Category: communities of practice

Tinkering and Playing with Knowledge

cc flickr image by System One GangThe word “tinkering” keeps coming up to my radar screen, and it makes me happy. I love the idea of tinkering and find it central to the practice of stewarding technology for ourselves, our communities and networks. Imagine. Create. Reflect. Share. Adjust and go at it again. Experiment. Mash-up and recreate. Build upon the work of others.  It is for me a deeply ingrained practice of learning both by myself and with others, particularly in my communities of practice. 

Last week, on one of our many, many, many calls in creating the Digital Habitats book, Etienne Wenger noted something about a blog post I had here and on the book blog about experimenting with the community orientations we write about in the book. it was about using the orientations via a spidergraph to explore and understand one’s community. I wrote about how Shawn Callahan had taken the idea in one direction, and I in another. Etienne mentioned on the call that he had been doing this for a long time. I stopped short, feeling embarassed that I had not recognized that I had tinkered upon HIS work, and our work, and then Shawn tinkered upon it in his own way. It made me more aware of recognizing the substrate upon which we tinker. The shoulders upon which we stand.  Etienne said something to the effect that despite the hours we spend working on the book together (along with John Smith), we often don’t know what each other is working on. We are tinkering more alone than together. 

This made me realize I had been focusing on tinkering as an individual…

John Seely Brown was recently interviewed about education and he focused on this role of tinkering. He says in the video linked below, “Let me take my imagination and build something from it. Does it work? If not, why not. If it does work, can it work better?” Be open to criticism.  Brown talks about a networked world as an open source world that facilitates this tinkering. And about how our identities are now bound up in what we have created alone and with others. And how others have built upon what I have built. New social capital.

 Take a peek.

www.johnseelybrown.com “I am what I create” says John Seely Brown addressing the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching – Stanford, CA, Oct. 23-25, 2008

So we have the idea of tinkering as a way of creating our identity in the world. Tinkering as a way of learning and creating with and for others. 

cc Flickr image by kafkanAlex Soojung-Kim Pang looks at the origins of tinkering and why it feels on the rise again. (Go see the whole post – it is fabulous.)

Think of the historically contingent forces shaping tinkering first. I see several things influencing it:

  • The counterculture. Around here, countercultural attitudes towards technology– explored by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said (here’s my review of it), Theodore Roszak (his Satori to Silicon Valley is still one of the best essays on the historical relationship between the counterculture and personal computing) are still very strong, and the assumption that technologies should be used by people for personal empowerment. Tinkering bears a family resemblance to the activities embodied in the Whole Earth Catalog.
     
  • Agile software. Mike sees some similarities between agile software development and tinkering; in particular, both are attempts to break out of traditional, hard-to-scale ways of creating things.
     
  • The EULA rebellion. The fact that you’re forbidden from opening a box, that some software companies insist that you’re just renting their products, and that hardware makers intentionally cripple their devices, is a challenge to hackers and tinkerers. Tinkering is defined in part in terms of a resistance to consumer culture and the restrictive policies of corporations.
     
  • Users as Innovators. The fundamental assumption that users can do cool, worthwhile, inspiring, innovative things is a huge driver. Tinkering is partly an answer to the traditional assumption that people who buy things are “consumers”– passive, thoughtless, and reactive, people whose needs are not only served by companies, but are defined by them as well. When you tinker, you don’t just take control of your stuff; you begin to take control of yourself. (John Thackara talks about user innovation wonderfully in his book In the Bubble. As C. K. Prahalad argues, this isn’t a phenomenon restricted to users who are high-tech geeks: companies serving the base of the pyramid see the poor as innovators.)
     
  • Open source. Pretty obvious. This is an ideological inspiration, and a social one: open source software development is a highly collective process that has created some interesting mechanisms for incorporating individual work into a larger system, while still providing credit and social capital for developers.
     
