Category Archives: Community of Practice

My take on Communities

I’m a little tired.  Two nights out with the kids, Music with Mark at Burnside High School (where we made over $90 in the 15 minute interval selling drink and chips) and Drama/dance with Anna.  I was so tired last night I probablyu could have fallen asleep.  And my wrists are playing up a little.  But I did drift away in my thoughts last night and decided I do have a little to say about community.

Homework

The homework for this week: «Write a post to your blog with your thoughts about the meaning of an online community and its uses. Include a list of identifying features that YOU would look for when assessing an online group or network for features which make it a community»

Community is about people.  With a cause.  [eg Educational designer, Clinicalhealth education, Media studies teachers, Non-hodgekinsone lymphona sufferers, waste water engineers] Dare I say some passion and care.  Care for the cause and for other people.  They need some level of shared experience, history, trust and/or understanding.

Here it immmediatley becomes complex.  Poor understanding can be balanced by some good shared experieince – understanding emerges, or can emerge.  A high level of understanding can make up for lack of shared experieinces and help trust grow.

I think there needs to be some sort of core group: formally or informally recognised.  I often prefer the word leadership rather than facilitation.  But a particular type of leadership: frunction (ie what they do) rather than status (ie it’s Not a power thing).  Leadership by influence.  Greenleafs Servant Leadership one model I warm to.  Or the notion of distributed leadership.  On the other hand a strong individual with the right habits and attitudes can also have the nurturing emergent effect needed in a community – as opposed to a team (with it’s boundedness and task oriented nature.

Again it is complex: weak leadership can be made up for with other factors – like shared care.  leadership trying to come in from outside and shape direction for external agendas can kill off a budding wannabe community.

Merrolee Penman coined the term “Community with Amnesia” in her peripheral participation in an online workshop in 2004.  ‘They have the seeds of community, but don’t know it’.  I remember raising the existential question with her: Is a coward a coward before they do a cowardly act?  Is a community a community before they do a community act?  Mere potential is not enough for me.

Dysfunction can set in when levels of trust + shared experieince + caring + passion + care + focus + vision (etc) add up to less than a critical mass.  [But a level of tension and debate is also needed to prevent communities from atrophying, imploding, withering.]

This is my cylinder theory, I’ve never put on the net: the cylinder of function can be filled up with lots of different inputs – - – I may come back to this.

I have seen a teacher switch schools and see a difference in community feel that is like night and day.

Here is recent news (headline news here yesterday) of the funding body/sponsor for one community I have been involved with:

From Aug 4th 2008:  The West Coast Development Trust is so dysfunctional and divided that it can not be trusted to do its job in delivering economic benefits to the region, the auditor-general said today.

The trust was set up to administer $92 million of $120 million funding package given to the West Coast in compensation after it banned the logging of native forests.

The auditor-general’s report released today paints a picture of trustees infighting with allegations of corruption being thrown around and counter-allegations of leaking confidential information.

The auditor-general said the situation was so serious that trustees should sort it out immediately or just stand down.

“Unlike other public entities with elected board, there is no other ready mechanism for resolving this level of dysfunction,” the report said.

“Until we see evidence that the group of trustees is able to take effective collective responsibility for the governance of the trust, we are unable to provide assurance that the trust is able to deliver fully on its purpose of generating sustainable employment opportunities and economic benefits for the people of the West Coast.”

National Business Review

Lastly (for now) there is the concept of membership and identity.  Who can join?  If I show up will I be accepted?  If I bring in screwy ideas, what will happen?  If I turn up with an agenda, ditto?

I have tremedously benefitted from community like entities over my entire professional life.  I have had a lot of fun.  I have seen (unfortunately) more than my share of bullying, manipulation and crassness.  But: I have not given up yet.

The online/virtual bit?

Communities exist [or not] and the online supports them.  How, tech problems etc is a whole other matter.  Someone else can write on this.

How do we recognise a [healthy] community?

I think from the people, that they have some sense of identity that they carry with them that allows them to be better stronger as individuals than if they were on their own.  Both a sense of their own identity and their identity as part of a group.  Are they better in their cause for being part of the group?  Is there nurture and care, both of the person and the cause.

Robert Greenleaf said this: “Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?” (You can Google to find the ref)

How do we recognise a dysfunctional/dying withering comunity?

You get the idea.  I’ll only write on this if I really need to.

Refs: you will recognise elements of Etienne’s forumlation here (Domain, Community, Practice, CoP), and Amy Kim, and Nancy White etc etc.

Portugal: what it was all about (1) THEKA (Fri, Sat)

oportosaturdayflag.jpg  I did have some difficulty in connecting online at Setúbal, and I’m a bit behind in things here. I’m back, slept for most of 18 hours to recover, and it still seems to have left a residue of tiredness.
I nearly ended up not going. Phillipa was rushed to hospital with appendicitis and it was only after she was out, and the op went well, and my family had rallied round that I felt I could go. This was still not the best.

Arrived to what they described as cold weather. Setúbal is 50 km south of Lisbon. It was only after a few more conversations with Bev and João the final bits of this rather unusual enterprise fell into place: what on earth were we actually here for??

oportosaturdaymap.jpgOn Friday we drove 4 hours to Oporto, north from Setúbal.

The venue was not all that friendly. Hard echoey floors, not a lot of space. But a fine group of positive and optimistic librarian-leaders. Half way though a one year leadership role. There were 4 groups, roughly . . .

