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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

1. Participation & Reification: challenges of institutionalization

Things that are institutionalized (eg policies, roles, laws etc) become public and are easier to pay attention to and better able to cross boundaries BUT it

• creates fixed points around which to negotiate alignment but tends to become frozen in reification
• offers opportunities for drastic change but has limited ability to mobilize the power of practice
• consumes energy
• can restrain domination by specific interest groups but can also become the instrument of such domination

Designing processes and policies is important but in the end it is practice that produces results.

Too much institutionalization – can stall the institution

Too little institutionalization – not enough material to hold the organization together

Key questions:

• What should be institutionalized and when should participation be relied on?
• What forms of participation are required to give meaning to institutional reification?
• At what point is institutionalization a distraction?
• Where are the points of leverage at which organizational interventions can support learning in practice?

2. The Designed & the Emergent

An organisation is therefore the meeting of two sources of structure, the designed structure of the institution and the emergent structure of practice.

Unless the defined institutional roles/systems of accountability/artifacts (like procedures, rules) can find a realization of identities in practice, they are unlikely to connect with the conduct of everyday affairs

Must be a certain amount of free play between practice and institution: relation is one of negotiated alignment.

Key questions:

• How can the design be kept minimal and still ensure continuity and coherence?
• What are the obstacles to responsiveness to the emergent?
• What are the provisions for renegotiating the design under new circumstances?

3. The Local (improvisation) & the Global (patterns)

The fundamental principal is to connect and combine the diverse knowledgeabilities that exist in a range of practices.

Key questions:

• Does the organizational design serve as a communication tool?
• Does it help the various forms of knowledgeability to involved in a constellation to recognize each other?
• Are information flows reciprocal?
• Are there forms of multimembership that connect the local and the global?
• What perspectives are privileged and which are marginalized or made invisible?

4. Identification & Negotiability

In organizations many people belong where they have little say and many have a say where they do not belong

Key questions:

• What are the sources of identification that keep an organization together?
• What are the obstacles to expanding fields of identification?
• How can an organizational design promote and distribute ownership of meaning?
• By what processes can a community modify its field of negotiability?

- Emphasis should be on learning rather than teaching by finding leverage points to build on learning opportunities offered in practice

-Communities should be engaged in the design of their practice as a place of learning

- Communities need access to the resources they need to negotiate their connections with other practices and their relation with the organization

Organizational engagement

• As people build histories of doing things together, any organization will spawn some communities of practice
• Communities of practice are organizational assets that represent investments in mutual engagement
• Since they are by nature self-organizing, communities of practice usually have rather modest organizational needs

Communities of Practice: the social fabric of learning

Challenges of organizational design:

• Negotiation of meaning (sustained history of practice helps the negotiation process)
• Preservation and creation of knowledge (old knowledge when kept alive produces new knowledge)
• Spreading of information (new info acquired by one member can quickly become the property of everyone)
• Home for identities (despite a focus on communities of practice also places a specific focus on people)

Key is to honor the meaningfulness of members participation and value their membership as a key to their ability to contribute to the competence of the organization.

By offering an institutional home to the communities of practice that are key to its competence, an organization helps sustain the kinds of identity that allow participants to take active responsibility for some aspects of organizational learning.

Communities of practice are organizational assets as they are the social fabric of learning in the organisation – but because they are not formally organized they are often a resource that are easily overlooked.

Boundaries

- Boundaries are a sign that community of practices are deepening.
- Focusing on boundaries helps explain unusual events, connections, interpretations etc
- Boundaries confront newcomers and outsiders
- Boundaries are the likely locus of the production of radically new knowledge or places where new practices often start.

Depth and fragmentation

The challenge of engagement requires a balancing act between depth and fragmentation

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

2. The Designed & the Emergent

• There is an inherent uncertainty between design and its realization in practice since practice is not the result of design but rather a response to it.
• The structure of practice is emergent, reconstituting itself in the face of new events: this emergent character gives practice and identity their ability to negotiate meaning anew
• This means practice cannot be the result of design but instead constitutes a response to design
• So the challenge is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent but including it and making it an opportunity
• Aim is to balance the benefits and costs of prescription and understand the trade-offs involved in specifying in advance.

3. The Local (improvisation) & the Global (patterns)

• Designing for learning cannot be based on a division of labour between learners and non-learners – communities of practice are already involved in the design of their own learning as ultimately they will decide what they need and how it operates
• Paradox: No community can fully design the learning of another AND No community can fully design its own learning
• So a design must aim to combine different forms of knowledgeability so they inform each other
• Design is a boundary object that functions as a communication artifact around which communities of practice can negotiate their contribution, position and alignment

4. Identification & Negotiability

• In order to have an effect, design must shape or form communities and economies of meaning
• How is the power to define, adapt or interpret the design distributed?
• Design represents a perspective and can results in privileging of perspectives – which can then curtail negotiation and create fragmentation among constituencies
• Design is a proposal of identity and creates a focus for identification – it is a bid for ownership of meaning
• So design creates fields of identification and negotiability that orient the practices and identities if those involved to various forms of participation and non-participation.

