Archive for: March 2005

The Jisc Effective Practice With e-Learning (good practice in designing for learning guide) makes for an interesting read. It is an attempt to distill down the findings from research into e-learning since 2003 when the Jisc e-Learning and …

I have been talking to Jonathan Furness about how to migrate to a different domain name and retain Google juice. Jonathan’s advice is pretty straight forward and the key points he makes are:

it will take time for the new …

I have been reflecting about the online learning community projects I have been involved in over the past 5 years or so to try and identify some patterns. From my experience I could …

I listened to a presentation by Dr Pak Yoong using stories fro his past to illustrate his take on communities of practice. Some of what Pak said I could readily agree with when he talked about learning ‘having’ …

First impressions from reading the forward and executive summary of the e-learning strategy (called Harnessing Technology Transforming Learning and Children’s Services) is that it felt to me like a document that everyone could take some comfort from. …

I have just read the HEFCE strategy for e-learning document published this week. Nothing particularly stunning in it, but it could be seen as a strong endorsement of the Ultraversity model that we are working on at Ultralab/APU. …

For the workshop, previous blog, we started off using SubEthaEdit for a warm up brainstorm. It worked a treat yet again, both from the point of view of an ice breaker and at getting people to work collaboratively generating a shared document.

We then used the quote below to start a discussion as it illustrates well the false assumptions that are often made about CoP. The sub text to this quote is that when Wenger and Leave were considering what to call their theory, they were careful to steer clear from the word learning. This was because they recognised that not all communities of practice had ‘learning’, or at least what might be considered desirable learning. For example (a bit of a caricature), a group of youths in an inner city school might have a very strong CoP that is based around a culture of not learning or at least learning which might be considered unproductive.

It also illustrates the belief that some form of ‘leadership’ is required to provide the challenge to reflect and learn. It might be that this is multiple leadership with individuals taking on a variety of role. Certainly in Ultraversity we have seen this in action where researchers and learning facilitators take on different roles at different times.

“You cannot assume, again, that a community of practice is reflective, like you cannot assume that people are necessarily reflective on their actions….

You need challenges, whether the challenge is the intention of a trainer who says ‘I am going to make you reflect’, I think a community of practice can take on its own learning and create reflection.”
(Interview with Etienne Wenger, June 2002)

This diagramme below provided the framework for the workshop and some more notes are included in the extended entry.

I am taking a workshop with a colleague (Anne Trewern) on Tuesday with the title “Emerging trends in online learning communities - challenges of learner centred approaches to lifelong learning.” and have been thinking what we will cover.

I …