Tema A. Biblioteca Escolar, tecnologias da informação e Web 2.0
Animadores [School Libraries - information technologies and Web2.0]:
Oficina 1. Angelina Pereira (THEKA), Susanne Nyrop (Dinamarca)
Oficina 2. Helena Paz dos Reis (THEKA), Shirley Williams (University of Reading, Reino Unido), João Dias (Banco Santander, Portugal)

Tema B. Biblioteca Escolar, professor-bibliotecário, equipas e identidade profissional
Animadores [School Libraries - librarian, teams and professional identity]:
Oficina 3. Lucília Santos (THEKA), Patrícia Arnold (Munich University of Applied Sciences, Alemanha), Nancy White (EUA)
Oficina 4. Maria José Carvalho (THEKA), Derek Chirnside (University of Canterbury, Nova Zelândia)

Tema C. Biblioteca Escolar e desenvolvimento de aprendizagem
Animadores [School Libraries and learning development]:
Oficina 5. José Saro (THEKA), Marc Coenders (Network Learning Architecture, Holanda), Maarten de Laat (Department of Education, Exeter University, Reino Unido)
Oficina 6. Maria José Malo (THEKA), Andy Roberts (PajamaNation.com, Reino Unido), Bill Williams (Instituo Politécnico de Setúbal / Instituto Superior Técnico de Lisboa, Portugal)

Tema D. Biblioteca Escolar e produção de sentidos na e com a Comunidade
Animadores [School Libraries and sense-making in and with a community]:
Oficina 7. Carminda Correia (THEKA), Bronwyn Stuckey (Innovative Educational Ideas, Austrália), Alasdair Honeyman (Reino Unido)
Oficina 8. Luís Mourão (THEKA), John Smith (EUA), Ueli Scheuermeier (Suíça)

Where we did some of our preparation:

oportosaturdaywhereweworked.jpg It was at this stage I could trot out a whole lot of buzz words. We were there to “empower, lead, facilitate, assist, train . . . ” – the aim being for these wonderful leaders to devise and lead a workshop for the next day for quite a few more librarians who were giving up their Saturday. Friday was in English/Portuguese, Saturday in Portuguese. In fact it was a wonderful time of working together with a high level of cross cultural synergy.

We did it – after a breathless session, we had a plan for Saturday.

Aside: A night out and a visit to a market . . .

oportosaturdaymusic.jpg oportosaturdaydance.jpg  We stayed in on of Oporto’s nice areas, in a cheap hotel. Lots of participants were also there, and we met up for tea in a cafe, where we also sang revolutionary songs from the 50′s, danced a bit, and learned that some of the leaders were burning the midnight oil to further plan for Saturday. 

The market . . . 

oportosaturdaymarketstal.jpg oportosaturdaymarket.jpg

The workshop: a little taste. 

oportosaturdaysmallgroup2.jpg oportosaturdaysmal-group.jpg

Who are you as a librarian? What are the issues, thoughts, challenges you face?
We wrote on postit’s, gathered the stories, and grouped in themes.oportosaturdaypicture.jpg oportosaturdayidentity.jpg

Then: “Maria is now entering her training as a librarian. In five years time she is starting here first day, in an ideal world, and ideal environment. On that day and as she starts her new career, imagine what she is thinking and facing: who does she interact with? What does she think about? What are the critical relationships . . . .
Draw a picture to represent this.

Lunch . . .

oportosaturdaylunch.jpg oportosaturday.jpg
Then the hard part: What do we need to be doing NOW to see this future become a reality?

This whole day was a bold and audacious undertaking. oportosaturdayetienne.jpgThe backdrop was Etienne’s presentation on communities of practice, a wonderful high vision of a social structure to support change and support the community. oportosaturdaycop.jpg The catalyst of course was Bev, with the leaders in THEKA who grasped the nettle.  The project is looking ahead long term.  It has a good chance of succeeding, if those I met were any indication.

I am reminded of a quote from somewhere: What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Thoughts on Communities, Blogs and Moodle

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. smile

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.

Web 2.0 tools

There was a Comunities of Practice workshop on Friday folowing the CPE conference with Etienne Wenger.
EW

He shared a neat new diagram developed with Nancy White and John Smith, addressing the tensions inherent in community life (for example the individual vs the group), and how different technologies can assist in managing the tension. It is a work in progress, but it has got great potential to open windows and shed some light – as well as helping define the appropriate portfolios of e-tools for a given group.

Cops and Bloggers

Jack Vinson probably did not quite mean the comparison to be this literal:

Blogs are better than communities because:

  • Weblogs are more respectful of their authors and of their audience
  • Weblogs are better connecting tools.

Communities are better than blogs because:

  • Communities are better social structures for problem-solving, knowledge stewarding and innovation
  • Communities of practice are better social structures for learning

And how can blogs and CoP’s live together:

  • Blogger networks generate communities of practice (and communities of practice generate projects)
  • Communities of Practice can use weblogs to communicate with the outside world.

And this extracted from James Farmer: “Blog based communities – explaining the basics:

“Discussion boards are completely poor at facilitating one-one communication, as users have little control or ownership and few methods of participatation” (Incorperated Subversion):

Not sure that I entirely agree with this comment.

Nancy White, in reading this article came up with concept of Blogs as “containers of conversations”. However she does also point out (on a comment on James’s Blog) the difficulty some people have and some conversations pose.

CoPs and Blogs

There are two specific discussions involving Blogs I am interested in at the moment:

  1. The differences between online journals, blogs and forums.
  2. 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.

Etienne Wenger seminars

Well, the four events in New Zealand have been and gone.

Polytech in Dunedin, Evening Adult Education talk and day General CoP Workshop in Christchurch, Ministry of Education workshop in Wellington. Quite transformative. Having this time with Etienne has helped make his books and writings come alive. . . .

I did compile a readings booklet with three three top articles which I think gives a good summary. e-mail me if you’d like a copy.