Month: March 2009 | Page 2 | Full Circle Associates

CoP Series #10: Stewarding Technology for Community

This is the 10th and last in a series of blog posts I wrote for Darren Sidnick about communities of practice in an elearning context late last year. I am finally getting the rest of the series up. Part 1, part 2, part 3,, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8 , and part 9 are all here on the blog.

Elearning is growing and evolving hand in glove with a constellation of technologies that have their roots in a number of places. One is in collaboration software. If we look back to the origins of the internet (ARPANET) through to today’s big emphasis on “Web 2.0” tools, there is a constant thread of the dynamic interplay between technology and the groups using it. The early software was written because scientists needed better ways to collaborate. Usenet evolved as more and more people started using it, creating both technological and social demands on the system. Personal publishing – while easier today with blogs and wikis – has been around since the early nineties, giving voice to people in new ways that ranged wider than their geographic communities, creating learning connections that span the globe. Community influences technology and technology influences community. This is true in the application of technology for learning.

The second root to the technology supporting elearning is the traditional structures of teaching, particularly of the western world, with the notion of “course” and “classroom” guided by the hierarchy of the “school” and the “teacher.” As people developed technologies to support learning, they often recreated these same structures in their software.

Today the world of community technology and learning technology offer us something beyond the classroom metaphor. They offer us affordances for group,community and network learning. There is an interplay between the technology and those who use it, driving the evolution of the tools forward every day. Further more, there are so many different tools and technologies that our heads start to spin like that scene from the Exorcist!

We can’t cover all of this in one blog post, but let’s get a few of the issues out on the table. This is a very high level “skim.” This is a complex area. So take my words with a grain of salt! 🙂

1. We are not simply deploying technology. We are designing for social learning and interaction.
First, from a CoP perspective, the platform is NOT the community. It is the people. Second, it is easy to reduce technology selection to a set of features and pick the platform that seems to have all the features we need. But what we really need to understand is how these tools can support social learning and interaction. This is both a technological and social design issue. So before going into a technology selection and deployment path, be clear on your goals. This is not a content warehouse, nor simply a tracking system to account for student activity.

You are designing a “place” where people will learn together. Do you go to where they are already online (sites like Facebook and Meebo) and connect those sites with your material, or create a space you invite them into? Does everything have to happen in one place (via something like a portal) or can it be spread about the net a bit?

What attracts people to a place? What makes it easy and enjoyable – yes ENJOYABLE! You are designing a place where people need to “show up.” Is the place easy to navigate. Are the tools organised in a way that reflects the content, learner and course needs?

How does the technology support the type of group? If you are trying to foster a CoP, there needs to be attention to both community, domain and practice. If however, you are supporting a course a learner works through by themselves, you don’t need to support sociality between learners.

How is the learner’s identity expressed? What control do they have over their experience? How are you designing for multiple learning modalities?

Answering these and other social design questions is the starting place for technology exploration, not things you think of after the software is installed.

2. How do we select in the jungle of technology options?
How often have you heard the debate. “Oh, you should only use a blog for that!” Or “wiki, use a wiki!” People have strong opinions about what a tool is useful for. Let me share a hint. Don’t start there. Start with what sort of activity you want to support, then evaluate the context. THEN start thinking about software. Not an instant before. For example, here are some learning activities and some potential tools to support them.

Learning Activity 1) Conversations between learners. This supports discovery, meaning making, group work and building relationships. Tool = could be discussion boards, email lists, wikis (not for all groups, but some make it work), synchronous chat rooms
Learning Activity 2) Learner reflections or assignment portfolios. Tool = blogs, file sharing tools, e-portfolio’s
Learning Activity 3) Co -writing. Tool = wikis, Google docs
Learning Activity 4) Feedback, testing closure on a discussion, decision making. Tool= polling tools
Learning Activity 5) Sharing of course materials (written, audio, images, video). See http://darrensidnick.blogspot.com/2008/07/make-podcasting-easy-for-learners-and.html Will the material be provided, or are you supporting learner contributed content? If the latter, they have to be able to contribute, not controlled from a central webmaster point. Tool = File sharing, Content management system, Podcast and vodcast tools, Photo sharing tools
Learning Activity 6) Finding other learners with something in common. Tool = profiles, pPersonal pages, social networking tools, Twitter
Learning Activity 7) Finding content. Tools = search engine, tagging tool

Once you have identified the activities you want to support, you can either look for a platform that brings the required tools together (like an Elearning platform, content management system or a hosted site like Ning http://www.ning.com). Part of the decision making here also includes your need to host a system or have it hosted, privacy and security issues and cost/or free with ads. This is where working with your IT team is really critical.