  • The shift from means to meaning. This is a term that my Innovation Lab friends came up with a few years ago. Tinkering is a way of investing new meanings in things, or creating objects that mean something: by putting yourself into a device, or customizing it to better suit your needs, you’re making that thing more meaningful. (Daniel Pink also talks about it in his book A Whole New Mind, on the shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The geodesic dome is a great example of a technology whose meaning was defined– and redefined– by users.)
     
  • From manual labor to manual leisure. Finally, I wouldn’t discount the fact that you can see breaking open devices as a leisure activity, rather than something you do out of economic necessity, as influencing the movement. Two hundred years ago, tinkering as a social activity– as something that you did as an act of resistance, curiosity, participation in a social movement, expression of a desire to invest things with meaning– just didn’t exist: it’s what you did with stuff in order to survive the winter. Even fifty years ago, there was an assumption that “working with your hands” defined you as lower class: “My son won’t work with his hands” was an aspiration declaration. Today, though, when many of us work in offices or stores, and lift things or run for leisure, manual labor can become a form of entertainment.

 

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Anne Balsamo, who has written quite a bit on tinkering,
reflects…

 

1) Why is tinkering and “hand-making” important at this historical juncture?
2) What are the key sensibilities of a tinkerer?
3) How is an interest in tinkering stimulated or provoked?
4) What new tinkering practices are emerging in contemporary culture, especially in light of the rise of makers’ culture?
5) What is the relationship between tinkering and knowledge formation?
6) What research has already been done on tinkering as a mode of learning?  What research might be needed to understand it better?
7) How should we rethink the notion of tinkering in light of digital media?

Anne’s post has more video’s of people talking about Tinkering that were created with the Seely-Brown video shown above. Again, if you are interested in tinkering, it is worth clicking into Anne’s piece. (As a side note, Anne is also interested in the “corporeal (body-based) dimension of digitally mediated learning ” which pings on my recent note on the kinesthetic!)

So are we in the age of tinkering? Should we be paying more attention to our tinkering practices and patterns? How are YOU tinkering these days? 

 

More recent posts on Tinkering, many inspired by the John Seely Brown video.

Remembering our bodies when working online

While I blather on about visual thinking, it is important to remember we have bodies. I saw this great quote from Gabriela a while back and have been meaning to share it out. photo by pablosanz on Flickr CCGabriela on Coniecto

How is distributed collaboration affected by the lack of movement and space awareness? People tend to assume that their counterpart works in a similar place, in similar conditions- and this is most of the times false! People tend to guess each other’s reactions in call conferences. People in the same room express through gestures unknown to their counterparts. Is a video channel a solution to this? I don’t think so, although it is very useful in some circumstances. 

CoP Series #5: Is my community a community of practice?

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts I wrote for Darren Sidnick. 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  are all here on the blog.

Many people get worried about making sure their group is a CoP. They ask “How would I know? Does it matter?”

In our first post on Communities of Practice (CoPs) we disabused ourselves of the confusion between a community and the platform that allows a community to interact together online. In this post, let’s wrestle with what a CoP isn’t, and if that really matters anyway. This may also give us insight as to what we are trying to do and perhaps point to a different strategic option when trying to support and extend learning. After all, as much as I think CoPs are amazing, they are not the only thing we have at hand.

