Monthly Archives: April 2008

Reflection #1 on Wenger – Influence of perspectives

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“The perspectives we bring to our endeavours are important because they shape both what we perceive and what we do.” Pp. 225, Communities of practice, Wenger, 1999.

So this means the first stage of designing an effective learning experience is to determine the perspectives from which potential learners will be approaching their learning. This is a challenging thing to do! Can we survey students? But then can we trust their disclosures? Perhaps they will be influenced by other factors and say what they think we want to hear. Perhaps they are not fully aware of their own perspectives, especially at a subconscious level.

In the learning community I examined (php coders), the community may be a diverse group of people but their perspectives that relate to php coding and online learning are all fairly similar. I would suspect most of the group is self-taught to some extent, most of the group is used to finding online support for tech issues and all of the group know the frustration of trying to resolve a programming issue. This results in a fairly cohesive community who achieve fairly specific outcomes as they are all entering the community with similar perspectives and common goals.

Wenger Reading – Where to Begin?

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‘Communities of Practice’ – Wenger (1999)
This extract from the final chapters of Communities of Practice, by Etienne Wenger – provides us with a dual framework: 1) as a participant – which aspects of design to you notice are present (or not) in your community and 2) as a designer – as we prepare to move into the second part of the subject, it provides us with a framework for our own designs.
Focus on part 1 – your community experiences.
How does Wenger’s work inform your analysis of your community?.

There was just soooo much in this reading (as you can see in the three summaries below in which I was actually pretty ruthless and left out heaps of stuff I would have normally included only because otherwise the summary was going to end up as long as the reading). I can see again I am going to have trouble being ‘brief’ in my response to this article.

So instead of just recording all my responses as to how Wenger’s work informs my analysis of my community, I am going to just wait a few days and see which of all the thoughts swirling around floats to the top – what really speaks most to me based not on first thoughts and reactions but instead on considered reflection.

So in the words of Arnie, ‘I’ll be back’.

UPDATE A FEW DAYS LATER

I have decided that there is so much I want to discuss in the Wenger article I am just going to post a series of blogs over a period of time to respond to the questions above.

Summary Part 3 – ‘Communities of Practice’ Wenger

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SUMMARY NOTES of the key concepts in: Chapter 11, ‘Communities of Practice’ – Wenger

PART 3: ORGANIZATIONS

Communities of practice differ from institutional entities:

  • they negotiate their own enterprise
  • they arise, evolve and dissolve according to their own learning
  • they shape their own boundaries

There are two aspects to the organization – the designed organization (the institution) and the practice which gives life to the organization and is often a response to the designed organization.

A. DIMENSIONS Continue reading →

Summary Part 2 – ‘Communities of Practice’ Wenger

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SUMMARY NOTES of the key concepts in: Chapter 10, ‘Communities of Practice’ – Wenger

PART 2: LEARNING ARCHITECTURES

Need a skeletal architecture for learning (purpose of a conceptual architecture is to lay down the general principles of design ie state what needs to be in place)

So must recast the conceptual framework, laying out the basic questions that must be addressed and basic components that must be provided for a design of learning. Conceptual architecture can guide design by outlining:

  • i) general questions, choices and tradeoffs to address
  • ii) general shape of what needs to be achieved – basic components and facilities to provide

A. DIMENSIONS (of the ‘space’ of design for learning)

1. Participation & Reification (which are dimensions of both practice and identity)

  • both avenues for influencing the future (whether person or practice)
  • ensures some artifacts in place: tools, plans, procedures
  • makes sure right people are at the right place in the right kind of relation to make something happen
  • design cannot be a choice between these two – design for practice must be distributed between participation and reification (realization depends on how these two fit together)
  • therefore design involves decisions about how to distribute between these two: what to reify, when and with what forms of participation, who to involve and when and with respect to what forms of reification
  • this means trade-offs: rigidity vs adaptability, partiality of people vs ambiguity of artifacts etc Continue reading →

Summary Part 1 – ‘Communities of Practice’ Wenger

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SUMMARY NOTES of the key concepts in: Synopsis, ‘Communities of Practice’ – Wenger

PART 1: SOCIAL PERSPECTIVE

Perspectives are important because they shape what we perceive and what we do.

We often learn things without having any intention of becoming full members in any specifiable community of practice.

Some learning is best done in groups while some learning is best done by oneself.

Social Perspective on learning:

  • Learning is inherent in human nature (an ongoing and integral part of our lives)
  • Learning is first and foremost the ability to negotiate new meanings (involves our whole person)
  • Learning creates emergent structures (requires structure and continuity to accumulate experience and enough discontinuity to renegotiate meaning – constitutes elemental social learning structures)
  • Learning is fundamentally experiential and social (involves our own experience of participation and reification – is a realignment of experience and competence, whichever pulls the other)
  • Learning transforms our identities Continue reading →

Musings: Videophilia (April#5)

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What prompted these musings? An unfamiliar term I came across in the Australian Teacher magazine.

