Mar 23 2012
(Cross-posted from CPsquare.) There’s a steady amount of experimentation that we do in the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop. Although it’s a workshop, not a community, both share the challenges that come up around experiments, like keeping track of what worked, culling the best stuff, putting the results in a place where you can [...]
Jan 25 2012
This is cross-posted from CPsquare.org… My fellow-conspirator Sylvia Currie posted a reflection on her blog, too. We’ve had a regular series where CPsquare members and friends go on a virtual field trip to observe something about a community of practice, it’s activities, technologies, or challenges. Today Sylvia Currie and I organized something new — a [...]
Dec 16 2011
How communities of practice give us access to observing, orienting, deciding, and acting in a world of practice. Happy Corner, where the tailors studied by Jean Lave (2011) worked in the 1970′s, was a remarkable community of practice. The community provided resources an individual couldn’t afford like sewing machines or cutting tables, real-time help making [...]
Mar 22 2011
These days we are all pulled in many directions, including conversations and communities that pique our curiosity or compel our participation for one reason or another. The conversations about communities of practice are a case in point. Nobody can follow them all, or read everything that’s written about communities of practice. Google says there are [...]
Dec 23 2010
It may be situated, but learning happens all over the place. One of the useful things that a community of practice does for us is to provide some useful boundaries for our attention. We can focus on a set of relationships, conversations, resources, and trajectories that move will our learning forward. Everything around and outside [...]
Oct 18 2010
Jerry Michalski put out a call for past author / presenters to show up and talk about what’s changed since they talked on his weekly phone call in observance of the 300th call. I offered to talk about the very simple mix of tools that support the Yi-Tan community (yes, I think of it as [...]
May 21 2010
Kathy Milhauser mentioned that she assigned Digital Habitats to students in a course on globally distributed project teams. That got me thinking about the difference between a project team and a community as far as their digital habitat is concerned. Of course there are many project teams that have spawned communities and many communities that [...]
Mar 14 2010
You probably already know that Skype is a great tool – especially for community leaders. If you are a technology steward, you’ve got to know how to use it and talk about it, too. To really talk about how to use a tool we’ve got to talk about all the buttons and about the user’s [...]
Jan 06 2010
A perennial question in supporting a community is how to focus conversations. How to dig deeper into a topic, explore new perspectives, or move a conversation forward over time. Those are questions that a community insider may be able to answer but may not be answerable by people who are not members, not involved in [...]
Sep 12 2009
I’m organizing the fourth year of CPsquare’s shadow the leader series. We’ll be visiting with Josien Kapma, a Dutch dairy farmer living in Portugal every month for a year. She’s a member of CPsquare and the leader of “Melken Over De Grens” or “Milking on the border” — http://www.melkenoverdegrens.nl. It’s a global community for expatriate [...]
