Learning Alliances

But the way we meet is “fixed” in many ways and hard to change. Yesterday I spent the day with Shirley Williams’ research group (http://elgg.sse.rdg.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/) at Reading University’s Computer Science department. When we were planning the afternoon session with Karsten Lundqvist, I asked, “What if we take notes during our meeting – in an IRC channel or a Skype chat session?” I’ve become very dependent on collective note-taking because so much of my work is distributed, collaborating with people who are many time-zones away.

Well, we tried it in the “Cybernetics Seminar Room” and the note-taking and use of technology in face-to-face settings itself became a subject of our conversation. A bit of a debate, it being a university research
setting and all. I guess it confirmed my conviction, however, about changing the form of our conversation – it so often is a practical thing to do. We didn’t actually specify what technologies to include in their project planning about MeAggregator (http://elgg.sse.rdg.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/1448.html) which was one of the meeting goals,
but we did talk about longer-term strategies for listening to the intended users. It strikes me that this kind of project can, over time, really change students’ experience of being in a university.

The last time I’d spent any time with Shirley was in a bridge-building exercise in Second Life (http://elgg.sse.rdg.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/1268.html). It’s very interesting to see how people change (or don’t) when they’re home, going on favorite walks after dinner, or whipping out a delicious pasta dish with prosciutto and asparagus.

In a chat with Mark Kuznicki about his recent work with BarCamps and other open space, wiki-style events, we resonated around the idea that in our observation, Open Space meetings are great at beginning but once people know each other and have a history together, things veer off in other directions, towards other social forms.

That got me to thinking about really old communities of practice and what social practices they use to hand down wisdom and views over hundreds of generations. As I thought about it, I realized that I’ve run across several recently:

• One community I know of is considering the idea of beginning every meeting with a D’var Torah (a “word from the Torah”) which involves a short talk that brings the group together around its essence, its core text. Depending on length, a D’var Torah (or a variant based of it) could be part of a regular telephone conference call.
• Another practice I recently heard of in the Jewish tradition is Hevrutah, where two people commit to meeting regularly to read, contemplate and interpret scripture together. It strikes me that this practice is a great way to support ongoing learning and of keeping a text alive. There’s no reason that distributed communities can’t set up Hevrutah, using phone, chat or even email.
  
• Another example that I observed recently was a group of Buddhist administrators, struggling with all the details of keeping their meditation centers alive, relatively harmonious, and with all the bills paid. A relatively virtuous group, it ended its conference call (which included people from a half dozen time zones around the world) with the dedication of merit, which is a very traditional way of acknowledging “the rest of the world” at the end of a practice or work session. It was striking to me how people mix and re-mix traditions with a little bit of noise from the ether to make it happen on a global level.

If such elements are part of your tradition, be sure to include them in your community’s repertoire. If not, it might be useful to think about what it is that makes these practices so powerful and try to adapt them to the learning in your community.

What other practices can you think of that have really been proven by the test of time?

Yesterday we invited all of the people we’ve interviewed in our coaching study to meet for a conference call to talk about what we’d learned from them about community leadership and coaching. As a broadcast of our “findings” it wasn’t too successful because we didn’t even get through our slide set, much less get much feedback. But as a kind of community call where we got down to an important discussion about learning and leadership it was great! I hope to more details soon. One of the people who showed up on the call was Matthew Simpson, who I met at the Coconut Grove CoP conference in 1999 and has been working at IBM helping communities function, stay connected, and stay visible all along. Hearing Matthew talk about his work always reminds me that insuring that communities are able to surprise us and invigorate our practice depends on a kind of persistence and longevity that he himself exemplifies.

As a surprising aside, Matthew mentioned a story he’d heard recently on the radio and he circulated the URL for it. It has a lot of relevance to professional associations and personal connections from a communities of practice perspective. In “81 Words” Alix Spiegel tells a story about her grandfather and his accomplishments. Gradually it becomes clear that it’s also the story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. Listen to it here. (It was broadcast on “This American Life” on May 11, 2007 — a replay of the original broadcast from 2002.) From a CoP perspective, it’s interesting to see how the judgments (or “knowledge”) of a learned society like the APA was actually reversed, what events and conversations played a role, and just how personal it all was. The story has it all: learning, meaning and identity. And they all change.