You don’t have to have one single platform. You can assemble bits and pieces into a unique configuration. This is trickier and does not scale out, nor does it work well for groups who won’t tolerate multiple accounts and sign ins, but it can be very rewarding for groups who want to be flexible and experiment with tools during their course work. For examples of this, see the work of Leigh Blackall with Wiki Educator (http://www.wikieducator.org/Facilitating_online_communities) and Stephen Downes/George Siemens for their recent Connectivism Course (http://ltc.umanitoba.ca:83/wiki/Connectivism).It is easy to get really wrapped up in technology selection. The three things to remember are: keep it simple, keep it flexible because things WILL change, and finally, remember it is the people, their interaction and the course content that matters. The platform is the means to the end, not the end!

Beth Kanter's Tech Steward image from Flickr Cc 3. There is a new job out there – Stewarding technology for the learning community
In the “roles” blog post I talked about the role of Community Technology Steward. This is, according to the work I (Nancy) have been doing with John Smith and Etienne Wenger, the person who knows enough about the community and enough about the technology to help pick, configure, and support useful practices with that technology. In large organisation, there may be an IT department that makes the big decisions and supports the back of a set of technologies, but there is always that place where “the rubber meets the road” and someone has to make easy the path of using technology. Let’s look briefly at each of the parts of this role in the context of a learning community. We’ll make the assumption that in this case, the steward isn’t making the technology selection decisions, but that is often part of the role.

Provide input into the selection of technology. While the IT people are going to be the go-to people for issues such as security, reliability and scalability, there is that ticklish piece of USABILITY. It is important to have input from people who know the social side of using software for community oriented learning. This means knowing what the community needs (see picking above) and a sense of what the community can do technologically. Knowing how many tech barriers they will tolerate. As a community technology steward, you want to test any proposed software and map the learning activities you need to support to the tools and features provided. This means that just because an elearning platform has a blog, doesn’t mean it is a useful blog. So test, test and push for ease of use.
Configure technology. With so many software packages like Moodle and hosted platforms like Ning, you are often given a ton of options. Start simple and activate JUST the features you need to support the learning activities you identified. Don’t get carried away. And remember, you are designing for a group, not just yourself. We have a tendency to design for our own preferences. Get some potential learners involved at this stage testing and giving feedback. Listen to and respond to the feedback.
Support useful practices using the technology. Once your technology is selected and configured, think about onramps for learners. Create some simple initial learning activities that have meaning to the domain AND give learners a chance to use the technology. Debrief the initial activities and identify any barriers or changes that you need to make. As learners discover useful practices, share them across the community. People are creative and inventive and figure out things the software designers never even thought of. Use that as part of the learning.

4. Security, Open and Closed

Finally, there are many issues around what levels of privacy and security are required (by law), by culture and organisational convention. Traditionally we have designed closed learning systems, but there are experiments to open up learning, creating online courses that anyone can join, but only those who enroll and pay get specific support. (Again, see the Connectivism coursehttp://ltc.umanitoba.ca:83/wiki/Connectivism) If we advise clearly that a course is open, is that acceptable to institutions and students? When does openness contribute to learning? I suspect it is more often than we might ini

tially imagine. But there are times when closed and private are needed, especially for students who are concerned about their lack of preparation or skills, or have special needs that might not be well understood in an open situation. This suggests that we are transparent about what is open, what is closed, why and under what conditions. But it is useful not to assume closed and private all the time. We learn in and with the world.

I have just touched VERY lightly on these issues and there are many more associated with technology in online learning and with communities of practice. So consider this just an appetizer. But we now know that not only is technology important, but HOW we select, configure and use it, and within what context, that creates the sum experience. Not just the software.

Image Credit:

Beth Kanter for the Tech Steward Plumber

The graphic at the top is mine!

Tom Vander Wall Nails My Sharepoint Experience

For a number of years I have cringed every time one of my clients tells me that have or are planning to deploy Microsoft SharePoint as a collaborative platform. They say it is their “social media” deployment. SharePoint is many things, but it misses the critical element of social media which is networked connection between people and ideas, easy discoverability, makes visible and allows people to act on weak ties, and support for other network-like interactions rather than closed group performance.

