Group Work - Online Collaboration
On reflection of yesterday’s group session I was amazed at how quick and painless the process of group work can be if using the principles of collaboration and utlising a “wiki” to its full advantage. Much of our pre-work had been done on the wiki so our F2F get together was really a matter of editing and resolving some issues relating to content choices.
The above image shows the elements of the group process which when working in harmony can produce some great work and lesson the perceived negatives of university group work.
Thanks to fellow Ju Jus … Michelle, Prue, Nicole, Mal, Heather and John for a productive day yesterday and hope to see you on Bling soon :)
CoPs, Ramblings | Comment (0)Evolution of humans within a community
In Amy Jo Kim’s book “Community Building on the Web” she talks about the various roles which community participants assume in their journey within the community. The above picture shows the stepping stones as visitors become novices who in turn become regulars and then can become leaders, experts and then finally elders.
“Shy visitors evolve into confident contributors; eager students become knowledgeable teachers; and novice game players become tournament champions. It’s your job as a community-builder to create an environment that fosters these basic social roles, while meeting the changing needs of your members as they become progressively more involved in community life” (Amy Jo Kim)
In designing our learning communities we are looking at the roles that people play withing the community and in community building…we havn’t got the answers yet but so far I agree with Wenger (1999) who states that you can define the roles but you cannot design the identities that will be constructed through these roles.
CoPs, Ramblings | Comment (0)Building Communities - ROI Continued
As we begin to design our learning communities I search for evidence of “experts” who are building and advising on community design. As I am a visual learner I like these two graphs from Passionate - Creating Passionate Users which have relevance for community building. Previously I have looked at ROI and found this interesting graph on Community ROI which explains that there still needs to be investment but the community will provide pretty sound ROI with additional activities which are usually beyond the original investment.
“Think about all the things a strong user community can do for you: tech support, user training, marketing (evangelism, word of mouth), third-party add-ons, even new product ideas”……”Yes, there’s still a budget… but we’ve all seen third-party fan/user groups that got no support at all from “the mother ship” and yet thrived and gave users a level of support and training the company didn’t provide” (Creating Passionate Users).
The second image relates to user needs and I notice at the top of the hierachy is flow and engagement. From my readings and experience I would support flow and engagement being at the top of my list - we have all experienced the concept of “internet time”…..and we often wonder where has the time gone as we sit online day after day……mmm I must have been engaged or in Csikszentmihalyi moment of flow.
Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as ‘the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.’
CoPs, Reflections | Comment (0)Wenger is way cool
Wenger is way cool ………………..
The body of work on communities of practice by Etienne Wenger is starting to make a few ELMT1 students heads spin. Check out Prue’s summaries - a truly brillant summary which we are all grateful for.
In my research for both ELMT1 and ELMT2 wherever I turn his name pops up again and again……does Wenger ever sleep I wonder? His website is a great resource for e-learning students with links to various papers and reports that you can download - you can find it at www.ewenger.com.
Does anyone know that song “Jesus is Way Cool”……start humming a few bars while I amuse myself or click on the link if you haven’t heard it
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGz3wO1zxao&feature=related).
“Wenger is way cool. ELMT students liked Wenger. Everybody wanted to hang out with him. Anything he wanted to write, he did.He turned community into practice…..
OK you got the gist…maybe you would like to add to it whilst I amuse myself….. think this is the long awaited distraction from focusing on my current two assignments.
CoPs, Ramblings | Comment (0)ROI through communites of practice
My colleague John prompted me to include this as a post to my blog. As part of my research for Assignment 2 and work on the wiki it got me thinking about training and ROI from a business perspective. Having recently been involved in budget cuts at work it is often the training budget which is the first to go… So how do we as trainers or learning professionals convince the corporates that training cuts are a short term strategy (particularly in an era of skills shortage, buoyant labour market and employee mobility).
One solution is to look at investment in human capital as a sound investment strategy that has measurable business outcomes. Another solution is to redefine learning and training initiatives and set up communities of practice within organisations.
(COP - a group whose members regularly engage in sharing and learning based on their common interests).
An article by Lesser and Storck 2001 discusses some links to business outcomes and organisational performance which could be used in justifying the worth of establishing communities of practice as learning vehicles within organisations. Lesser and Storck (2001) argue that the “social capital resident in communities of practice leads to behavioural changes that result in greater knowledge sharing which has a positive influence on business performance’ (p833).
Business often look for ROI and increases in productivity from training and learning initiatives. In addition the loss of product knowledge and social capital which an employee takes when they leave an organisation costs organisations thousands of dollars as does the cost of training a new employee and bringing them up to speed.
So a justification could be that the knowledge that has been captured in perpetuity within this global virtual space during e-learning activities remains the property of the organisation and a resource which new employees can access and get quickly up to speed with an organisations goals, practices and networks.
This study looked at seven local and global organisations which had implemented communities of practice with the following key outcomes:
- maintaining and developing an organisations long term memory
- sharing knowledge outside traditional organisation hierarchical boundaries and within and across departments
- enriched learning opportunities for individual members of the community
- higher motivation to apply what people have learned
- decreasing the learning curve for new employees
- responding more rapidly to customer needs and inquiries through improved knowledge
- reducing rework and preventing “reinvention of the wheel”
- generation of new ideas for products and services (Lessor and Storck 2001)
