Before Christmas, I commented at some length on the problems over Eduspace and about how communities can and should be organised. There is much to learn from the Eduspaces issue and I have spent much of the last couple of days pondering on it. The reason – a new project with very small funding from the Jisc Emerge programme.

The following abridged version of the funding application explains the aims of the project:

“1. develop an international Community of Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning Research);

2. promote a two way discourse between member of the Emerge community (and in particular Emerge projects) with members of the wider international research community;

3. provide a forum for dissemination of Users and Innovation programme funded projects;

4. develop international research teams in conjunction with User and Innovation funded projects;

5. establish a discourse between researchers and developers in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL);

6. a mutual commitment to warranting causality and exploration of international notions concepts of impact and effect of technologies on learning.

What we will do

4.1 Stage 1
Stage 1 of the project will involve a deep analysis of user needs. Given the dispersed nature of the community this will be undertaken through:

a) A web based survey of potential users.

b) Follow up in depth interviews using Skype.

The data will be subject to a user analysis focusing on gathering information in the following areas:

• what kind of people the users represent;
• the tasks and activities of users;
• understanding and insights into the user context.

This data will in turn be used to generate a scenario based User Needs Analysis. The scenario will take into account both infrastructure requirements in terms of community platforms and tools and requirements for activities.

4.2 Stage 2
Stage 2 of the project will involve the rapid prototyping of a community platform. This will be based on the existing beta Freefolio collaboration software which is already at an advance stage of maturity and being tested with three user groups.

4.3 Stage 3
Stage 3 is based on facilitating the emergence of the community.

This will include:

1. testing and evaluation of the Community platform and tools;

2. facilitation of community events. Whilst the form of the events depends to a considerable extent on the results of the User Needs Analysis it may include: on-line seminars and presentations, on-line poster sessions, on-line conferencing, research fora and the formation of virtual international work teams. .

Stage 4
Stage four will comprise the ongoing evaluation of the project activities. This will be carried out using a creative slant by adopting the collaborative community based tools as the vehicles for building the evaluation which itself will become a reflective exercise engaging both project members and the community itself.”

I will write another post over the weekend about some of the issues in implementing the project.  In the meantime if you are intersted in taking part in the project just get in touch.

I have used many different systems in the various projects I am involved in. I have used Plone, Jumbla, Elgg, Post Nuke and now am working with WordPress. But it is still difficult to sustain communities and even more so to get members of projects to communicate effectively through different platforms.

Too often we are using the wrong tool. Why insist that people log in to a platform when all tehyw ant to do is exchange occasional emails to a list of 5 or 6 people.  On the other hand email list servers are not particualry effective in developing a pool of shared knowledge. One project I work with commissioned me to develop a ‘communication platform’. We have built a relatively lightweight platofrm for teh project using WordPress. Yet they do not use it. One of the problems is they do not know how, I suspect. WordPress is very easy IF you are used to using social sofwtare or blogging applications. If email and word are your main experince of using computers for communciation itis a whole new world.

And then again, I sat down this afternoon to write some ‘easy to use’ instruction on how to use teh site and for what. The how to use is difficult enough – it might be easy to shwo someone but it is quite hard to write. But the for what question was much harder. When should project partners write a blog – and why? What should they – or might they want to share? What is the forum for – and how is it difficult from the blog?

Of course the one thing they probably want most – to share files – is not particularly well supported in wordpress.  Yes, they can make a new page or blog post and add them to this. But what if they want to link to a file in the forum? Of course they can upload a file in the new post section – not publish a post and then link. But that is not so easy to explain. Ah well -will keep thinking. I am well puzzled at the moment about teh best way to support projects – anyone any ideas?

I have been pondering the implications of the demise of Eduspaces. I am not privy to the thinking or reasons why Curverider decided they could no longer support the service but it is not too difficult to understand some of what has happened. Moreover, the closure raises a number of issues of longer term significance.

Eduspaces was formerly elgg.net. Essentially when Elgg was launched elgg.net was a space for people to try out Elgg. Because the Elgg developers, Ben and Dave, came from a background in education – and the original ideas behind elgg were developed through working on ePortfolios – the major take up was in education.