I am not an IT manager, nor would I say my main competence is in portals and intranets. My focus is on what people DO with these tools, and very often I’ve seen people struggle with SharePoint.

Recently Tom Vander Wall has posted a really thoughtful blog post that says what I have experienced. SharePoint is a silo builder, not buster. (Thanks to someone in my Twitter network for Tweeting the link and I’m sorry I did not note who this was!!)

In SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools :: Personal InfoCloud, Tom quotes one of his informants:

“We went from 5 silos in our organization to hundreds in a month after deploying SharePoint”. They continue, “There is great information being shared and flowing into the system, but we don’t know it exists, nor can we easily share it, nor do much of anything with that information.” I heard this from an organization about 2 years ago in a private meeting and have been hearing near similar statements since. This is completely counter to the Enterprise 2.0 hopes and wishes they had for SharePoint. They were of the mindset that open sharing & having the organization and individuals benefit from a social platform.

Clearly, the challenges of any platform is not just the platform, but how and WHY it was used. Driving from real needs, not simply IT convenience or standards alone. But there is something critical here that is missing from a social interaction perspective. Horizontality.

Without extensive customization (and addition of external functionality), SharePoint requires you to dive into an area, then back out of it before you dive into another area. It is built on a tree-branching model. To maximize the power of networked interaction, you need a networked architecture. If you are trying to reify and support a hierarchical reporting and accountability model based on the org chart, SharePoint fits like a glove.

Our mental models and values permeate the very coding of the software we use. When people say technology is value neutral, I say people have values and people build software, therefore the software carries the imprint of the designers’ values. SharePoint is a perfect example.

If you read the excellent comments to Tom’s post, there is some great insight as to what Sharepoint is good for and some ideas about how and why it stumbles in other areas. One of Tom’s own replies stands out for me:

There is a lot of understanding of how social tools should work and need to work in enterprise (deeply based on how people interact with others and with interfaces) that must go on top of the technology platform. I have deep interest in that story and that understanding, as it is one I rarely see inside enterprise, but I see with in the makers of the social tool products.
The point I hear over and over from those trying SharePoint to accomplish enterprise 2.0 functionality (open social interaction, ease of use, ease of working in the flow, sharing collectively, aggregating in context, and eventually getting to collaboration) is not the platform on its own to do this without very deep pockets for development. Lockheed and Wachovia are the only big deployments I know that went down this path..

From a global perspective, there are some additional challenges which I brought up during a live webcast (recording of Part1) and web discussion (on Ning) that Tony Karrer hosted on SharePoint a few weeks ago. (If you are interested in some on-the ground conversations about SharePoint, dig around the Ning site):

SharePoint is not low-bandwidth friendly. Between page load times and the need to navigate up and down, people in low bandwidth areas struggle with SharePoint.
SharePoint does not have many offline options for those who have intermittent connectivity, but the tie in with MS Office can offer some opportunities for work-arounds.
For global organizations, IT tends to make the software choice without a lot of insight about field conditions and social interaction/working patterns AND are often lured to use any software offered to them free as an NGO. The false economy is the customization costs eat up any savings and then some for these organizations.
Global NGOs often do not have the support team to help with implementation and roll out, leaders rarely use the software themselves, setting poor examples and middle managers have little incentive for creating the culture change to adopt the tool. This is NOT a SharePoint problem, but it is a factor that increases the failure rate.
The organizations that have successfully implemented SharePoint have good connectivity, robust IT and support teams and usually have a strong content management (file sharing) practice. Not network collaboration.

DavidSibbet: Power And Love

As a follow up to my post on leadership in challenging times, I wanted to point to David Sibbet’s post, Power And Love: Is it Time for Bi-Lingual Leaders?

David shares some ideas of Adam Kahane about what he has seen as needed beyond the wonderful work he has been doing with scenario planning (which has also captured my attention recently about how it helps us generate innovation and possibiity.) David describes scenario planning as being “fundamentally about surfacing and refreshing the core stories that people tell about what is plausible and possible.”

David wrote:

Adam reported that he’s working on what he found was missing from his initial work with scenarios, which is addressing the issues of power. Scenario work, as Adam experiences it, is really about bringing people back to sense of connection with each other and the larger whole – at core about releasing love into a system. But he has discovered, in spite of having extraordinary experiences of breakthrough in understanding and connection between people, that when the questions of power and resources then needed to be addressed the processes broke down. “It was as though the strong feelings of love and connection actually made the issue of power un-discussable.”
“My new book is basically unpacking a sentence that Martin Luther King wrote that points directly at this issue,” Adam said. King wrote:
“Power without love is reckless and abusive.
Love without power is sentimental and anemic.”
“My thesis is that if we want to address complex social challenges we need to be be bi-lingual about both power and love,” Adam said.

