Phronesis

Communities of Practice - becoming "alive"

I am preparing a session for small workgroups in a global network who want to get better at "marketing" themselves and recruiting new members.

This got me re-reading Wenger, McDermott and Snyder's chapter in Cultivating Communities of Practice where they suggest seven design principles for bringing out a community's own internal direction, character, and energy - or for becoming "alive". The principles are:

1. Design for evolution.
2. Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives.
3. Invite different levels of participation.
4. Develop both public and private community spaces.
5. Focus on value.
6. Combine familiarity and excitement.
7. Create a rhythm for the community.

If there is one thing that strikes me as I read this it's that this book was written in 2002. I'm reminded of how design principles can be excellent - but people only hear them when they are ready for them.

Is the worm turning and the importance of an empty space

I'm at a new desk. I've transformed one of my rooms into a new office - come guest room. The desk is tall and looks like a bar and you sit on bar stools (with lower back support). My idea is to have a space where I can work with people round the same table. We can talk and work and it's easy to slip in and out of the space.

I'm paying attention at the moment to the way my work with online tools is making me more conscious of offline spaces. I find myself worrying at  the way people are reaching for online tools as panaceas. Mastering the tool becomes a pathway to  a promised land.

I'm co-responsible for those expectations. And I increasingly doubt them. Spaces as places to be together and alone. How do we design for those spaces and places?

In her (as always) fantastic Nobel Lecture on Not Winning the Nobel Prize Doris Lessing says

"Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.      

        If this writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn."

I'm struck by how "writers" could be a metaphor for people as creators of meaning. Do we need an empty space to surround us as we design meanings for our lives? Where are the empty spaces for listening and paying attention to words and inspiration?  How meaningful is what we are doing, if we can't find that space? How many poems and stories of learning and change may be stillborn, if we  grab the instruments and ignore the spaces?

Profound effects

Steve Bridger's comment on my blog post - what can I say?-  feels like one of those life-changing moments! He led me to a brief interview with Michael Wesch who did that great video of Web2.0.

If I substitute "cultural anthropology" for "life learning" then Wesch is talking loud and clear to me. In the interview he says:

"...cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected. This is true on many levels. First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself. Second, everything is connected throughout all time, and so as anthropologists we take a very broad view of human history, looking thousands or even millions of years into the past and into the future as well. And finally, all people on the planet are connected. This has always been true environmentally because we share the same planet. Today it is even more true with increasing economic and media globalization."

And that reminds me - again - of why I have to move beyond reading, talking about, and doing communities of practice and Web2.0 because it is reductionist and ignores all the other things that bring meaning, connectivity and learning to our lives. Or rather, my understanding of what I'm trying to do will come as much from things outside the magnifying glass as it will from what I see through the lens.

Let's face it - you can't look at learning in isolation from history, love, philosophy, sex, religion - and cross-country cycling - and that's just how it is!

Questions about online communities

At a recent workshop with Etienne Wenger about "Learning Communities" I promised to put up the questions that were asked by workshop participants.

Only just doing it now. Sorry!

The questions are great. They reflect those that I often hear and would easily the basis of a future workshop discussion (online or face-to-face).

• How can I transform my own organisation? How can I mobilise using my own experience?
• How do we sustain a community of practice?
• There are lots of words - forum, discussion, communities... What are they and what's the difference?
• Looking at educational technology. How do you include that in a learning community. What about face-to-face, where does that fit in?
• How can an eLearning model be based on the value of people and their experience? How do you "open the space"?
• What are the critical factors for success? Does size matter?
• How do you reinforce/sustain a community - especially when work takes over?
• How do we recognise/certify informal learning and how do we measure an increase in productivity of that community?

eLearning conference notes.

My not-so-brilliant notes taken at Etienne Wenger's workshop at the eLearning conference in Lisbon are on the conference blog.

Informal Learning - Etienne Wenger

I've put up my notes on Wenger's session at the eLearning conference in Lisbon on the conference blog.

Etienne talks about learning as a question of who we are in the world. Who we are as learners is not a technique it as an experience of being alive and of being in the world.

This seems so key and so fundamental to all the work that I do. A social perspective on learning is a perspective of learning to become a person who has a certain experience of the world. This perspective is integral to my designs for learning. People ask me for techniques, methods, tools, recipes, activities, communities of practice. And I can earn an income from selling them those.

But really all I have to offer is something of my own trajectory and my own being in the world.

My being in the world is increasingly complex and covers many domains. I engage in many different domains, personal, public, professional, academic - and what's more, my domains cross languages and cultures. The question facing me and other people is: how do I manage myself in a meaningful way at the intersection of my involvement in  these different domains?