  • Is a “class” or “cohort of learners” a community? It might be. If the group continues to learn after the course is over, the course then becomes the catalyst for the beginnings of the community. That said, we can take a “community perspective” when we design a course which would place an emphasis on interaction and making meaning of the material between students. An example might be to have the learners apply their learnings “out in the world” then come back and report on what they learned, questions they had and, if relevant, how application changed their understanding of the material. By doing this WITH others, they get feedback and other perspectives. Often Ufi learndirect learners are working individually through content. So that would suggest the community may be something offered alongside the course. The content also matters – some things lend themselves more to a community model than others. Context matters!
  • Is a group of people who all took a specific elearning offering – at any time, alone or together, a CoP? They could be! When we think about the value of learning, and measuring learning that stays with us, we often think about learning applied in use. So if I use that math in my job and do my job better, or I become a better manager because I have a basic grasp of change management. Application, as noted above, always depends on context, so providing space for cohorts or anyone who has taken a specific course to come back and clarify, ask and answer questions can be a very productive learning environment.
  • Is a team a CoP? Not usually. Teams are focused on an outcome of a task. CoPs are focused on the learning about how to do that task. That said, many teams have a CoP component to their work as a way to continue learning, improving and innovating. Again, if we take a community perspective on our team work, we would include processes and time for learning while doing!
  • Is a CoP the same thing as a (social) network? There is often some overlap. A network is the collection of connections and relationships between people. Right now, “social networking sites” such as Facebook and Meebo are all the rage. They can be useful tools for communities of practice, but they aren’t the same thing. The line between a community and a network is fuzzy in terms of membership, but the difference between a community of practice and a network is that the CoP is interested not just in the connections or relationships, but in the domain and practice. We’ll talk more about the important dynamic between communities and networks in a subsequent post.
  • Is a CoP the group of people who generate content on a website? That is one thing CoPs can do. Some communities have a strong orientation towards creating content that reflects their learning and their domain. For example, writing down/recording/drawing what we know helps us solidify and share the learning. But few communities just create content. The interaction in learning and creating is as important as the artifacts they create. So setting up a site for user generated content can support a CoP, but it is not THE CoP itself.
  • Is a portal a CoP? No. A portal is a website that brings together content and often tools for people to interact. So it has the domain of a CoP. But remember, a community is the people, not the tool. So if you have created a portal, you need to think about how to nurture the interaction between the people. That suggests facilitation, mentoring and other actions that stimulate interaction. The old “build it and they will come” rarely comes true. Portals, however, can be fantastic repositories for content created by a community (or many communities).

In an e-learning context (the context for this series when it was first written for Ufi ), it might be useful to share a few examples and test our understanding of them as CoPs… or not!

Message boards don’t automatically become CoPs
Between 2000-2007 message boards and chat rooms were provided within Ufi’s Learner Management system (called the LSE). These tools can support the conversational aspects of communities. But there has to be a spark. Here is the story Darren shared with me.

“In the initial implementation, there were no community facilitators or educational practitioner driving use whether on a local basis within centres (in Ufi lerndirect speak called the “tutor”) or a national basis. No-one had been mentored or trained to be a “bee,” mentor, coach or friend (more of this in a later blog). There was no guidance on what the message board/chat room was for. Surprise, surprise no-one was using it! In 2007 UFI removed this functionality.”

This is an example of having some missing “legs” for community. Yes, there was the “domain” of the course. But there was no defined community because learners were working solo with no specific path for building relationships and no facilitation for both the socialization and interactive learning conversations. So practice was missing as well. So the question remains, can web based conversational community strategies mix with Learndirect’s elearning “at any pace, any time, any place.” Can learning cohorts be built?

Some domains lend themselves to CoPs
One of the amazing things I’ve seen in CoPs is how well some types of professions are culturally so well suited to a community of practice way of being. Public health nurses in the United States (not sure about the UK!) have a practice that is all about sharing learning with each other and with their clients. Teachers who are isolated in their classrooms often have a hunger to interact and learn from other teachers. One of Ufi Learndirect’s audiences, childcare providers, is another one of those “natural” domains. In 2008 Ufi learndirect is starting a CoP pilot around Childcare.

Darren shared this information with me, which reinforces this idea that some domains are ripe for using a community approach.

“In Childcare a portal has been developed (this will go live in autumn 2008). It is for childcare professionals whether new to the professional or experienced. It is both a portal of resources (just in time training and information) to the more formal vocational qualifications (called NVQs in the UK). We hope to develop an active CoP in childcare as research has shown that childcare professionals do like to share with colleagues and do like to work together. It is a sector based approach so there is a common tie there (quite a bit of learndirect content is generic across sectors where it is felt harder to develop a community). If the Childcare Pilot is successful, Ufi will look to develop CoPs further”.

