Jan 02 2010
A key story in Charlotte Linde’s Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) is about an insurance company that was having trouble getting its agents to sell certain policies. The company’s management wanted to know whether the problem was a learning problem (e.g., so you’d “solve it” by having [...]
Aug 04 2009
After more than 5 years working on it, Digital Habitats (the book I wrote with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White) is here. (At least a couple proof copies have arrived in the mail. Copies for sale are on their way.)
It has been really fun. What’s next?
Stay tuned.
Jul 03 2009
Rebecca Egolf, I think, recommended The reason YOUR CHURCH must Twitter; making your ministry contagious by Anthony D. Coppedge and I’ve recommended it to several people since buying the $5 e-book about a week ago. So it comes with excellent ecumenical credentials, since her recommendation said, in effect, that it was “good for synagogues, too.” [...]
Jan 14 2009
My work as a tech steward and community leader involves dealing with a lot of little sets of data that comes from different sources. As our communities live on more and more different platforms, for example, it becomes a messier and more complicated job to keep track of who’s on which platform, and we often [...]
Dec 31 2008
I’m working with several meta-communities: communities of practice made up of people who are themselves supporting communities. Of course CPsquare is very much my “main meta-community” but I’m a bit surprised at how these meta-communities are turning up. (I guess I shouldn’t be, since that’s where I started 10 years ago working to get a [...]
Oct 24 2008
Last week was the fall vacation for universities in Denmark, so their facilities were used for conferences such as AoIR 9.0 and EPIC 2008. Many of the people who participated in either conference did not seem to know about the other one, even though to me there were many connections and overlaps. There was a [...]
Oct 11 2008
Gene Smith observes in his book on Tagging that Cialdini’s idea of “social proof” explains a lot about why social tagging is useful. Smith’s book is full of insights and suggestions for software designers, but also seems very useful from a tech steward’s perspective. And “social proof” is one of the reasons that communities of [...]
Jun 27 2008
I’m posting this here because CPsquare’s blogs are broken (soon to be moved & updated).
CPsquare book club: We’ll be reading selected chapters from Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators, edited by Chris Kimble, Paul Hildreth, and Isabelle Bourdon. See the table of contents for both volumes. Several of the authors are [...]
Jun 26 2008
Woke up thinking about all that could be done — and that had to be done today.
Before walking the dog, at 6:15 am, I went through the previous night’s email on Outlook, looked at my schedule and made some plans:
A workshop payment mix-up (money going to a personal Paypal account rather than the CPsquare account) [...]
Nov 15 2007
Although I’m still inching my way through Geoffrey Bowker’s “Memory practices in the sciences”, I’ve been sneaking peeks into Charles L. Briggs, Learning How to Ask; A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). This little statement stood out loud and clear:
Interview techniques smuggle [...]