Interview about communities of practice

I was interviewed about Communities of Practice in relation to the CoP on Innovation and Mainstreaming  and these were the questions I was asked:

• We are finding it a challenge developing our CoP. Is that something normal?
• If the potential participants in the CoP don’t recognise the advantages of participating in it, is there any advantage in creating and developing it?
• If learning and sharing are not sufficient motivation, are there other strategies for mobilising participants?
• Our face-to-face meetings have been more mobilising and more fruitful than the online communication. Doesn’t that mean that there should be more face-to-face in the starting period? (This is the one I referred to in "Let's meet ... ")
• People complain that they don’t have time to dedicate to the CoP, but they have time to travel to face-to-face meetings. What is your comment on this apparent contradiction?

I also recorded a Skype interview (on Evoca) with Nancy White to get an examples or stories of some of her experiences, which is at the end of the interview.

A phase change

Yesterday I was facilitating a "phase change" that is the reuslt of a six week workshop I presented last year about communities and web2.0  technologies. It's fascinating to look back on a post I wrote as I did the preparations for that workshop. When I wrote the post I never imagined the ongoing life of the workshop a year after it was over.

The ongoing activity and  conversations after the workshop have been energising. Participants are divided between the "crentes" (believers) and the agnostics. The believers are those who felt transformed by what we did and the agnostics were the ones who didn't engage in the workshop - but who still give up a mornings or afternoon to participate in conversations about it.

The workshop and its processes and results have now been called a "product", something that can be validated and re-used, a step in the process that friends in the CPsquare dialogue were a part of. Yesterday I was facilitating to help the group articulate better what exactly this product is: A workshop? A methodology? A wiki? A community? During the afternoon we planned the next steps to "finalise" it as a joint product.

I was really energised to see that the workshop no longer belongs to me. Rather, the experience of the workshop and the follow-on have resulted in the group taking ownership of the whole package. And that was what they decided to call it: a package.

The result is a dynamic package of:

• Communication tools (e.g. Skype, wiki etc.)
• Training (including the needs analysis and methodology)
• Action (including examples and stories of where it has been applied)
• Production (for example, the Wikis that have resulted from it)

One group defined this package as "a combination of tools for the animation of networks for:

• autonomy/empowerment of the participants;
• made-to-measure;
• interactive communication;
• open to the exterior;
• continuous assessment."

("conjunto articulado de ferramentas para a animação de redes para:

• autonómia/empowerment dos participantes;
• construção a medida;
• comunicação interactiva:
• abertura ao exterior;
• avaliação continua.")

The other group defined it as "interactive, dynamic methodologies, tools and guidelines to mobilise the management and animation of communities to improve communication, interaction, training, monitoring and information."

("interactivo, dinâmico metodologias, ferramentas, guidelines para mobilisar gestão, animação de comunidades para acrescentar comunicação, interacção, formação, monitorização, informação.")

I've had a number of deeply honouring moments this year, and I count this phase change as one of them.

Magic fingers ...

Last week I gave a brief presentation about communities of practice at the launch of Magic Whiteboards by INOV@R in Mangualde.

Later, over wine, cheese, and conversation one of the teachers was enthusiastic about the active group of teachers he was part of, and with whom he felt he learned so much. He also observed that the success of this group - which he could now call a community of practice - could be attributed to the "magic fingers" of the school president. These fingers subtly worked to connect people and put opportunities for them to meet in the way. 

I thought that was a fantastic observation. And a great word. In my line of work we talk about facilitation. And now we have started talking about technology stewardship. How DRY!! Neither of those titles captures the magic and playful essence of community building.  Neither do they say anything about the invisibleness of most of that work.

And then there is the problem of translation. In Portuguese I really dislike the word animador for facilitator. It gives the idea of an entertainer, or  someone who is jumping up and down rousing people to respond. But facilitador doesn't sound good in Portuguese either - making thing easy for someone is not something you associate with learning.

And let's not even start talking about stewardship! How will I EVER translate that word, let alone the concept?

From now on I'm sticking to metaphors for the idea of facilitation .. magic fingers - dedos mágicos. 

Technology stewardship as translation

Of course I love Michel's analogy of the technology steward with a translator.

I would say that 80% of my time goes on translating language and context for different people involved in any one project. I'm translating between different:

• national languages, 
• social and cultural contexts,
• uses of tools and technology,
• disciplinary and world views.

Translating is both a process and a product. It's a process as you negotiate the meaning between different perceptions and expectations of the words you use to talk about the tools, technology, people and processes. And it's a product as you "translate" those expectations  and perceptions into words.

That would be the duality of participation and reification in the words of Wenger and communities of practice. But this duality is not just a process of translation, it's also one of recontextualising meaning.

Technology stewardship is a process of negotiating meaning. Technology stewardship is a dance and a relationship between different languages and world views. It's an engagement in shared sense-making and
an attention to the processes and products of "translating", recontextualising and making meaning.