Group items tagged

Interviews with four CoP practitioners including Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, May 2012. PLP uses three buoys for worksites--Ning, wiki, and website.

Amazing paper by the Berkana Institute on how networks serve as incubators for CoPs, leaders, new ideas and ways of doing to emerge. It makes me think about leadership training programs vs. networks/forums for growing leadership in the collective. This aspect of emergence has profound implications for social entrepreneurs. Instead of developing them individually as leaders and skillful practitioners, we would do better to connect them to like-minded others and create the conditions for emergence. The skills and capacities needed by them will be found in the system that emerges, not in better training programs.

short interview with David Vladeck, former head of FTC Consumer Affairs on privacy issues online and how Google and Facebook failed to live up to protecting privacy of their users. by Jessica Leber, June 26, 2012.

Presentation by Elyse Eidman-Aadahl on CoPs for professional learning,

website for Knowledge Communities. Look at this mission: Knowledge Communities trains community facilitators how to tap into the intrinsic motivation of individuals and groups to move a community or network forward toward more autonomy, productivity and sustainability. The outcome we aim for is improved practice. Over time, network members take over the role the paid facilitator has played, requiring fewer external resource to produce greater results. To learn more about our projects see our white papers.

This excerpt from an interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, PLP founder, captures critical points for PD online. "Will and I agreed that we would only work with teams of school-based educators because the research made it clear that it was collaborative teams within in a school, working together, that really brought about sustainable improvement. That would give us what we needed to anchor the virtual experience in a local context. We also wanted participants to experience a global community of practice-to be able to have conversations with people very different than themselves, with fresh perspectives. Our thinking was that if we put teams of educators who had different ideologies, different geography, different purposes and challenges, all together in the same space, then they could each bring what they did well to the table and people could learn from that. Ultimately that would mean public, private, Catholic, and other kinds of schools; educators teaching well-to-do, middle-class, and poor kids; educators in different states and nations, at different grade levels, and in different content areas and roles. What ultimately grew out of our brainstorming was a three-pronged model of professional development that emphasizes (1) local learning communities at the school/district level; (2) an online community of practice that's both global and deep; and (3) a third prong that is more personal-the idea of a personal learning network that each educator develops as a mega-resource for ideas and information about their particular interests and areas of practice. (These three prongs are described in depth in a new book, The Connected Educator, where PLP community leader Lani Ritter Hall and I tell the story of the evolution of our model and the very solid research base behind it.)

Interesting interview Nancy did with Aaron Leonard at World Bank in September 2013. Makes me think about a lot of things, including how different technologies label us generationally with each generation (only ten years apart in some cases because of the creation and adoption of new communications media) using different tools and how this affects collaboration choices. Excerpt: "Right now email is the reigning champion in the Bank and if we have any hope of getting people to work differently and collaboratively we have to first get rid of email."

Wonderful explanation of the power of pull and its exploration in books written by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information author among many other foundational books), and Lang Davison (former director of Deloitte Center for the Edge and editor-in-chief of the McKinsey Quarterly). Endorses community of practice and "socially embedded practice in driving knowledge creation and performance improvement." From April 9, 2010

a wonderful blog post by Jim McGee, April 1, 2002, on the importance of keeping a knowledge-log--k-log--for being able to retrace one's steps when the final conclusion/work product falls short and one has to start over and for engaging with others about how the thought line developed. Justifies paper printouts and variously named file versions to show stages of idea exploration and development. Our electronic work flow replaces how we used to work with handwritten drafts with all the erasures and column notes, then send them to a graphics person for placing into a graphics format, then circulating for reaction from involved stakeholders, some of them junior staff, then incorporating feedback, final edits, and voila! a product for the client.

An open Google Document set up by Leadership Learning Community with categories--network culture, network mindset, network behaviors, processes, skills, network structure, and personal mastery--with attributes for each, and a column for voting,