Group items tagged

Twitter Set Theory & The Wisdom of the Group Wednesday, April 9, 2008 Several weeks ago I was introduced to an idea that I have found to be profound in its simplicity but complex in its implications. In an informal discussion about educational technology at EduBloggerCon West, Steve Hargadon described the kind of learning that is taking place in today's social networks. Interestingly enough, I caught the discussion via Ustream (and participated remotely within the Ustream chat), demonstrating yet another facet of this idea. I will paraphrase what Steve has come to call "the wisdom of the group": You don't need to have everybody in the room in order to have a good conversation. In other words, once you reach a certain number of people - local experts, if you will - you can have very rich dialog without requiring that all of the experts be present. Steve has found this to be true in many of the social networks that he frequents, and I have found it to be true in Twitter. In the days following our discussion, I have drawn up several diagrams that I think demonstrate additional dimensions to this concept (they also fit in nicely with this fine collection).

The adult learners we work with face a difficult conundrum: Their social world is constrained by the technologies they know how to use and vice versa: The technologies they know how to use are limited by their social world. For many people, a solo exploration of the online world can be arduous, insecure, and time-consuming. In an age characterized by increasing access to information and communication technologies, and by learning through these technologies, such issues acquire a great significance. This is particularly true when we view learning as a social experience and not one of absorbing information. In this article, we explore a design for learning that includes connecting people across time and distance so that they develop practices for sharing and creating information and knowledge rather than just acquiring it.

Community of Practice Handbook - Company Command Posted on April 10th, 2008 by Harold Jarche company-command.jpg Company Command is the most practical community of practice (CoP) implementation guide that I've read so far. It traces the story of the development of an online community designed to share knowledge between US Army company commanders, past and present. If you can get over the military jargon (and even some acronyms that I, an ex-soldier, couldn't figure out) the lessons in this book are transferable to civilian life. Here is a summary of the key concepts from Chapter One: * Knowledge resides primarily in the minds of community members * Connecting members allows knowledge to flow * Relationships, trust and a sense of a professional community are critical factors for an effective community * Content development emerges from needs expressed in conversations * A decentralized network is best

ABSTRACT Communities of practice consist of people who are informally as well as contextually bound by a shared interest in learning and applying a common practice. Their focus on learning, competence, and performance bridges the gap between organizational learning and strategy topics and generates new insights for theory and practice. This paper outlines the rationale for a competence-based view of organizations and proposes a community-of-practice approach to address a number of important business challenges: mergers and acquisitions, leveraging and stretching competence across functions and SBUs, accelerating innovation, business-unit disaggregation, and outsourcing. Communities of Practice

Social network analysis (SNA) is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, animals, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships. Management consultants use this methodology with their business clients and call it Organizational Network Analysis (ONA). A method to understand networks and their participants is to evaluate the location of actors in the network. Measuring the network location is finding the centrality of a node. These measures help determine the importance, or prominence, of a node in the network. Network location can be different than location in the hierarchy, or organizational chart. We look at a social network, called the "Kite Network" (see above), developed by David Krackhardt, a leading researcher in social networks. Two nodes are connected if they regularly talk to each other, or interact in some way. For instance, in the network above, Andre regularly interacts with Carol, but not with Ike. Therefore Andre and Carol are connected, but there is no link drawn between Andre and Ike. This network effectively shows the distinction between the three most popular individual network measures: Degree Centrality, Betweenness Centrality, and Closeness Centrality.

Communities of Practice, a Brief Introduction Print This Page. Author: Etienne Wenger Etienne Wenger is a globally recognized thought leader in the field of communities of practice and their application to organizations. He was featured by Training Magazine in their "A new Breed of Visionaries" series. A pioneer of the "community of practice" research, he is author and co-author of seminal articles and books on the topic, including Situated Learning (Cambridge University Press, 1991), where the term was coined, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1998), where he lays out a theory of learning based on the concept of communities of practice, and Cultivating Communities of Practice: a Guide to Managing Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), addressed to practitioners in organizations. Etienne is also a founder of CPsquare, a cross-organizational, cross-sector community of practice on communities of practice. His work is influencing a growing number of organizations in the private and public sectors. Indeed, cultivating communities of practice is increasingly recognized as the most effective way for organizations to address the knowledge challenges they face. Etienne helps organizations apply these ideas through consulting, public speaking, and workshops, both online and face-to-face. His new research project, "Learning for a small planet," is a broad, cross-sectoral investigation of the nature of learning and learning institutions at the dawn of the new millennium. Check out his website www.ewenger.com

Etienne Wenger is one of the founding fathers of Social Learning Theory and the concept of "Practiced Communities". People are learning together - every individual deals and engage in many different communities of practice. Here people negotiate and define what competence and knowledge is. To know something or to be competent builds on the individuals experiences of being in the world - learning is a constant transformation or journey of the self.

communities of practice\nThe idea that learning involves a deepening process of participation in a community of practice has gained significant ground in recent years. Communities of practice have also become an important focus within organizational development. In this article we outline the theory and practice of such communities, and examine some of issues and questions for informal educators and those concerned with lifelong learning.

Amazing blog post looking at the evolution of social software.

Worth a look around this blog, has some excellent posts!

I recently read a very interesting post by Terry Anderson, Edublogers as a Network of Practice. Network of Practice - a distributed aggregation of members who share some common interests and values, but their correspondence and especially face to face meetings occur much less often or not at all. Leadership and activities in a NoP are emergent and usually informal. NoP members interact sporadically and develop their network in an informal and spontaneous manner that is occasioned through blogs, social software based communities, perhaps a face-to-face or online conference, newsgroup, mailing list or other shared social networking interactions. Membership in a NoP is voluntary, usually open, often transitory and likely many of the NOP members are strangers to each other.

Template for Building a Small Powerful Network December 15, 2008 · 58 comments networkThis post is somewhat inspired by a thought Jeff Pulver tossed out as an aside at his Social Media Jungle prototype in Long Island a few weeks ago. Hat tip to you, Jeff. Jeff Pulver said this: "We're making our own dial tone." In such a typical Jeff Pulver way, he tossed out a little idea that had been bouncing around his head, but that he hasn't rolled into any particular context yet, so I'm going to run with it. I've got an idea that came to me tonight about Twitter (amongst other social networks), and I'm going to share it with you: take that dial tone idea and build your own network. We're sitting on something because we're still in the "gee whiz" mode. Let me explain.

I've been preparing a class session on communities of practice this weekend, and it's been underscoring for me just how important people are to an effective learning environment. We're independent adults, and we like to think of learning as something that each of us does for ourselves, but all the terrific resources in the world can't hold a candle to the power of what can occur between people.

INTRODUCTION The current environment for organizations is one that is characterised by uncertainty and continuous change. This rapid and dynamic pace of change is forcing organizations that were accustomed to structure and routine to become ones that must improvise solutions quickly and correctly. To respond to this changed environment organizations are moving away from the structures of the past that are based on hierarchies, discrete groups and teams and moving towards those based on more fluid and emergent organizational forms such as networks and communities. In addition to the pace of change, globalisation is another pressure that is brought to bear on modern organizations. Although some argue that the increased internationalisation should bring about an increased need for knowledge sharing (Kimble, Li and Barlow, 2000), many organizations have responded to this development by restructuring through outsourcing and downsizing, which paradoxically can result in a loss of knowledge as staff leave the organization.

A couple of short videos on communities of practice. The first is from Dave Vance, former president of Caterpillar University, who shares some of Caterpillar's experiences in facilitating online communities of practice. His advice?