What is Toluu?
Toluu is a free service for sharing the feeds you read and discovering new ones.		 Get Invite

Learning Alliances

Insights for communities of practice, their leaders, and their sponsors


Sneaking into EPIC 2008October 24

Last week was the fall vacation for universities in Denmark, so their facilities were used for conferences such as AoIR 9.0 and EPIC 2008.  Many of the people who participated in either conference did not seem to know about the other one, even though to me there were many connections and overlaps. There was a big contingent from CPsquare traveling to Denmark, mostly to AoIR.

Outside the EPIC Conference in Copenhagen
Outside the EPIC Conference in Copenhagen
Originally uploaded by xeeliz

Beverly Trayner and I had been corresponding with Gitti Jordan about a CPsquare-sponsored dialog on Sunday October 19, so to get the conversation going we snuck into the EPIC conference to join a workshop she was leading on Mobile Work and Mobile Lives. After we’d looked around to determine



Social proofOctober 11

Gene Smith observes in his book on Tagging that Cialdini’s idea of “social proof” explains a lot about why social tagging is useful.  Smith’s book is full of insights and suggestions for software designers, but also seems very useful from a tech steward’s perspective.  And “social proof” is one of the reasons that communities of practice are so powerful for spreading practice (whether good or bad, whether about technology or not).  Among other things seeing that others in your community are paying attention to something is proof that it’s important.

A few weekends ago I helped design an event that brought together volunteer administrators from Shambhala Centers in the Northwest region.  I had pushed for the idea that the whole day should be focused on sharing administrative, financial, instructional, or technology practices.  It was a great day.

But during afternon the report-outs it was surprising how the people who were in sessions focusing on fund-raising or leadership or schedule coordination had so much more enthusiasm for using technology to do their work than the people we had brought together to talk about technology as such.  I think we didn’t provide enough social proof that technology

Twemes.com vs. Search.twitter.comSeptember 18

It’s really great when special-purpose websites are mashed together.  The effect is multiplicative.  For example, Twemes.com, although it has a really ugly pattern for a background, is elegant and simple and combines:

Here’s a silly example:

http://twemes.com/tlapd08

It turns out that the combination of those three special-purpose sites is very nice for supporting events, whether face-to-face or otherwise, allowing a group of people who agree on a tag to combine messages and resources on the fly.  Here’s a more serious example, where a lot of people at a recent Community 2.0 Conference in Las Vegas used it to share resources and for back-channel chatting during the conference:

http://twemes.com/c20

It’s a bit of a problem that a short tag like “c20″ because it can have different meanings to different people, so that one person’s use of the tag

Visiting with University of Puerto Rico librariansAugust 22

It was really hot on August 13, the last day of my vacation visiting my brothers in Puerto Rico. But, in more ways than one, it was really cool inside the library at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras, where all of my friends from high school went to college.

I was hosted by José Sanchez-Lugo, a UPR professor I met in the Connected Futures workshop last May. He and his colleagues are doing fascinating work. They are way beyond the “ills of bestness” that Patrick Lambe describes. When I think of fights I’ve had with program evaluators who are trying to make a community of practice initiative fit into a neat pigeonhole, it’s inspiring to see someone launching a bunch of active communities with the original funding from an evaluation effort. Not only have they developed their reflective practice in areas such as collection development or research support, they’ve cooked up new directions for innovation, such as virtual reference or uses of Second Life.

Here’



After all the administriviaAugust 5

CPsquare is having a book club event, where everyone is invited to read a book about communities of practice together. Sounds simple enough, right? Fortunately or unfortunately Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators is a book where, if you’re interested in communities of practice, you might want to read all the book chapters. Not to be thwarted the book club organizers, Bronwyn Stuckey and Jeffrey Keefer organize a process to figure out who in the community wants to be involved, what general themes are most important to them, and within that, which specific chapters we’re going to read together. Ah, now we can sit down with a deep dive into an excellent chapter about how academics in South Africa adopt new technologies and think about teaching, right? No.

It turns out it’s even more complicated. A synchronous read is a wonderful idea but to actually make it happen takes a huge amount of effort. Fortunately, in this case, all the organizers are doing an amazing amount of work. And that includes the book editors, too — evidence that Chris Kimble, Paul Hildreth and Isabelle Bourdon love their (and our) topic.