Communities of Practice: Walking the Walk 2012

Communities of Practice in Digital Scholarship (DH6001) is a core module in the Master in Digital Arts & Humanities here in UCC, and I feel the group are more than ready to  break cover from the institutional VLE and “walk the walk” in public, even if no one much is watching! For next Monday’s seminar, rather than circulating readings among the group and having discussion in the room, we are going to do something different – we’ll still be in the room together playing with some technology but a lot of the substance of the discussion will be public.

I’ve picked two readings which are important, but not, I think too difficult in themselves. Etienne Wenger is one of the most important theorists of communities of practice. He was, along with Jean Lave, one of the first people to define the field in the contemporary world, and his Communities of practice: a brief introduction  is important as a short outline of the topic.  Everyone should be happy they understand the framework there, and, for our seminar, how it might relate to where we are and where we are going this year in the course, and what we hope to do with our community skills.  This one topic for discussion.

The other piece is the Introduction and first Chapter to Wikinomics which applies these ideas to practical cases in business. It is not blind to the problems (what are they? how have they emerged more clearly since the book was written?)  The book extract is part of a website which has other resources we can explore, and it does beg the question – how far has the book spawned a community which developed the ideas? How far does the website show evidence of the book kicking off a successful community of reflection and further research and learning on the topic?  And, again, how can we apply these ideas to our situation in a wet Cork city in November 2012?

Apart from a few discussion starters, I tend to leave the field open because I am sure interesting perspectives will arise from the group which will make next Monday’s session  interesting.

Moving from theory to practice, there are a couple of things I want the group to prepare for the session:

I want everyone to finish setting up blogs, and post your reflections on the readings to your blogs.  Post a couple of short headline points and a link back to your blog in the comments on this post.

Secondly, read other people’s blog postings and comment on them (on their blogs, not here)

Thirdly,  if you have not already got a twitter account, set one up. On Monday in the first 10-15 minutes of the seminar, we will work mostly quietly as people post 2-3 tweets highlighting key points from their blog postings, and respond to other people’s tweets. We will use the #uccmadah hashtag to draw these together. I’ll archive these in a number of ways for later use.

This will allow us to explore, in a practical way, how we write in the different environments of blog and tweet, and how we run into the “I don’t get what you meant there” issues which are an important part of online presence.

In terms of tech & logistics, everyone will, as usual BYOD  - Bring your own device, laptop or smartphone.  Try and get it registered on the campus wireless before class, but I can turn on the wireless hot-spot on my phone in the room.  Obviously, you need a twitter client on your laptop or smartphone.  I’m hoping that we have a decent collection of tech problems to solve on the day, so the seminar in the room  will be a jolly mess out of which we learn both theory and practice, while it looks profound and wise on the web as we “fake it till we make it” as one piece of advice for DH newbies says.