As coming close to the end of this class, 597 Disruptive technology, I’ve seen myself actually trying to define the word community. So let’s come to the basic question, what is community? I understand that every one has a slight definition on community, especially after reading the Wenger book and the class, that it’s place where people gather. The reason for gathering can be different among individuals, it can be interest, or by some other reasons. However, I think that community doesn’t always need to be interest related. The community can be a place where we gather for some different reason such as the same purpose and not need to correlate with others. However, it seems to get blurry when we come to the ‘belonging’ issue in the community. For example, in a bus, would this count as a community? I would say ‘yes’ where people have the purpose to go somewhere to take the same bus. Do they know and react with each other? this answer can be ‘no’. Participating in the community depends on individuals, and many reasons can cause not to participate in the community. As a gamer, especially World of Warcraft, people engage in interesting conversations about quests, weapons, race (game character race) and even just normal real-life style conversations. If you can listen and observe to the conversations not everyone would participate in the conversation. Some will talk mostly some will listen. Within the community other community exist. And higher community can also have effects on other community. The meaning and purpose of the community can change according to the other community. What I want to point out here is that community itself seems to be social as a human being. Community itself can generate a new community and also oppress other community to change the value of it’s community. The community works as a social, and can be considered as one. Almost close to humans. In this sense the community seems to be complicated as knowing what humans are. Therefore this semester, I’ve learned the value of community and what communities are, but also I learned it’s same as humans when it comes to defining what it is.
Archives for April 2008
Who are we? A Comment on Identity…
Over the semester, I have been refining my definition of identity. Similar to Twitter, which asks the question, “What are you doing?” to me, identity answers the question, “Who am I?” Luckily I don’t have 140 characters or less to answer this question, but I did find one way of describing identity which might be short enough to define it in less than the required characters. In Betsy’s entry To Be or Not to Be, she comments on identity as being our personal lens to the world. It reminded me of the glasses that Nicolas Cage finds and uses in National Treasure. His use of different lenses reveals different clues on the map. This thought implies that our identity is how we see ourselves in this world. It’s our way of looking at the world. I want to expand upon this notion by defining on what I think creates that lens and ultimately shapes our identity.First, I have been pondering about the purpose of a name and how important a name is in our identity. Minh’s entry, On Identity, Community, Web 2.0, and the Design of Pligg, challenged me to articulate my thoughts on the purpose of a name. In this entry, she discusses her frustrations with Pligg regarding her inability to choose her name. Instead our Penn State identity becomes our name. Her passion challenged me to consider how names and the choice over names impacts our identity. In response to this entry, an interesting dialogue ensued on Pligg. For me, our names are what distinguishes us. In particular I take pride in my name even though I had no choice in its selection. My birth name represents my heritage. In fact when I married, I really struggled with losing my last name. After all, that name was how I defined myself for 25 years, and by taking on a new last name, I had the opportunity to create a “new” me. My link theory between names and identity was shattered one day in class when Doug raised a very philosophical question, which is similar to the adage, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Doug challenged my thinking when he raised the question, “If a man is alone in a desert, does he need a name?” His question required me to consider the link between identity and community. Considering these thoughts, I discussed my theory and Doug’s question with McEd. McEducation affirmed my theory in that he commented on how we are our names. Providing me with a historical perspective, he commented on how originally people’s names were related to characteristics that defined them including personality and occupation, hence the last name Smith, etc. Ultimately I still see our identities as being defined and communicated through our names sealing the important connection between identity and community.John’s entry, Identity is in the Eye of the Beholder, asks an intriguing question. He comments on this notion of perception when he asks, “Who decides on one’s identity?” Identity is not just how we see ourselves; it’s also how other people see us. Sometimes we select what we reveal to others and sometimes our revelations are accidental. Identity is inextricably linked to perception both internally and externally. Our identity is composed of our personal constructions of what we believe ourselves to be and how others perceive us to be. Sometimes those perceptions align, and sometimes they don’t. It seems like our identity could be compared to a wiki – a page that is created, altered, and controlled by us and those who have access to us.Mike cites some of Wenger’s thoughts on identity in his post Finding Identity and Networking, same thing? He discusses how Wenger states that our identity is formed through identification and negotiation, and Mike poses the question of its relation to networking. Here again the notion of community intersects with identity. Our experiences inevitably shape who we are – our identity. To some extent some would argue that we have choice in those experiences. To answer his question, all members of the CI597C community will forever be changed by our experience and participation in this community. Access and participation in communities touch our lives and alter our identities both positively and negatively. CI597C has altered our identities – it has added and deleted content, some more than others, on our individual identity wiki pages.In closing, Donna provides an intriguing visual of identity in her post “We’re all Onions.” Here she describes identity as an onion, layers of ourselves, which are altered by life’s experiences. Whether we see ourselves as onions, wiki pages, or another analogy, our personal perceptions of ourselves and other’s perceptions of us coupled with life’s experiences shape our identity of which are combined and then attached to a label, our names, that act as our coat of arms in the world.
