Group items tagged

There are growing expectations among college students to be able to access and manage their course materials over the World Wide Web. In its early days, faculty would create web pages by hand for posting this information. As Internet technologies and access have matured over the past decade, course and learning management systems such as Blackboard and Web CT have become the norm for distributing such materials. In today's Web 2.0 world, wikis have emerged as a tool that may complement or replace the use of traditional course management systems as a tool for disseminating course information. Because of a wiki's collaborative nature, its use also allows students to participate in the process of course management, information sharing, and content creation. Using examples from an information technology classroom, this paper describes several ways to structure and use a wiki as a course management tool, and shares results of a student survey on the effectiveness of such an approach on student learning.\n\nKeywords: Wiki, Course Management, Collaboration, Web 2.0, Content Creation, Student Learning.

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.

Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn't change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what's possible. This is good news for those of us intent on changing the world and creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don't need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage, and commitment that lead to broad-based change.

he concept of a community of practice (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs and shared sociocultural practices that emerge and evolve when people who have common goals interact as they strive towards those goals. The term was founded on the work of a few cognitive anthropologists, namely Barbara Rogoff (1985) and Jean Lave, who attempted to explain and describe learning that occurs in apprenticeship situations. Later, Lave, in collaboration with Etienne Wenger (1991) originated the construct legitimate peripheral participation in their studies of five apprenticeship situations: midwives in the Yucatan, Vai and Gola tailors, naval quartermasters, meat cutters, and a group of alcoholics anonymous. From their development of legitimate peripheral participation, they created the term community of practice to refer to communities of practitioners into which newcomers would enter and attempt to acquire the sociocultural practices of the community.

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

Aid Workers Network is a free service set up to enable aid workers to share practical advice and resources with each other. 17011 people like you are in the network! * Find practical help in the Advice Pages * Check Blogs from aid workers * Read interesting articles and swap tips in Aid Workers Exchange * Learn about developing a career in aid and raising funds * Learn about the Aid Workers Network history and management

Starting an Online Community Posted on March 24th, 2009 by Harold Jarche There are several factors that should be looked at when creating a collaborative working/learning space. I've previously referred to Column Two's three tiers of collaboration - Capacity, Capability & Strategy and it's a good model to start with. Part of capacity are the existing processes and culture of collaboration while capability includes the best tools for the job. It's not easy for a group of individuals, who do not know each other, to work collaboratively from the onset. It is even more difficult to ask that this collaboration occur online when the participants are not in the habit of working on the Internet. The practice of sharing needs to be joined with the tools that work for the culture. Finally, strategy includes the leadership, direction and project management of getting things going to work collaboratively online.

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments Posted January 7th, 2009 by Michael Wesch , Kansas State University Tags: * Essays * Teaching and Technology * anthropology * Assessment * information revolution * multimedia * participatory learning * Web 2.0 2 Comments | 9313 Page Views Knowledge-able Most university classrooms have gone through a massive transformation in the past ten years. I'm not talking about the numerous initiatives for multiple plasma screens, moveable chairs, round tables, or digital whiteboards. The change is visually more subtle, yet potentially much more transformative. As I recently wrote in a Britannica Online Forum: There is something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.1 This new media environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able.

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.

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?