Tag Archives: groups

Summary – ‘Building a collaborative workplace’

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SUMMARY NOTES of the key concepts in: ‘Building a collaborative workplace’ – Callahan, Schenk and White

New environment for innovation and getting things done:

  • no lone pursuits
  • need collaboration
  • changing skills so seek people with these skills

But:

  1. Collaboration skills don’t tend to be taught – on the job or hit and miss.
  2. Organisational culture will determine how collaboration is supported.
  3. Many companies but ‘collaboration’ software they are not using well

“Technology makes things possible; people collaborating makes it happen” Continue reading →

SIGNPOST to Assessment 1 Part 2 (EMT1)

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SIGNPOST FOR ANNE TO ASSESSMENT TASK

Main challenges with this task:

  • not getting dragged into spending hours in the community
  • trying to keep the technical details to a minimum
  • again trying to reduce what I had written to the word limit!

Although I entered this community for this assignment, it is a community that I will stay a part of as it has been pretty useful.

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 →

SIGNPOST to Assessment 1 Part 1 (EMT1)

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 My main challenges with this task were:

  • Deciding from the mass of resources available on this topic which I would reference in this assignment.
  • The actual referencing, I loathe it as the best of times as it is so fiddly but even more complicated when web resources are involved.
  • Reducing the assignment from the huge amount I originally wrote to the more concise 750 word limit. I was ruthless in cutting it down to the limit.
  • Forcing myself to stop playing, stop improving and just post the damn thing. Because I knew I really had till Saturday morning, I could have kept changing a word here or there, tweaking, improving so it took lots of willpower to just stop!

Another thing I found interesting:

I have never had a task where your work is posted publicly available for all to view. I was wondering, despite the fact that we are mature-aged students, if there would be any ‘borrowing’ or ‘adapting’ of other people’s work. But when I had a look at a few blogs, it was interesting to see how completely different all the postings were – they are so totally individual there is no way anyone would even consider using anyone else’s materials (although I saw a few interesting references I’d like to read up myself).

Although I was annoyed : ) to see Deborah had a voki in her post (although I haven’t clicked on it to see what it says yet) as I had just done one thinking what a clever original idea to lead Anne to my assignment but when I saw Deb had clearly posted hers prior to mine I went back and changed it to the above signpost image instead.

Musings: Defining a learning community (March#5)

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What prompted these musings? Well this is actually an excerpt from a uni assigment. While the assignments might disappear from this site eventually, the blog will remain so I would like to share my thoughts on the topic of coming to a definition for a learning community.


My view:

A learning community is a group with a shared interest who have acted upon a desire to learn more and help others learn more. They interact collaboratively through different learning activities to share information, resources and ideas around their topic in order to facilitate group and individual learning.

A true learning community is representative of unselfish, collective learning as opposed to individual, secretive learning. There is no single ‘teacher’ but instead the members contribute to the learning of the community. The knowledge is not hidden, but shared, creating a knowledge base for the community to build upon.

This supportive environment, combined with the group’s social interaction, creates a strong sense of ownership and commitment to learning in the community.

How I came to this viewpoint: Continue reading →

READING Week 5 – Keeping up with the Jones’

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Chapter 4: Social Learning – Cornford (1999)
What are the significant aspects of social learning theories that relate to learning communities / networks? Again – aspects of the works in this chapter can be useful frameworks for analysing your community. You may like to select a framework or focus for analysis – even before you select your community! This will also provide you with some focus when researching further for articles in journals.

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.

Continue reading →

READING Week 4 – Now play nicely together…

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Chapter 3: Social Psychology of Adult Learning – Saunders (1999)
Reviewing the chapter with our focus of learning communities as a framework – how will the various different theories and perspectives apply to our context? Already we have some experience with self-disclosure (look at our Profiles on Ning!) Review some of our discussion forums for learning conversations…. just for starters.

There was so much in this article that was relevant to our focus of learning communities as a framework that I am going to focus just on the top 5 areas that I found most interesting.

1. ADULTS AND GROUPS

There was much discussion and research presented in this chapter about the concept that adults will learn more effectively through interaction with others and participation in groups. Yet my observation has been that many adults prefer a lecture-style presentation than having to participate in a group activity.

Continue reading →

SUMMARY Week 4 – ‘Social Psychology of Adult Learning’ Saunders

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SUMMARY NOTES of the key concepts in: Chapter 3, Social Psychology of Adult Learning – Saunders

THIS ARTICLE COVERS:

Themes relevant for learning in group contexts

  • Overview of research in social psychology
  • Social Learning Theory
  • Social Comparison Theory
  • Social Judgment Theory
  • Self Disclosure
  • Feedback
  • Learning Conversations

Continue reading →