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.