“Design is what you do when you don’t yet know what you are doing… G. Stiny
Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.
Charles Eames
Design is the contrast of the core of limitations therefore there are no boundaries. It is simply an interpretation of creativity.
Jenaiha Woods
Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era – it’s a process that creates order out of chaos, that renders technology usable to business. Design means being good, not just looking good.
Clement Mok
We have shirked out duty where design is concerned in this class. However, if I must say so myself, Team Tweet has discussed it ad nauseum, and we have learned quite a bit. I added the quotes above to contextualize this short discussion about design.
Creativity. usability, purpose. Lessig said it best in his keynote when he talked about design being creative and that the best designs are not necessarily new, but re-purposed, innovated upon.
Just seeing in 15 weeks how Twitter applications have flooded the market in the short time I have been following the twitter blogs and mega-ite, I am utterly amazed at how design flows in fits and spurts…mashable
Like follows like. Twitter, Jing, etc…. Face Book, Ning…..so many more beyond comprehension….Sometimes I just have to turn the computer off, there is so much to take in. And so much to learn.
Where design is concerned, the jury is still out. I have to spend more time with it, more immersion, to see how design plays out for teachers and schools. Wenger did not give me as much with this as the other two themes. Seems our class too, it rather Light on design.
I will close by saying that I have had an amazing time not being afraid of the technology, by closing my eyes and just pushing buttons and pressing keys to see what happens. That is a lot like what good design is,
trying things on in different venues, seeing what works and what does not. For teachers there is so much now, but is there community? Can you build identity enough to stick with something new?
I am inspired to take these ideas back to practice as I return to work in the schools. I will literally keep you all “posted” by posting to my Improv blog and my horsemanship blog, and my social network blog.., Horse Whispers…
Lacking any real design experience, I will close with this quote:
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”
Eliel Saarinen
“Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended.”
Raymond Loew
My Head Hurts
Terribly sorry all… I know I was supposed to separate the last post into three, but as of Tuesday (and the last revision of my draft post), I have come down with some sort of flu. The meds + fever are preventing me from any form of coherent thought (my head actually hurts from entirely non-academic reasons tonight). I figured it would be best to post the draft “as is” in order to give people a chance to read over it. Again, my apologies.Community, Identity, Design.
I can’t seem to separate one from the others, so I wish you luck trying
to follow the thoughts of my very scrambled brain. Our class has shifted from reading a wide
variety of authors to Wenger; so needless to say, many of my thoughts (ok, our
thoughts) are centered on the ides of Wenger.
From my very first post containing substantial content “Thinner” I have
been concerned with the concept of identity.
From the comments received, it seems like others have their concerns
too. I believe that identity is a lens as
stated in my post “to be or not to be,” and I agree that is not a dichotomy but
a gradient between the individual and the rest of the community. If the community were to disappear, you would
no longer have a lens, but a mirror.
What you see in a mirror is quite different from what is viewed through
a lens. I am finding comfort in this
definition because you can control your own identity (to some extent). You can control what is put out there for the
rest of the community to view through the lens.
You cannot control, however, the lens through which people are looking
back at you, and that makes part of your identity not your own. In this way, your identity means something
different to everyone whom with which you engage. I am still uncomfortable with the thought of
multitudes of identities looking back at me.
As Wenger writes, maintaining an identity takes energy and energy is a
finite resource. I like to be able to
pick and choose (to the greatest extent possible) what parts of me I will show
to other identities to be viewed through their own lenses. This discretion takes some energy, and I am
sure this energy expended will increase greatly as I have more contact with
younger students. Some designs allow
more of your identity to be seen than others; writing in blog, sharing an
evening (in the same room!) with friends, or posting on facebook, all change
the identity lens. In the case of
facebook, I am very glad that the design is so restrictive (to the point that I
feel it is not even a community). A
person’s information is shared, but as Wenger says sharing information is not
the same as engagement. To have
engagement a person has to be a part of a community and he or she has to have
an identity in that community that is shaped (though the lens) by the other
community members and the other community members have their identity shaped by
that person. In the blog post “it takes
a virtual village,” Lis beautifully states how she engaged with her virtual
community. Her identity was changed by
her community and the other members’ identities were changed by Lis being a member
of the community. If Lis were never to
have joined that community, neither she nor the other members would have had
the same type of engagement. With
facebook, if a user were to stop using (yes like an addict), the other “pseudo
identities” of the other facebookers would not be affected. Again, I’m trying not to be a hater I do
think that there can be wonderful, rich, virtual communities; I just think that
engagement may come a bit more naturally when people are in more “personal
contact.” (Humans have evolved within
the context of voice inflection, body language, and physical contact.) Back to design design can be a facilitator
of engagement. It can help create a
community or help prevent one from forming.
