I’m calling for a Birds-of-a-Feather session for faith-based organizations at the Rstudio::Conf this week. I thought I should write down some of my musings to be clearer about where I’m coming from. All of these issues come up in the context of creating a “Societal Mirror” for Shambhala that combines administrative and survey data with […]

Sean Murphy and I have been experimenting with a form of fast learning — and figuring out what we’re doing as we go along.  We’ve evolved from thinking of it as a clinic to something else. The current tag that I’m using on Twitter and in Evernote is mvpOODA. At the very beginning the OODA […]

Tags: mvpOODA

A conversation in a bar the other day made me pull out Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context (1995).  In addition to the diversity of examples in the book’s chapters, Jean Lave’s intro has a statement that I keep coming back to again and again: “Participants in the conference agreed, on the whole, on four […]

Next week Nancy White and I are doing a talk at USAID on “Keeping Our Eye Out for Learning: How to identify learning practices and leverage them more strategically” We are inviting people to step back and consider a wider range of learning as a step toward asking what, exactly, learning is (and how to do […]

(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 […]

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 […]

Recently I finished a remarkably useful book: Mizuko Ito, et al.  Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).  It has some common ancestry with ours, since the first authors of both Hanging Out and Digital Habitats were at the Institute for Research on […]

From my perspective we wrote Digital Habitats as a call to action (and reflection) more than anything else.  So it’s a bit ironic to see it used as a textbook, at least for me, being so skeptical about exactly what kind of learning is going on in schools.  But actually it’s pretty cool.  Of course […]

There’s a pattern that’s developed in CPsquare and that I’ve been purposeful in developing elsewhere. I think it has lots of good learning practice built into it.  I put it on a public Google doc for a while, but since I haven’t received any comments about it for a while, I decided it was stable […]

Recently I read a wonderful article by Jean Lave where she asked the simple question, “what’s a learning theory?” and suggests some questions to ask about learning theory instances. Jean Lave (1996) “Teaching, as Learning, in Practice” Mind, Culture, and Activity 3 (3), 149-164. http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327884mca0303_2 On page 156 she says: “[Martin Packer] asked [what a […]