These two examples help us see that we have to look at conditions that enable CoPs.

So now that we’ve looked at these different forms, what do you think? In your context, is a CoP what you need, or something else? Share your story in the comments!

Want some more examples of communities of practice in an elearning context? Here are a few:

CoP Series #4: Practice Makes Perfect

CC Flickr picture by matthijsThis is the fourth in a series of blog posts I wrote for Darren Sidnick. I posted three last fall, then sort of forgot about the rest of the series. I’ll get the rest of them up over the next few weeks. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6,  part 7 ,  part 8 , part 9 and  part 1o  are all here on the blog.

The is the fourth post exploring more about Community, Domain and Practice aspects of CoPs mentioned in the first post of this series on communities of practice (CoPs). This is the “where the rubber meets the road” leg of the stool, Practice.

CoPs are not about learning things in the abstract. They are about learning and putting that learning to practice, and learning from that practice in an ongoing cycle of learn/do/learn. This is why businesses and organizations have been so interested in CoPs — they see them as a way to improve practices in the context of work. While a “to do list” gets you to “done,” it does not surface or share the learning of that task for the next time around. But by linking practice to learning, improvement and innovation is more likely. Here is Etienne Wenger’s description of Practice:

The practice: from http://www.ewenger.com/theory/
A community of practice is not merely a community of interest–people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction. A good conversation with a stranger on an airplane may give you all sorts of interesting insights, but it does not in itself make for a community of practice. The development of a shared practice may be more or less self-conscious. The “windshield wipers” engineers at an auto manufacturer make a concerted effort to collect and document the tricks and lessons they have learned into a knowledge base. By contrast, nurses who meet regularly for lunch in a hospital cafeteria may not realize that their lunch discussions are one of their main sources of knowledge about how to care for patients. Still, in the course of all these conversations, they have developed a set of stories and cases that have become a shared repertoire for their practice.

Implications of practice

The practice of communities  that are not colocated and whose members are not around and available to each other, can be invisible unless we find ways to talk/show it to our fellow members. So in thinking about practice in CoPs related to distributed communities, what do we need to consider? We each can’t “know it all” about our domain, but by tapping into our community members, we as a whole know and learn a whole lot. The trick is to start to make that knowledge and learning available and encourage the practice of sharing our practice! Here are a few possibilities:

  • Telling stories of our practice – is there both a compelling invitation and a place to tell stories of applying learning out in the world? Oddly, people often think their story is not “important enough” to share, so it is not enough to put up a forum and say “share stories.” Role modeling, acknowledging and encouraging — all forms of facilitation, are critical to nurturing storytelling.
  • Sharing “stuff” – tools, resources, links to other people. Is it easy to post resources to a community website, or to share a “tag” that identfies useful materials on the internet? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata) for a definition of tagging.
  • Asking and answering questions – again, both the invitation and the process for this matters. Sometimes it is the “senior” or “expert” members we need to hear from, but it is important to make space and value contributions for all members. Newbies know a lot as well, and bring in fresh perspectives into our communities.
  • Mentoring – is there a mechanism to pair or create small groups of people to mentor and closely follow each others’ practice? This can be REALLY important in large communities where it may be harder for this closer and more intimate form of learning to occur. It also builds the community side of the “three legged stool!” Events – people lead busy lives, so time-limited events (online or offline) can focus attention on the community’s practice and learning.Ongoing conversations – little streams of conversation that connect and keep the community heartbeat going in slower times. This may be the conversations of a small subset.

The exciting thing about Practice in CoP is there are so many things we can do. That is also the problem. So focus on a few things and then grow from there. Don’t overwhelm at first and let the community lead with the practice activities that mean most to them.

If you are a member of or are a CoP leader, share a story about successful practice activities in your community in the comments section.