Now that’s a lot of quoting people, quoting people, quoting a person. But the resonance across these three people reminds me that this is a powerful pattern. Love and power are a yin and yang of each other, and if we have learned anything about the world, is that there are always forces that both pull apart and complement each other at the same time. This is not only a core of leadership, but of facilitation, and collaboration.

So how do we get it right?

CoP Series #9: Community Heartbeats

This is the nineth in a series of blog posts I wrote for Darren Sidnick late last year in the context of communities of practice as part of online learning initiatives. I am finally getting the rest of the series up. Part 1, part 2, part 3,, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7 , part 8 , part 9 and part 1o here!

Community Heartbeats – when synchronous interactions matter

Online community learning is great in that it provides us the opportunity to learn anytime,and anywhere we have connectivity. However, that is a pretty rosy view when we consider the competition a course or workshop has against everything else going on in our lives. Often the thought of “oh, I can do this anytime so I’ll do it later” leaves a course to be done in the wee hours of the night or on weekends when we really might like or need to be doing something else. A learner who stays away too long may begin to feel they have fallen too far behind, or isolated from their community. That’s where synchronous events can help. They can keep the heartbeat of a learning community going strong. For some, they create a sense of community, relationship and “realness” — voices and not just words on a screen.

What are synchronous events?
Synchronous online events are when some or all of the learners are online at the same time and interacting using tools such as Voice over IP (VoIP), telephone bridge lines, chat rooms, web meetings and instant messenger tools – even Twitter!. They can be discussion based, or can be a presentation by a guest or tutor combined with time for questions and answers. They can be large group or small group breakouts from the larger community. Some examples include:

Weekly online tutor “office hours.” Learners can log on and ask questions, get support and just check in. These could be mandatory or voluntary. I find that if you do one first that is “all hands” people can get a sense of the value of the office hours, then are more likely to participate in the future.
Presentations and guest speakers & lecturers. First of all, if you aren’t planning any interaction with the learners around lectures or presentations, don’t make them synchronous. Save the synchronous time for INTERACTION. Content can be provided on the web to be viewed at anyone’s convenience. But if you can bring in a special guest, this is worth a fixed meeting time and it makes it — well – SPECIAL. Keep in mind, this is not about pushing powerpoints. A good online presentation will mix presentation with interative activities – a good mix is 7 minutes of content, 7-10 of interaction. An hour is good, and 90 minutes should be the maximum. Include audio, text and visual elements. Some of us are not so good at just listening!
Small group meetings. Is there small group work? Encourage learners to set a time to meet each week. This builds full participation and helps reduce procrastination. They can meet in a web meeting room or even just on an instant messenger or Skype. Even a shared Twitter hashtag can create little moments of shared learning and support.

What frequency of online events is useful?
For new learners, it is helpful to have regular synchronous events until they have figured out their learning and participation rhythms. Virtual team expert Martha Maznevski likens it to the heartbeat of a runner. New runners’ hearts are still weak so they beat fast early on in their runs. But trained runners hearts beat slower. So experienced learning communities may not need to meet as often, unless meetings are their preferred mode of interaction.

How do we bridge between the synchronous and the asynchronous?
Synchronous meetings don’t work for everyone due to schedules, internet access and personal learning preferences. So we need to have strategies that bridge between the synchronous and asynchronous.

Post recordings, notes and artifacts of synchronous meetings. Make sure your learners know where they are and how to access them.
Follow up on synchronous action items in the asynchronous interaction spaces. Notes taken “live” in a web meeting can be shared right afterwards, with action items highlighted. If additional conversation is needed, continue in a discussion thread, blog or wiki area.
Prepare for upcoming synchronous meetings by involving the group in planning, again using the asynchronous tools you have at hand. You can even use scheduling tools like http://www.doodle.ch to pick a meeting time!

Finally, check in with the group as to how the “heartbeat” is going. Ask for feedback and use that to improve the meetings and the timing of the meetings. Each group is different and we can use iterative planning to make the most of that diversity, rather than stifle it with set plans.

Resources:

Synchronous telephone conference tips

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.