The need for educators in communities

June 13, 2008 at 3:54 pm · Filed under knowledge building ·Tagged

Many groups that are formed for the purpose of sharing and developing knowledge often have a wide range of expertise, both in terms of technology practices and in terms of the theoretical or analytical concepts of the domain or business. A “learning community” (defined for now as a group with both individual learning and the creation of group knowledge as goals) that has been together a long time has a history and has progressed in developing ideas and practices of group interaction. In other words, ideas and group practices have been proposed, discussed and refined. Much of the knowledge, practices and history becomes background and implicit to further conversations. New people unfamiliar with the domain or the practices cannot adequately participate because they do not have the background knowledge to understand the context of the practices. New members are then “peripheral participants” in the larger group.

New members could be brought more rapidly up-to-speed in an established group if that group has taken time to make the history explicit and help new members to become familiar with it (either explicitly, as in mentoring or training, or by preparing representations of the knowledge and practices–essentially a learning curriculum). In effect, it seems that all knowledge-intensive and practice-intensive communities could serve new members most effectively by dedicating some resources to the ongoing creation of learning resources and activities for new and less-experienced members. In this sense, established communities are similar to established professions. In professions like science, history, software programming, project management, etc. there are well-defined bodies of knowledge and practices that often take people years to master. Educational institutions exist to bring learners up-to-speed in the practices of the profession. I am suggesting that established communities would do well to attend to the learning required to become an effective community participant by creating opportunities for new learners to grasp the knowledge and practices of the community.

Thus, there is a component of an established community that could be served by community members who are also educators. Educators bring specialized knowledge about how people learn, how to design learning contexts, and how to support that learning. Educators and educational activities would make the initial “peripheral participation” more effective and efficient.

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Practice vrs technology focus

May 30, 2008 at 8:04 am · Filed under Musings ·Tagged , , , ,

In the just-completed CPSquare “Connected Futures” workshop many of us have struggled learning, and learning to use, new Web 2.0 technologies. Exposure to these new technologies was part of the point of the 5-week workshop. But other important goals were to examine the part played by technology in supporting community groups and consider the characteristics of the role of “technology steward” (a term coined by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John Smith) in selecting and promoting appropriate technologies. While these other goals were addressed, I was struck by how much time and energy was consumed by the technology use. I wondered if there is a certain, inevitable churning and learning with technology at the early stages of new technology use in a community (what the workshop participants considered “entry practices”). This churning may always make it difficult to focus on larger goals.

I am reminded of my experience supporting instructor use of online course management software (such as WebCT, Blackboard, Angel and Moodle). It was difficult to get new users to think about the effective pedagogical uses of the technology while they were learning the technology. I found that the pedagogical discussions were much more effective after a certain level of facility with the technology.

This suggests to me that learning the technology may need to be an explicit focus in the early stages of community use of the technologies (or for new members of a community). This could be formalized for ongoing, stable communities (e.g., by creating a series of tutorials and exercises to assist new users). How best to foster the learning of the technology while, at the same time, introducing community practices to the new members? That is another topic for another day.

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Disorientation using new tools

May 20, 2008 at 1:11 pm · Filed under Musings ·Tagged

Well, I’ve been challenged by John Smith to provide some concrete examples of the disorientation that I’ve felt learning new tools this past week in the CPSquare Connected Futures workshop. He makes a good point that discussing disorientation without examples puts the action at a distance (from myself and others). That may have been part of my hesitation to write about it more specifically. The disorientation is uncomfortable and difficult to understand in ways that allow me to work through the disorientation. Thanks to Jeffrey for consistently speaking about this in the last few weeks (see his blog post). So I’ll attempt here to describe some of my disorientation.

Considering individual tools, my experience with Facebook is illustrative. Creating an account was no problem. Soon after I had a number of “people you may know” with each having a “add as a friend” link. What is a “friend?” Of course I have a real-world reference to that concept. But what is the Facebook concept of Friend? What does “adding a friend” make available in terms of interaction? What of my Facebook items can Friends see that others might not?

OK, I didn’t need to answer everything about “friends”, after all, part of the point was to try it and see what happens. But a problem arose immediately. Before I add a friend, how do I know if the person is legitimate? I cannot figure out how to easily find out details about the possibilities posted. Clicking on the picture or clicking on the add a friend link does not give me any more information about the person. Do I have to search for this person? Well, OK, that seems like a lot of work (why can’t the application simply give me the information when I click on the thumbnail–already I’m a bit frustrated by that lack of functionality). But I try a search. Nothing but the same information I already have (picture and name). I try a profile search. Nothing but a cryptic message that ” Profile search will only search your friends and profiles you can see from Portland, OR.” What does that mean? Can’t I see profiles of people throughout the world? What does it mean profiles I “can see from Portland”? That makes no sense to me.

OK, not being able to see a potential friend profile is frustrating. I think that if I understood more about how Facebook worked I might be able to figure out why my confusion. I don’t have a mental model of how it works. I’ve been trying things based on my experience with other such tools (e.g., clicking on a name or picture to see details), but that hasn’t gotten me anywhere.

Clearly, I don’t yet have a workable model of how to use Facebook. But I press on. I still don’t know how to determine if someone is legit. So I ensure that I can verify the person from other sources. Either I know them directly or they are in the list of people who are currently taking the workshop. I can do that. So I dutifully add those people I can verify.

But I also find two features new to me of Facebook that delight me. First, someone in the workshop has recommended a friend to me. Not only does this bypass much of my concern about a person being legitimate, but I realize that it is a nice feature to allow people to network. This seems a real benefit for discovering interesting new people, ideas and possible collaborators. The other feature new to me is the friend-of-a-friend feature. Again, this solves the legitimacy problem and also seems useful for gathering a growing community of people.

It seems clear that I’ve learned about these two features most effectively through the actual use of the tool. Someone could have explained those to me in some “introduction to Facebook” but I think the actual learning experience was more powerful given my previous frustrations with adding a friend. In effect, my frustrations probably led me to ask more significant questions about these features so I was predisposed to look for solutions. Note that one of the features was invoked by someone in the workshop community while the other was a feature invoked by the software. In other words, I learned about the first feature from a more experienced user who took the time to illustrate that feature to me. The second feature was an automatic function of the software, a kind of automatic social network analysis. Nice.

This post is already too long so I won’t continue. Suffice to say that I still have no answer for how to easily find out if someone is legit. And I also have new sources of disorientation (e.g., someone just asked me to share an application–what is that about?). And that’s just the start, I’m still struggling to get Netvibes working properly for me. Oh well, more food for thought.

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How do we learn tools, apply them in community?

May 19, 2008 at 3:44 pm · Filed under Musings ·Tagged

When we encounter a new tool it if often difficult to understand what it does and what good might it be for use in addressing some community (or personal) need. There seem to be two key cases: 1) New members of a community learning tools that are already in use by a community (or core members of a community); and 2) New tools which are not well known in the community but may have applicability. Are there necessary stages that individuals or groups have to traverse to learn new tools? What strategies might help facilitate that learning?

Focusing on the first case for now, it seems that someone learning a new tools must simply try it. Some things that might help would be descriptions or explanations that help frame the key features of the tool and examples that show the tool being used for do various things valued by some individual or group. For a tool used by a community, watching others use the tool (and the practices around the tool) are useful. All of these take time for the learner (and for those supporting that learning, e.g., creating clear examples). And these elements of learning are not linear by spiral. In other words, it is probably most effective for a learner to try some of the tool features, then see an example, try to apply the example for themselves, see how others use it, and then return to exploring the tool features, and so on.

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