John Smith and Bev Trayner have an article in eLearn magazine that combines excellent practical and theoretical insights on how to mix online collaboration with face-to-face events - something I'm currently working on.
The article is based on experience in the development of communities of practice, and uses the CPD framework of community (participants), shared interest in a body of knowledge (domain), and the development of practices that support further learning (practice).
It takes three main phases - online ramp-up (preparation phase online), face-to-face meeting, and online follow-on (post-meeting online phase) - and details issues likely to arise. Here's the first two of ten as a taster:
Phase: Getting into the online space
- Launching into various preliminary interactions, usually involving Web pages, emails, phone calls, and payment which have the function of bootstrapping other points of contact.
- Engaging with this new online experience balances uncertainty and extrapolation from previous experiences.
- Finding other people "there"—a glimpse that it may be worthwhile.
- Feelings of familiarity or frustration, despair, or delight.
Phase: Finding your way: asynchronous discussions
- Dealing with technical mechanics and overcoming social obstacles,both online and in a context around the computer at home and/or at work.
- Discovering that an asynchronous medium has a rhythm that intersects "real life."
- Getting to know (or not) how to use different pathways or facilities to participate in an online discussion.
- Figuring out the "right thing to do," acquiring social learning skills or technical mastery and taking some initiative (or not) as aresult.
I'm doing some work with Bev on a Drupal-based site where some 30 people are preparing, in half a dozen languages, for a meeting in a couple of weeks time, and anticipate exploring in greater depth what lies beneath the bullet points. More on that once things have got going.
I think there are some similarities in John and Bev's model to Gilly Salmon's Five stage model developed from work at the Open University. Although both models have been developed to inform the creation of learning communities - formal or otherwise - I think the principles apply in many other settings. The consistent theme, as John and Bev say, is "learning comes about through informal engagement with other people". It's about conversation and relationship, not just assembling and ingesting chunks of knowledge.
John maintains the the learning alliances blog, and Bev keeps a blog called Phronesis. John has now set up a feed to capture content from others in the CPsquare community of practice (CoP) about CoPs which you can find here.
Comments