I think sometimes design is unintentional by it is always
evolutionary. As the community changes,
identities change, and design changes as well.
Something with a static design may start out as a community but cannot
be maintained as a community.
I want to postscript
this blog with the fact that I am young: I’ve just had my 23rd
birthday. I’ve got sooo much living and
reflection to do. I feel that my age may
give me an advantage in the technology part of the course (ok, maybe not), but I feel at a
disadvantage when I hear (and read) the wonderful, insightful discussions
created by the rest of the community. I
want to say, while some improvements could be made in the design of the
disruptive technology course community (possibly more structure just a
thought), the ability to see though others’ lenses has made a great impact on
my identity… and Minh… all the ellipses are for you 🙂
Community-Final Answer
Well, I feel I understand community much better than the other two themes in the class. To borrow from one of my “heavy” Wenger posts of the last few weeks:
*Today, I, along with the rest of us, examine my mode of alignment with the practices recommended by the CI597 community: Facebooking, Twittering, checking our readers twice a day, sharing our personal selves in public venues, pouring heart and soul out in weekly blog posts. As we read Wenger this week we are able to put names to practices that we have been engaging in. We imagine our place in the group,we are/are not accepted, we are part of something new and bigger than ourselves, Cole and Scott love us and will have a relationship with us after the class, or we don’t relate to these practices, we don’t feel the groups are including me, we don’t see how these technologies will be useful and any reaction in-between. We are not certain what our classmates think of us, but we can only imagine our place in the community by what we feel and the feedback we get. We imagine the possibilities of continued participation, and imagine how it will feel when this class is over. Will our identity change when we are not required to participate? Will the community still exist for continued participation? How will I be changed by all of this at the conclusion of the community? Who will I be?
*
——- Well, it is now the end of the f2f CI597. There has been some noise in the Twittersphere about trying to keep the community going in virtual world. I believe the community that will continue on for a while will be the
“Tweets”—Team Tweet anyway. Becky pointed out that we have a natural inclination to want to communicate. I am certain that this is true for us as well, but as people go their different ways, however, the common purpose, the affilation, the shared experience that bound the community will begin to fade. As with friendships, perhaps communities exist for a reason or a season, and that i how it is meant to be.
In another former post, “Can’t We Just All Belong” it *is the mix of modes of belonging and their related identities of participation and nonparticipation that makes up, and is made up of, the extent to which we identify with our ‘practice’ and are able to control and negotiate meanings within it. At the beginning of the class we all had equal opportunity to belong. As the community built, we had varied experiences and developed a sense of where we fit in all of this (defies a descriptor, fill in your own here__)or as our fearless leaders call it, “the GRAND EXPERIMENT”.
*—-The reason for our community of practice will be over. We will scatter and strengthen our affiliations with other communities, and our practice will veer away from this class.
What I have learned from this experience, however, will not fade as I veer off into new territory. I learned that building shared experience- using the technology or not-helps to strengthen relationships that bind communities. I learned that reaching the right people(Paul Revere) at the right time, builds desire to affiliate. I learned that some people will always be joiners(early adopters) and some people will never be joiners and that is OK. The wonderful thing about humans is that there are so many kinds of people with so many varied interests and confidences and needs, that community-building becomes an art, and even somewhat of a science. To become a harbinger of change, one needs to read the stakeholders, assess the need, find the leaders, and then work the Wengerian magic….
Attempting to Design Knowledge and Learning
One can design systems of accountability and policies for communities
of practice to live by, but one Cannot design the practices that
will emerge in response to such institutional systems. One can design
roles, but one cannot design the identities that will be constructed
through these roles One can design visions, but one cannot design the
allegiance necessary to align energies behind those visions. One can
produce affordances’ for the negotiation of meaning, but not meaning
itself One can design work processes but not work practices; one can
design a curr iculum but not learning One can attempt to institutionalize
a community of practice, but the community of practice itself will
slip through the cracks and remain distinct hom its institutionalization
. (Wenger, 229)
I haven’t written much about design over the semester because I don’t feel that I have mastered the concept. However, I am going to take the above quote and apply it to our class. When Scott and Cole first introduced this class, it was labeled the “grand experiment”. Their established practices to live by included reading assignments from Thursday through Monday and posting a reaction by Monday at 5pm. On Tuesday, by 5pm, the class was supposed to react to peer’s postings. Our fearless leaders could not have antipated the community this class and these practices have produced.
