Learning Alliances » Education

Cantilever out from the known

John David Smith — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 01:00:02 +0000

Several people from the Fall 2009 Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop have continued meeting every few months to catch up with each other, find out what people are working on, and swap stories. In a way it’s a CPsquare dream that people should connect so much during a workshop so that they would want to keep in touch like that afterward. Dreaming and wanting it is not enough, so we always try to plant the seeds, so when it does happen it feels great! And in fact it’s a valuable conversation, as this report tries to show.

During the Foundations workshop we try to establish the practice of using a teleconference to think together in a very open, self-organizing and relaxed way, allowing the conversation to turn in whatever direction seems to make sense. And we support that practice with MP3 recordings and a chat that captures the main point of our meanderings. It turns out that the logic of the conversation may not be clear at all in advance, but in retrospect you can always see how it makes a lot of sense. I personally have learned a lot about myself, how I facilitate or participate and how I interact with different people by listening to the recordings we make (primarily for the benefit of people who didn’t make it to a meeting). The chat transcripts are very handy for looking up ideas, getting URLs, or making a summary of the conversation. All of that collective context and experience is the base from which we could cantilever out.

At one recent meeting of this group someone was talking about using video for community meetings. We decided to hold a more focused meeting this last time where we experimented with one tool.

Last week we experimented with TokBox.com, a video meeting tool. It’s a free tool that sets up a “Hollywood Squares” kind of format where everyone can see everyone else who has a video cam. In a way *the way that we explored it* is was as interesting as the tool itself. Two people met on TokBox beforehand and found that they had some audio feedback problems, so we decided to use the CPsquare phone bridge for the session’s audio channel. Someone sent out an email invitation to all the workshop participants, (whether they’d participated in these interim check-ins or not). It named the phone bridge as the initial meeting point and the first thing each person had to do when they arrived at the TokBox meeting page was find the mute button so that anything they said (or heard through the TokBox audio feed) wouldn’t disrupt the conversation. One of the people who had explored the tool beforehand sent out session invitations during the call by email as people showed up on the phone bridge.

It’s obvious that to explore a social tool like TokBox you can’t do it alone. You need partners. But to find out how it supports a conversation, you need to have a conversation. So you need other people who share your language, are willing to explore the tool, and can connect (and re-connect when you fall off the call). In particular it’s helpful to have a back-channel, whether email or a Skype chat. Several back-channels are helpful, actually. Our phone bridge was a back-channel and the backbone of our conversation. We cantilevered out from there. And the standard against which we measured the tool was known to all: our previous conversations on the phone bridge.

In addition to the phone bridge connection, during the session several of us were also connected via a Skype group chat. Most but not all of us were on the TokBox site. Several people didn’t have a video connection (or maybe they were having a bad hair day?) and one just listened in on the phone (e.g., a mobile phone while driving). At different points we experimented with TokBox’s auxiliary tools like its chat tool, its etherpad, and some others. All of that makes for a very complicated group structure. All of us could hear, but what each person could see was not the same.

The conversation was very much about observing out loud what we were seeing, considering how it worked for us, and thinking about how it would work for the several groups that each of us work with professionally. Was there value in seeing other people’s faces via the group video? (Answer: for some, but not all.) How would the tool work for a lecture or for a more horizontal conversation? What were the set-up issues in terms of inviting other people to join on the fly? Was there a difference between using the TokBox email invitation tool and sending the URL by some other means? (Answer: not much.) Although some web conferencing software completely lock down the structure and shape of the interface, TokBox lets you float video windows around, open and close apps like etherpad, and much more. What are the benefits of that kind of malleability? Does it also cause problems? (One of us kept getting dumped from the video connection whenever we entered an etherpad window. We never figured out why.) We compared TokBox to others that we’ve been exploring, including:

(there are more tools mentioned on the CPsquare wiki)

From this example, I’m left thinking of three different overlapping questions:

