Prue Salter’s Blog: Exploring the Power of Technology as a Learning Tool

“Collaboration is a process through which people who see different aspets of a problem can constructively explore their differences and search for solutions that go beyond theoir own limited vision of what is possible.” Building a collaborative workplace, AnecdoteCollaborativeWorkplace_v1s.pdf (541.552 Kb) Shawn Callahan, Mark Schenk and Nancy White from the Full Circle Associates website: http://www.fullcirc.com

Callahan, Schenk and White state that ” today we all need to be collaboration superstars”.  The article discusses how a new environment for getting things done is evolving. Technology has made it easier to communicate, to share ideas and to work collaboratively without the need to occupy the same physical space and now with the pace of change we need to be link up with people with complementary skill sets to meet increasingly complex outcomes.

The article discusses that fact that collaboration skills do not tend to be taught. Having just completed a collaborative project using a wiki with my uni colleagues, I began to reflect. What collaboration skills did we use and how could we teach these?

Some of the skills that we needed were to be open and honest about our ideas and those of others in the group, to be receptive to other people’s point of views, to have the ability to take and give constructive criticism in a supportive and accepting way, to accept that it is a joint piece of work and you will not always agree with everything that is done, to not take over and to encourage others to share their ideas as well.

I have always thought that good team skills in really an extension of being a good human being and now I am starting to think collaboration is just taking good teamwork skills to the next level.

I think the big difference is that in team work often the work is parceled out and worked on individually whereas in a collaborative experience that notion of proprietary ownership is dismissed.

Perhaps it is best summed up by a statement in our group standards for our collaborative wiki project:
“Edit the entry as though it was your own, but with consideration and respect for differing viewpoints.”

 Thanks JuJu Members - it was a stimulating experience to work with you all. Truly the whole ended up being greater than a sum of the parts!

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“One can design systems of accountability and policies…..but one cannot design the practices that will emerge…One can design roles, but one cannot design identities that will be constructed through these roles. One can design visions, but one cannot design the allegiance necessary to align energy behind those visions….One can design work processes, but not work practices; one can design a curriculum but not learning.” Pp. 229, Communities of practice, Wenger, 1999.

As we begin the process of designing a learning community in our group, re-reading this passage in Wenger was initially a bit discouraging. It seems there is only so much we can do to design an effective learning community, we have to accept that the community will start to take on a life of its own and determine its own direction. On reflection, I actually found this concept empowering. What we are doing is creating a vehicle for learning, but then handing over the navigation and driving to those who started off as the passengers. It our role as designers to then be responsive and reactive to the needs of the community and to provide the necessary frameworks as needs and wants emerge.

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“…because all learning eventually gains its significance in the type of person we become.” Pp. 226, Communities of practice, Wenger, 1999.

One thing about learning is that you will never know when things you learn become useful later in life. When I was living in Singapore in the mid nineties, my employed paid a web design company (there wasn’t a lot of choice then) to design their site. It was expensive and inadequate. I bought a book ‘html for dummies’ and said I’ll make the site for $1000. And I did! And then I taught Primary school students how to code in html and they made web pages showing all the Australian lollies they were missing in Singapore with scanned images of the wrapper papers.

At the time (oh how naïve) I thought I am never going to use this skill again. In the end it has turned out to be one of the most important skills I have developed.  Wenger is right, eventually, all learning gains significance through the skills we develop and how that transforms as us a person and our ability to participate and negotiate meaning.

This unassuming skill has certainly transformed my life and my identity in many ways I did not expect 13 years ago!

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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.

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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.

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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