In creating these guidelines, they have attempted to facilitate learning. It is very hard to put a label on exactly what we have learned this semester, but I feel that is because the learning that has taken place is can not be measured by traditional means. Personally, I have internalized and questioned the concepts of community, identity, and design. The meaning of these concepts that we have negotiated through our interactions have been, and still are, changing while we add to our knowlege base. As instructors, they have allowed us the freedom to converse and add to the curriculum. They had no way of predicting the quantity and quality of conversation that has taken place outside of the classroom or the relationships that have formed as a result of their intial set of practices. They could not design the alligences to the members of our community.
We have aligned ourselves in a way that is unlike many academic classes in my career. As we part for the summer, the community of practice that we have established will modify itself to settings outside the classroom. As Wenger suggests, it will become distinct from the institution of its birth. However, it will continue.
Making Gravy
My favorite picture of my Grandmother is one of her in the kitchen stirring the gravy. In my Italian house gravy is the red stuff made from tomatoes and eaten with spaghetti and spaghetti is any type of pasta. I would watch my grandmother make that sauce and see her add the tomatoes, garlic, meatballs, and sausage. There had to be something else she added to make it taste so good. Everyone in my family has eaten that sauce and spread that secret ingredient out in the world. She taught her all of her children and grandchildren how to make that gravy. That gravy is the reification of a community of practice. My initial post talked about my siblings and I attempting to maintain our community. After Grandma’s passing, I see how she was the broker of information to our family. She held the history and traditions and passed them on to us, who intern made small changes and will pass them on to future generations. She told stories of the ways her grandmother and mother did things. Her goal was to teach us to live meaningfully. I look at my earlier posts and see that her teachings have permeated my own. I think of my students and our conversations about goals, working hard, strength, responsibility, and leadership. Those core values were at the root of my classroom and the root of my family. Shared goals, methods, and stories are the elements of a community of practice. Each member of my family has participated in making that gravy. Chopping the garlic, pureeing the tomatoes in the blender, and rolling the meatballs. We take the recipe, add some of our own identity, ingredients and experiences then spread them into the world.As with the gravy, we will take the community formed by this class and add our future experiences to it. Our gravy takes the form of a blog, posts on twitter, and messages passed through various forms of the internet.
I’m so glad we had this time together . . .
Just to have a laugh and sing a song;
Seems we just got started and before we know it,
Comes the time we have to say
So Long”
Those of my vintage (and maybe younger, thanks to Nick at
Nite) may recognize this as the way the venerable Carol Burnett used to sign
off her show every Saturday night on CBS.
As I was reflecting back on this course, these lyrics popped into my
head and seemed appropriate to use for my final post.
We’ve stroked a lot of keys during the last fifteen weeks
writing about community,what makes one, what doesn’t, what maybe kind of does,
etc. And I think that it was during these
and other discussions that we in 597 became part of an official community of
practice. And though part of me wants to
say that some members of this community are more equal than others,because there
are some who were way more engaged and productive than others both in their
contributions in class as well as out., Wenger would say that “each participant in a community of practice finds a unique
place and gains a unique identity, which is both further integrated and further
defined in the course of engagement in practice. (75-76)”, which Lis
wrote about in her “Are you Living?” post way back when. I’m good with that. So even though there were some in our class
who did not sit at the table; some who skipped from time to time; some who went
through an entire 3 hour session without saying a word, the CI 597 community of practice is still
theirs to call home.
I truly enjoyed this experience,
even though there were certainly times when my head throbbed both in class and
out when I struggled to come to terms with a particular thread of discussion or
reading. 597 has spawned a multitude
of interests for me, and I think has really helped confirm for me the direction
that I want the rest of my PhD studies to follow. The fact that this could be done amid quick
wit, friendly ribbing, and lots of Twittering is a major bonus. I expect to never have a similar class
experience, but hope that I do, and will strive to create it in courses that I
lead in the future. I have a feeling that communities of practice
have a bit of a viral aspect to them.
Once one has been part of one, one might want to try to replicate them
in other parts of life, whether academic, professional and personal.