Elgg took off fast – it is a very good product – and Curverider was in a dilemma. Despite a successful product they had limited infrastructure and little income. Eventually they got organised and whilst remaining committed to supporting Elgg as free Open Source software, they turned their attention to developing commercial services to provide a stable basis for their work. All very sensible. Over time, Eduspaces was floated off as a separate community. Now it appears they feel unable to continue to support what is a very different community from their core development efforts.

The big issue for me is whether when a small company develops such a product and service, it should be supported by the publicly funded education community. Whilst s0me would say this is not a role for education organisations, education does support large vendors through buying their products. Why, just because software is free and open source, should no such support mechanism exist? Of course Curverider can apply for various grant fundings. Pontydysgu works in many funded projects. Yet these projects are short term and it is hard to make enough money to survive.

Why should the edcation community support services like Eduspaces? Many would say that it is not for the education community to host and provide such services – better to leave it to the private sector. In my view we should host such services because we need to support and develop communities. Eduspaces is not just Elgg. It is a (almost unique) world community of educators. This in turn raises a new problem. Educational institutions and organisations support students and researchers in their own institution and their own country. The very strength of Eduspaces becomes its weakness. Yet if we believe in learning through communities, through open knowledge exchange, through social networks, this process cannot be left to the private market. This is the learning arena of the future. If nothing else, we need to support communities like Eduspaces as an experiment in knowledge sharing and community development. Not as a subsidy for Elgg but as a service to the education and community. And such communities should not have borders, either institutional or based on nationality.

Several people have homed in on the structured blogging functionality in Freefolio. The templates we have provided are only examples and were designed for particular contexts. I suppose we should have changed them for this release but we really wanted just to get the thing out.

But the possibilities are very considerable. It is not so difficult to write the templates (having said that, I did not code them myself) – they are small XML files. It would not be impossible to develop a custom editor to write the templates. And the XML leaves intriguing possibilities. We have got one somewhere for a book review – will tery to get this one on the demo site – which, when you put the title in – hits the Amazon databases and auto fills the ISBN number, the date of publication etc. and even provides a thumbnail of the cover. OK, nice but gimmicy.

But imagine if we were to be able to hit a database of competences. Users would not be constrained in what they would add to their portfolio but by simple keywords could indicate what competences their learning contributed towards and with a bit more coding we coudl develop a custom report of that learning towards a formal qualification – wherever the learning took place.

Still easier, might be to develop an organisational knowldge base, based on the XML entries in individual blogs.

Non trivial but doable. If anyone has ideas of a little funding to help us do this I would be very grateful, equally does anyone want to join us in working on this?

Some people seem best with text, some with diagrammes. Me, I am a text person. I find it hard to understand the graphic representations. But, when I was working on a progress report on the development of Freefolio, I did adapt (or repurpose) an activity diagramme (originally produced by George Roberts for the Emerge project) to show the ideas behind Freefolio. If you are a visual kind of person, this may make sense to you.

I think this is rather good. Although it is entitled ” Implementation guidelines for Communities Of Practice within the hospitality sector”, it has much wider applicability and interest. It has been produced by Marcel van Holstein from the Horeca Branche Instituut in the Netherlands as part of the European Work and Learning Together project. I am evaluator of the project but to my shame did not know about the wiki until I interviewed Marcel by telephone this afternoon. Below I list Marcel’s critical success factors But do look at the rest of the wiki.

I certainly concur when he says:

“Setting up a virtual COP takes time. This is especially the case when the virtual COP is not added as a tool to an already functioning COP. In that case building trust and commitment and letting the identity of the COP emerge is a gradual time consuming process.”

Marcel would very much like feedback so please so send him your comments.

“Critical success factors for the implementation of communities of practice

The success of a community of practice depends, to a large extent, on participants of the community, because of the voluntary participation, self determination and practical relevance for the individual or organization. These aspects can be cultivated best, when the following critical success factors are taken into account:

1. It is important not to apply very specific and narrow criteria with respect to what constitutes a COP and to when a COP is successful. Communities are intrinsically hard to define, because they are not by nature clearly bounded.

2. Participants of a community of practice have to experience the relevance and perceive the goal(s) of the community as useful. They will have to be able to identify themselves with it, to become “owner” of the community and enthusiastic about it.

3. Participants of community of practice have to be convinced of the fact that continuously improving and learning (new) competences leads to an improvement of job performance.