Each dimension has distinct (but interrelated) trade-offs and challenges.

1. Engagement

Engagement is a matter of activity, community building, inventiveness, social energy and emergent knowledgeability. Infrastructure of engagement should include:

• i) Mutuality (interactional facilities, joint tasks, peripherality)
• ii) Competence (initiative and knowledgeability, accountability, tools)
• iii) Continuity (reificative and participative memory)

2. Imagination

Need imagination to deal with a broader context. Needs:

• i) Orientation (location in space, time, meaning, power)
• ii) Reflection
• iii) Exploration

3. Alignment

Imagination can open up practices and identities beyond engagement but it is not always effective in connecting learning to broader enterprises. Through alignment we can have effects and contributions to tasks defined beyond our engagement. Needs:

• i) Convergence
• ii) Coordination (standards and methods, communication, boundary facilities, feedback facilities)
• iii) Jurisdiction

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
• Learning constitutes trajectories of participation (builds personal histories in relation to the histories of our communities)
• Learning means dealing with boundaries (multimembership in the constitution of our identities)
• Learning is a matter of social energy and power (thrives on identification and depends on negotiability)
• Learning is a matter of engagement (need opportunities to contribute actively to the practices of community and integrate their enterprises into our understanding of the world)
• Learning is a matter of imagination.
• Learning is a matter of alignment
• Learning involves an interplay between the local and the global)

Communities of Practice

• May be potential, active or latent
• Are about content: learning as a living experience of negotiating meaning
• Are not reified, designable units (practice itself is not amenable to design)
• Can design policies or communities to live by but can’t design the practices that will emerge in response to the system
• So, learning can not be designed, it cannot only be designed for ie facilitated or frustrated.

I found Cornford’s discussion on social learning theories particularly interesting in relation to two specific communities I am currently exploring.

Impact of Social Comparison Theory on the search for an online community.

In my search for an online community to be examined as the subject of our first assignment, I directly experienced many of the phenomenon discussed by Cornford around social comparison theory.

Cornford argues that adults will learn more productively (and with less frustration) if they choose suitable models for comparison. So the choice of model can play a large part in the success (and level of satisfaction or enjoyment) of the learning experience. While the presence of others can act as a stimulus for learning and performance, if the model chosen is too superior in expertise the learner may feel overwhelmed by the gap between their current competence and that of the modeller.

When searching for PHP/MySQL coding communities, I initially came across some so that were so beyond my beginners level that I found the whole experience depressing and de-motivating (as Cornford describes) despite the fact that I have had some small successes in this area. But when it was clearly laid out to me how far I had to travel to reach a high level of competence (it was as though the site was, the gap in knowledge was staggering and oppressive. So my process for every community I investigated for suitability, my first task was to compare my level of expertise with that of the participants on the site until I found a group where I felt there was a cooperative environment with a realistic starting point for beginners, but scope to learn and move to the next level of skills.

Social Penetration Theory in Action

The second community where I could view these ideas in action was the NING community for our e-Learning group. This is a wonderful example of social penetration theory  in action – the movement from superficial levels of learning about each other to more personal, intimate levels. Despite starting as strangers, the group has moved from guarded impersonal posts to much more revealing and self-disclosing exchanges. What has struck me most is how understanding more about a person’s background, experience and perspectives adds greater depth to any commentary they might make. We too as a group have disclosed disclose incrementally, symmetrically and reciprocally as Cornford indicates is the usual progression. The Johari window of disclosure was also an interesting model as each of us participating will have our arena: open part of self (known both to self and others), our façade or hidden part (known to self but not others), our blind spot: (unknown to self, known to others) and the unknown part of ourselves.

Cornford’s discussions on the need for selective self-monitoring were also pertinent and really made me stop and reflect on my own postings on the site. Was I overly guarded at all? I was I writing what I really thought or what I thought I should be writing? How much of what I was posting was affected or driven by the environment and my response to cues from this environment?

I could also spend time discussing the advantages and disadvantages of group learning and the significance of research in social psychology on group dynamics, but I am endeavouring to shorten these posts so perhaps that is a topic for another time.