How does a community explore existing variance in the use of a tool? What are the benefits of or problems with uniform competence in using a tool once a group has settled on it? In this example, some people didn’t want to use video at all or found that it didn’t add much to their experience of closeness beyond what our phone bridge provides. For others it added quite a bit of context and sense of closeness that was useful.
Is it always clear what tool we cantilever from? Does that matter? Different groups might use different technologies and will have different amounts of trust or determination to explore. In this example, we used email to get everyone on a phone bridge from which we all got into TokBox. Stragglers got caught up via Skype chat. This is related with the “one more tool” question that Patricia Arnold, Beverly Trayner and I asked in the paper we gave at the Networked Learning Conference 210 a few weeks ago.
A final question is about what this process of exploration does to the group itself. Can it be outsourced? Can we leverage the experience of others? What are the implications of having others do the exploration for us, be they experts in your company’s IT department or technology stewards or whomever? In this example we were very much doing it for ourselves and that certainly colors our experience. How important is first hand experience of exploration?

TokBox came out looking really good! And it was great to see our learning companions!

Photo by Pete Lewis.

What it takes to detect absence or silence

John David Smith — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:50:03 +0000

In considering whether to take the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, a PhD student in the healthcare field wrote asking whether the workshop would be useful to her, given what she was doing:

I am going to examine what [communities of practice are already there in an academic health care setting] …. or as I suspect the lack of of them… and hopefully determine what those challenges [to their development] are, using an institutional ethnography approach.

I wrote back that …

Detecting silence or absence is huge, and they are only visible with careful ethnographic observation informed by theory. Last week the keynote at the http://epic2009.com conference was Gillian Tett, an anthropologist who ended up working for the Financial Times and noticed that there was an awful lot of silence around the global debt markets in 2007, despite the fact that they were much larger than the equity markets. There were a lot of reasons to not pay much attention to the debt markets at that time. Careful ethnography that paid off in the most unlikely setting.

I can’t resist asking whether you’ve bumped into Charlotte Linde, Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) http://isbn.nu/9780195140293 … a fellow-alum of the Institute for Research on Learning with Etienne. She’s using a vast ethnographic study of an insurance company, she sets up a powerful analytical framework and one of her chapters is about silence and “stories that are not told”… Well worth the read. (I reviewed the book in more depth here.)

Contact with Etienne is an important part of the workshop experience. He’s great to talk to – and he has a great way of sharing access to current practice in many different settings. But it’s also really important to participate in a wider conversation of people who are exploring and applying these ideas in all kinds of settings. The practice of cultivating communities takes more than research.

While I’m at it, I’m hoping you’ve connected with this group (or at least read their stuff). Fung Kee Fung, Goubanova and Crossly are 3 of the authors who’ve all done the Foundations workshop (at one time or another):

http://www.implementationscience.com/imedia/1788022150101911_article.pdf

A final thought: if part of what you’re looking for is absence of communities of practice (partly with a view of suggesting change to enhance learning in a complex system), you need to develop a pretty sensitive eye for the diverse kinds of communities that are fully functional out there. This workshop can’t be the last word on that subject, but it does bust some of the stereotypes that many of us adopted from reading about the “Turbodudes at Shell” in Cultivating Communities of Practice.

Visiting with University of Puerto Rico librarians

John David Smith — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:12:38 +0000

It was really hot on August 13, the last day of my vacation visiting my brothers in Puerto Rico. But, in more ways than one, it was really cool inside the library at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras, where all of my friends from high school went to college.

I was hosted by José Sanchez-Lugo, a UPR professor I met in the Connected Futures workshop last May. He and his colleagues are doing fascinating work. They are way beyond the “ills of bestness” that Patrick Lambe describes. When I think of fights I’ve had with program evaluators who are trying to make a community of practice initiative fit into a neat pigeonhole, it’s inspiring to see someone launching a bunch of active communities with the original funding from an evaluation effort. Not only have they developed their reflective practice in areas such as collection development or research support, they’ve cooked up new directions for innovation, such as virtual reference or uses of Second Life.

Here’s Liz Pagán’s report (titled, roughly, “yet another distinguished Puerto Rican” . There is a lot of activity in the various blogs and wikis of the communities launched by this project. (One great thing about this visit, apart from a couple hours with José himself) was that it gave me the chance to practice my “communities of practice” vocabulary in Spanish a week before a project in El Salvador. Talk about just in time practice!)