4. To realize this within the community there needs to be commitment and mutual trust. Participants have to experience their participation is valued by other participants. In most cases because of the knowledge they bring to the community but also because of their way of working and communicating.

5. The initiator of a COP will have to be prepared to give a considerable freedom to the participants.

6. Participants need to have well developed social skills. Working together within and outside the community will lead faster to new knowledge, insight and solutions compared to trying to solve problems alone.

7. Especially in the start up phase, a lot of attention will have to be paid to community building by community participants themselves.

8. Conflicts have to be dealt with in a timely and respectful manner. The solution of a conflict is not seen as a victory or loss or individual participants but rather as a learning opportunity for the community as a whole.

9. Dialogue has to take place. Conclusions have to be drawn in a collaborative way. Opinions of all participants should be respected. Conclusions should not be imposed by the moderator.

10. Participants should experience the community as a safe environment in which they can express their opinions and positions without fear, feel free to ask questions and free to explore non-conformist solutions and creative ideas.

11. Participants experience commitment and support from the management of the organization (if applicable)

12. Participants experience their participation as contributing to their personal growth. Bottom line is that participants experience that, based on the gained knowledge, their performance on the job in the hotel, restaurant, guesthouse, etc. where they work has increased.

13. Participants experience the added value of the fact that the community is of a multidisciplinary nature and consists of participants from different hierarchical layers of the organization.

14. Because the COP works to a large extent virtually, the community will need to be supported by a well-functioning collaborative working tool, which allows extending the range of functionalities as a community becomes more developed.

15. The management of the organization (if applicable) has to understand and actively support the strategic importance of the COP but should not be directly involved in its daily operation or setting the goals of the COP. The management has to accept and trust the community as a “self-steering” unit.”

Technorati Tags: communities of practice

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On a long trip around Romania and Poland – hence few opportunities to post here in the last few days. But, I have met many wonderful people and will come away with much to think about.

On Saturday I spoke at a seminar attended by the leaders of the Romanian students movement. Hope very much we will continue to keep in touch.

Monday I was in Constanta where I helped with a case study being undertaken as part of the European commission funded TT Plus project. The TT Plus project is looking at the changing roles and responsibilities of trainers. It is coordinated by my organisation, Pontydysgu, and has partners in six different European countries.

What makes the project especially interesting is that we are trying to develop new methodologies for comparative research. The main paradigm of comparative research, in education in Europe at least, has been to compare national studies – be it through surveys or case studies . We have borrowed from the computer world and are instead attempting to identify scenarios of practice and use cases (although these terms are difficult to define).

We are focusing not on functions and roles but on actual practice in providing training – whether or not the person is called a trainer. And we are attempting to look at practice from the perspective of different actors – including the trainer, managers and learners.

Rather than compare national studies we wish to identify different patterns in the scenarios of practice and use cases. Of course, practice will reflect national cultures. But we expect more in common between  scenarios of practice than differences based on country.

The scenarios of practice are based on case studies which is how I came to be in a cement factory in Constanta on Monday. Very interesting it was too. I will post the results fo the case study as soon as it is finished. For the moment, though, I just wanted to say a few comments about innovation. The cement factory, along with much of the industrial base in Romania, is old and in desperate need of investment. Much of the plant and machinery dates form the 1960s. If it was in the UK it would almost certainly be closed down on health and safety grounds – and in fact it is planned to relocate the plant outside Constanta because of new environmental regulations.

Not an obvious candidate for an innovation reward? Little modern technology. Basic products. But the innovation in maintaining and keeping such plant running is truly impressive. Monday I was talking to Paul, who used to be a ships engineer. He was telling me Romanian engineers were always on demand on cargo ships because they could mend anything. If a pump failed a British or German engineer would merely radio for a new one to be flown to the next port of call. The Romanians would fix the pump on the fly.

And such a tradition of innovation seems much closer to the ideas behind Web 2.0. We do not want shiny out of the box software – or even beautiful bespoke applications. Instead we need the electronic equivalent of the Romanian engineer, able to take what is available and make it work – hopefully adding value in the process. Such skills are very close to what John Seeely Brown has called bricolage.. Bricolage relates to the concrete and has to do with the ability to find something – an object or a tool, a piece of code, a document – and to use it in a new way and in a new context. This is exactly what is happening in the pre-digital world of the Constanta cement factory.

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