Jul
06
2013
This idea and the code to implement it may be useful in other settings, but I developed it in the context of supporting a community with a largely volunteer organization at its center. At least in my mind the code comes from a point of view. Here’s a picture of what it does: Here […]
Jul
04
2013
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 […]
Jun
12
2013
On Monday I did a webinar for a group that Joitske Hulseboch and Sibrenne Wagenaar have been leading on social media for professionals in The Netherlands. I’ve posted the slides here. Sibrenne and Joitske posted a summary here. We had interesting difficulties with the audio side of the webinar. If professionals like us encounter such difficulties, […]
Tags: social proof
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 […]
Tags: chat
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 […]
Tags: projects