts. Link
There are two specific discussions involving Blogs I am interested in at the moment:
- The differences between online journals, blogs and forums.
- The relationship between bloggers and communities.
“CoP’s and Bloggers” was my last minutish presentation at BlogHui, and I shared briefly on the Saturday, which was day 2.
I used the same slideshow on communities that I had created for e-fest last year. Stunned silence at the end of it at BlogHui. They had little to say on the key question “What are the key facets of community, have you ever been part of a real community, how does it feel?”
Maybe I shouldn’t have been suprised, this was a bloggers conference after all, and there were more typical bloggers present than a-typical.
Kai Koenig had told his story on day one: The macromedia blogs. This constellation of several hundred blogs has all the hallmarks of a genuine community of practice: identity, belonging, care for the domain, shepherding of the practice, informal emergent membership, discipline of members who get out of line. Etc. So there is at least one community build around blogging tools.
Things have moved on a lot: what I’d have said in May 2005 (BlogTalk Downunder) has now changed a lot.
I have been interested again how much difference there is in our understanding of basic terms: Community of practice is sometmes assumed to be ‘Online’.
I think a better term is distributed.
Here is a summary of my talk on “A vision for community”
Communities exist. They are bound together by a common practice, a common goals or common activities. Sometimes this is formalised by a professional association.
Communities are nurtured (or not) by events and activities. A professional association meeting. A conference or a workshops. A guest speaker. Informal links and collaborations, café meetings between individuals and groups.
Adding online support: a personal and community space
Once upon a time communities were more localised. Now with the power of internet connectivity they have some added tools to nurture the community.
This is my interest: the Online support for the community of practice that exists – or could exist.
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