Thanks everyone for your
contributions to my learning. I hope I
was able to do the same for you. Good night! Insert
virtual ear tug here. . .
designing a COP
This final posting in my CI 597 synthesis is the most
important in my opinion. The course
readings and discussions were great starting points for discussing Web 2.0
technologies. Cole and Scott allowed us
to form opinions and discuss and negotiate our meaning with our peers. But, how will we transfer this new knowledge
to the creation of our own online learning environments, communities, and
lesson plans? What we may not realize is that we have already started to transfer this knowledge. In our group projects in class, every group
designed a module of instruction around a Web 2.0 technology that incorporated
the ideas of community and identity. For instance, our TeamTweet group designed our instruction with identity having two
roles. Our instruction incorporated
everyone’s in-person identity and also online identity in Twitter.
How do we get started in design as we move past this
semester? Wenger provides a starting
point in the last two Chapters of his book, Communities of Practice. Wenger discusses four dimensions of
instructional design: participation vs. reification, designed vs. emergent,
local vs. global, and identification vs. negotiability. These dimensions task the designer with
answering the following questions: How much reification is appropriate and necessary in learning? How can we minimize teaching and maximize
learning? How can we link educational experiences to real world
experiences and other content areas? How is success and failure negotiated in
the design? I discuss these ideas in a
posting from April 15, 2008
entitled “Designing Learning vs. Designing for Learning.” The main argument that Wenger states and I
reiterate is that “learning cannot be designed, it can only be designed for” (Wenger 1998).
We must design environments and lesson plans that facilitate
(i.e. allow for) learning to occur. We
do this by creating environments where participants feel like they are part of
a Community of Practice. They can experience, do, belong, and become. They can negotiate, develop, and share theories
and ways of understanding the world. This
is accomplished through mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and a shared
repertoire. In creating our environment
and lesson plans, we must allow for collaboration and group work, discussion,
and shared goals. By providing
collaboration and group work, we are facilitating social interaction and
identity creation.
For anyone that is relatively new at instructional design, it
is important to start with design models.
One design model that I use is
Bielaczyc and Collins’ learning community framework. The framework requires community growth,
emergent goals, articulation-of-goals, metacognitive activity, respect for others, fail safe measures, structural dependence, depth over breadth, diverse
expertise, multiple ways to participate, sharing, negotiation and a good
quality of products. More on this can be
found in a previous post from February
4, 2008.
The take-home point from all my posts regarding CI 597 is the
following. In instruction, you must
constantly look at community, identity, and design. Even with new Web 2.0 technologies, you still
must go back to community, identity, and design. By accommodating for all three, you WILL
design for learning and WILL create environments that allow for learning to
occur.Thank you for reading my posts this semester! All links included in this post:http://www.personal.psu.edu/mdm392/blogs/ci597/2008/04/designing-learning-vs-designin.htmlhttp://www.personal.psu.edu/mdm392/blogs/ci597/2008/04/revisiting-cops.htmlhttp://www.personal.psu.edu/mdm392/blogs/ci597/2008/02/creating-communities-of-practi.html
a COPs Identity
In a Community of Practice (COP), there are many different
levels of participation. People can be
engaged members, periphery members, non-participants, etc. Participation is directly linked to identity
and belonging to a community. We choose
to participate and belong in certain ways and that belonging helps to create our
identity in that community. Wenger’s
three modes of belonging further explain identity. 1. Engagement or active involvement. 2.
Imagination or seeing connections in our lives through past experiences. 3.
Alignment or choosing where to use our energy.
Do we have an influence on our identity? Yes! Sherry
Turle describes identity as the sameness between a person and his/her persona. More on Turle’s ideas can be found in the
post “Neo’s Internet Identity Crisis” from February 4, 2008.
Etienne Wenger describes identity as negotiated
through social interaction and that by yourself, you don’t have an identity. More thoughts on Wenger’s discussion of
identity can be found in the post AND comment in “After class Identity
Discussion” from April 17, 2008. We have an influence on every social
interaction we are involved in, whether it be our demeanor, appearance, words, or
creations.
I feel that the biggest question from CI 597 this semester
dealt with one’s online identity. Is it
really your identity if someone is unable to see your demeanor and appearance? The answer is yes. No matter how little of a presence it is, you
DO have an online presence that people associate with you. This creates your identity. More on this is found in the post and comment
in “After class Identity Discussion” from April 17, 2008.
If we have a good grasp on what makes up a COP and how
identity is created and formed, can we design a COP? The answer will come in my next posting, “designing
a COP.”All links used in this post:http://www.personal.psu.edu/mdm392/blogs/ci597/2008/04/finding-identity-and-networkin.htmlhttp://www.personal.psu.edu/mdm392/blogs/ci597/2008/02/neos-internet-identity-crisis.htmlhttp://www.personal.psu.edu/mdm392/blogs/ci597/2008/04/after-class-identity-discussio.html