Having not heard of videophilia before, I did what we all do these days and googled it. On this site: http://www.videophilia.org/, I came across this definition:

videophilia: The new human tendency to focus on sedentary activities involving electronic media. Source:Pergams, O. R. W. and P. A. Zaradic. 2006. Is love of nature in the US becoming love of electronic media? 16-year downtrend in national park visits explained by watching movies, playing video games, internet use, and oil prices. Journal of Environmental Management 80:387-393.

Basically we are spending less time appreciating and experiencing nature and more time immersed in the digital world.

You might have an amazing garden in second life, but does it smell and feel like the real thing? Not yet anyway.

So take some time today to stop and smell the roses or feel the grass in your toes.

Musings: Technology is not enough…(April#4)

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What prompted these musings? A link to this video from a colleague (Thanks Suzanne!) which was very thought provoking. We can spend all this time on technology and tools but unless we have the fundamentals sorted, we have to question how effective the whole experience really is.

In addition to the jokes about educators which are very amusing, the funny stories about drawing a picture of God and the perils of being Shakespeare’s English teacher, and comments on male/female differences, there were some really fascinating points made in this video about creativity and education in schools by education guru Sir Ken Robinson.

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/iG9CE55wbtY” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” align=”center”/]

These were the main points that caught my attention from Ken’s talk: Continue reading →

Musings: A wealth of knowledge at your fingertips (April#3)

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What prompted these musings? Remembering what it USED to be like to arrange an overseas trip.

What I love most about the Internet is you can find out anything you could possibly ever need to know and it makes it all so easy. I remember when I first traveled overseas in 1991. You bought the lonely planet book. You read it. If you were brave you might translate a blurb into the appropriate language (using another book – not babel fish!) and you might ring overseas and try and book a room.  Now you can not only book the room online but see a 3D model to the point where you can tell what type of tea bags will be there.  And even better, you can hook up with total strangers and get travel advice on the best places to see, where to eat and what to do. 

This accessibility to information has opened so many previously closed doors. Just consider…… Continue reading →

Musings: Why does a true blogger blog? (April#2)

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What prompted these musings? Firstly a comment from a fellow blogger about disguising what is really an ad as a blog (http://forblogssake.edublogs.org/2008/04/05/when-is-a-blog-an-ad/) and secondly some comments from some classmates about their shyness and insecurities about publicly posting their thoughts on a blog as part of their assignments for this course.

I have a theory. I think a TRUE blogger blogs because a true blogger can’t help themselves. I am basing this theory on nothing more than my personal observations (very scientific). A month or so ago prior to starting this course I had nothing to ever do with blogs and no knowledge of blogs (other than having heard of Perez Hilton as a celebrity gossip blogger). I had no idea there were serious blogs out there or blogs that could be useful – I guess if I ever thought about them I thought they were simply the mad ravings of a tea-cosy headed geek. But the moment I set up this blog I was hooked. I am attempting to keep this blog more of an educational discourse on all things e-learning (of which blogging is certainly a feature) rather than my musings on everyday life (I am afraid if I started rambling all my thoughts about things like how people drive in Sydney, our tax system, our politicians, my new lounge room furniture etc etc I would never stop).  But I can see how it becomes an addictive process…..IF you are a certain type of person.

So what types of person blogs? Continue reading →

Musings: Who owns the right to your content on Facebook? (April#1)

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What prompted these musings? A recent discussion on ABC Sydney radio about the Australian swimmer whose party photos on a social networking site were suddenly brought into the spotlight by the media – highlighting the need for careful consideration of all information posted on the Net.

You probably think you own the rights to your Facebook content. Well read on, you might be surprised….

Social Networking sites are definitely here to stay. But do users really think about who might be looking at their information and what it could potentially be used for? If we want to use social networking sites in the e-learning process we need to be aware of potential issues.

  • We need to think about safety. Obviously one should never give away personal information (particularly home addresses) – students especially need to aware that the people they are interacting with may not necessarily be who they represent themselves to be.
  • We need to think about identity theft. This is a growing area of concern and too much publicly posted info makes it easier for the would be identity thieves among us. Reclaiming your identity can be a costly, time-consuming and frustrating process.
  • We need to think about the future. There have been examples in the US where candidates were not hired as interviewers have examined potential employees facebook pages and decided that their personal life did not fit in with the image the company wanted to portray. Things lurk on the net for a long long time. You think you may have deleted a file but it could easily have been held in cache by google and be around for a lot longer. The best way to think about it is never to post anything that you wouldn’t want anyone in the world to see from now until the rest of your life (and beyond!). Because those funny-at-the-time MySpace photos could come back to haunt you when you are trying for the job or career of a lifetime….

AND IF THAT WASN’T ENOUGH… THIS IS REALLY SCARY! Continue reading →