PREVELANCE OF SOCIAL LEARNING

• large amount of our learning occurs through interactions: observe others and model
• realization that this is important, but few satisfactory theories to explain social learning

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE:

1. Piaget’s Genetic Epistmological Theory

• From 1920s till death
• a theory of development of intelligence and cognitive functioning based on a series of genetically determined stages, fixed by age
• strong emphasis on social interaction
• theory has been attacked: invariability of stages, fixed sequencing of subcomponents, doubts about the reliability of tasks used

2. Vygotsky’s Social-Cognitive Approach

• 1930s theories to explain link between socialization, language, development of behaviour and cognitive processes
• central are concepts of self-verbalisation, proximal development (child encouraged to develop skills close to their immediate capability – like the concept of ‘readiness’), scaffolding of children through interaction with carers as they attempt to learn behaviour beyond immediate capabilities and progress to next stage of expected development
• relevance for adolescents and adult learners not established (motivation and willingness may need to be taken into account)

3. Situated Learning

• extreme position denied the existence of transfer and holds that learning is only attained through specific physical cues
• major problem is that most of these theorists do not assume fixed knowledge structures and so cannot account in a satisfactory way for memory
• other researchers have indicated that in additional to social and contextual factors need to consider individual’s learning processes
• Bandura’s theory then moved towards reconciling this

4. Bandura’s Social Learning/Social Cognitive Theory

• Bandura’s theories have developed beyond modeling
• Specifically took into account social, cognitive and physical aspects of learning

Importance of Modelling in Social Cognitive Theory and Development of Self Processes

• Foundation of social cognitive theory is belief there are complex interactions between individual, behaviour and environment.
• Modelling is therefore of great importance and seen as an environmental factor
• Modelling explains acquisition of a wide range of observable behaviours
• Modelling also important in learning the abstract rules which underline effective behaviour
• Civilised conduct is dependent upon recognition of complex rules derived from complex behaviour and adherence to these codes of contact
• Modelling through observational learning is also considered imp in developing self-regulation and positive beliefs about self-efficacy (belief one is likely to succeed)
• Considered that these self-processes are key issues in the development of effective learning and performance
• Levels for development of self-regulatory behaviour (observation, imitative, self-controlled, self-regulated): gradual movement from social to self sources.

Change, Possible Selves and the Importance of Models

• Any learning of behaviour , attitudes or values is dependent on having some conception of what that may involve and of possible selves, must be able to conceptualize what change may involve
• Humans are inclined to select the possible selves that they believe are effective performers
• Viewing of positive models also cuts down on the trial and error time

Some Common Effects of Model Observation

Factors which must be explained by any theory for it to be regarded as satisfactory are:

1. Inhibition/Disinhibition Effects

• Inhibition: effect of observation of models causing he individual not to engage in certain forms of behaviour
• Disinhibition: to throw off caution and engage in a form of behaviour previously considered not appropriate
• With these the environmental factors (esp carrot or stick) tend to be imp features

2. Creative Adaptations (adults adapt or modify modeled behaviours – need to be creative and improve what they have observed as well as adapt to different circumstances)

The Observational Learning Model

• see a model performing some type of skill or action, attempt to learn from this action and reproduced modeled behaviour
• In this model:

1. Attentional Processes – explain how learner selectively extracts info
2. Retention Processes – imp of retaining the info
3. Production Processes – process of converting the images and info stored in memory into some kind of physical performance – range of process and feedback variables imp.
4. Motivational Processes – imp in initial skill learning, maintenance of skills standards, improvement of skills over time (this process influences the others)

Attentional Processes: Modelled Events

• Salience (or distinctiveness of an event, must be able to distinguish the modeled act from other info in the context, notice the cues and realize there is something different to be learned
• Complexity (affects how much of event is observed, processed, retained, limitations of short term memory, need multiple viewings)
• Prevalence (more time repeated the better)
• Accessibility (how easy it is to access the modeling event – may be social class based factors or social taboos)
• Functional value (perceived value or usefulness of a modeled event to the observer – will affect how much attention is paid – rewards generally more motivating than punishments)
• Affective Valence (refers to the degrees of attraction and identification that exist between an observer and a model)

Attentional Processes: Observer Attributes

• Sensory Capacities (eg visually impaired students etc)
• Arousal Level (eg sleepy or hyperactive students)
• Perceptual Set (students frame of reference)
• Cognitive Capabilities
• Cognitive Preconceptions (past learning)
• Past Reinforcement

Reterntion Processes: Cognitive Construction

• Symbolic Coding (short term memory vs long term memory – humans must convert into symbolic codes ie representations of the observed events)
• Cognitive Organisation (linking together info, organizing it or grouping it with related pieces of info)
• Rehearsal: Cognitive and Enactive (physical)

Retention Processes: Observer Attributes

• Cognitive Skills  and Structures (cognitive structures that already exist will influence the observers efforts at symbolic coding and cognitive organization)

Production Processes:

• Representational Guidance (affected by accuracy of initial observation and effective coding of the observed data)
• Corrective Adjustment (during practice period corrective adjustments are needed from feedback and monitoring)
• Observer Attributes

Motivational Processes:

• Types of Incentives (external, internal, vicarious)
• Observer Attributes (diff people will have diff presences for different types of incentives)

In conclusion:

Bandura’s model has successfully reconciled elements from a range of theories. It is a unique approach as it explains (in convincing ways) the factors which operate in learning through observation of others. It is a detailed of analysis of component processes underlying observational learning and so we can gain insights into factors which must be taken into account in social learning situations.