team 4
Team 4- week 6 reflection
Wenger states that practice is a process that we engage and experience the world which includes the negotiation of meaning through participation and reification.
Online social networks are an interesting example of the interplay between participation and reification, and embody at their core the negotiation that happens between the two to produce meaning for their users. Clearly, there is a strong element of participation in social networks. In Facebook, participation can come in many forms: wall posts, tagging pictures of friends, playing multiplayer games. In fact, the process of “friending” someone, of negotiating that relationship and making a decision about whether or not it meets some threshold of meaningfulness to you such that you reify the relationship in a friend request or confirmation. This process of friending, or of building ones social graph, is indeed a perfect example of reification. It is the quintessential representation of participation in the social networking world. The social graph illustrates, in stark visual terms, all the relationships that constitute one’s socially situated identity, of the community one chooses to identify with.
Profile on MySpace would be another example of a representation of identity including photos, background, music, description of background and so on. This is an example of reification that we can assume a person’s identity from the profile page and it is often the source we start reading one’s blog or sending out our friend request.
However, Wenger points out that a reification is often an imperfect codification of participation, and that is certainly the case with the social graph in Facebook and also with the profile page on MySpace. There might be a discrepancy between identities once you read more tweets and blog entries, start chatting, making comments and receiving responses back, and so on.
In case of social graph in Facebook, complex relationships which at some level might involve rich emotional interaction are reduced to lists and numbers. In some online environments, you can even rank order your friends, or pick “top friends”. This short list is no doubt hotly negotiated, with its four or five lucky members changing at the moment by moment whim of its owner. Wenger also points out how meaning can become distorted if there is too much focus on either participation or reification. Again, the social graph illustrates an example of how reification, the process of representing one’s participation in a community, can become so oversimplified that it exists almost independently of participation, or at least such that actual participation is an afterthought in the formation of the graph. This can be seen when members of a social networking site like Facebook compete for the largest number of “friends”. The state of being popular, which once reflected at least some superficial qualities of one’s personality, can be reduced to a hyper-focus on building one’s social graph by obsessively clicking friend invites. Another example of this can be seen in the site “LinkdIn” which consist almost entirely of build one’s professional graph and often seems devoid of any participation at all.
<95 Theses>
* Theses 6,12, 34,35,66
-The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
-There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
-To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities. But first, they must belong to a community.
– As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other?
The Clutrain Maifesto focuses on the rising need for businesses to communicate with other businesses, communities, and individuals who invest in their products and services. The Internet has made this communication much more accessible. The smart businesses will find a way to utilize this communication tool to make their businesses better.
* Theses 34-40:
– To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.
– But first, they must belong to a community.
– Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.
– If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.
– Human communities are based on discourse–on human speech about human concerns.
– The community of discourse is the market.
– Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.
Market is a place where people communicate, exchange and negotiate. Essentially, any company that denies that it is part of a community, or does not attempt to be part of a community will be unsuccessful. People value interaction and genuine discourse, so a successful company must both belong to a community, but actively participate in a way that the community acknowledges and values that company as a part of the community. What can we do to belong to a community, then? It goes without a question that our social activities and productions need meanings, negotiated ones because it represents our human engagement in the world (p.53). However, if we do not belong to a community, I refer this as to not participating, how we can negotiate meanings with people, artifacts, symbols, social norms, and etc in the community and probably, there’s no social practice we can thus experience. No engagement, no meaning. Under this circumstance, a company cannot speak to its market and thus there is no market. It’s applicable to the educational setting. If there is no community or we pre set up a classroom culture, students probably cannot participate and thus negotiate meanings to themselves.
As stated in the introduction to the 95 theses, “learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf. While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.”
*Theses 51-52:
– Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
– Paranoia kills conversation. That’s its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.
These two are interesting to think about in that social networking and Web 2.0 have made these points even more evident. The flattening of organizations, and inter-connectedness of employees (whether facilitated by the organization, or due to employees’ personal social networks external to the organization) means that people will interact and converse with each other. And if they are not provided information, and do not feel as though the company is conversing openly, it’s human nature to use what’s available to them to explain things. So, if a company doesn’t provide information, they effectively tell employees and customers that there’s something that the company is hiding… something that the company is not willing to discuss with “outsiders”. This not only creates an “in” group and an “outsider” group, but it also leaves the “outsider” group with no other option than to invent their own information and explanations based on what is available. Lack of conversation breeds distrust, and people don’t want to work for or do business with an entity that they don’t trust.
It seems that the same thing could be said for a classroom. While the age of students in some cases requires command and authority, the teacher is also responsible for communicating genuinely with the learners. Students who feel that the teacher is hiding something or is telling them to do something based purely on power or authority will not trust the teacher, and by extension, will be uncomfortable in the learning environment.
In terms of “open conversation”, participation is necessary to be included if a conversation is open. If access to participation is limited, it is hard to have negotiated meaning. As a teacher, I explained to my students about assignments and sometimes they came to me and asking why this is a “good” assignments. Of course, I explained my rationals and concerns. Convinced or not, I cared more on why they came to me to ask about the meaning of doing such assignments. What’s lack of? I expected that after completing several lessons, they could see the meaning of doing those assignments. Apparently, it did not happen all the time. The idea of new conversation made me think about conversations between teachers and students. Can we have open conversations? In what ways?
* Theses 57-62
– Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.
– If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of IQ, then very few companies have yet wised up.
– However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.
– This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.
– Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false–and often is.
– Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.
In these points, the company can be seen as the educational institution and the market as students collectively. The smokescreen is the ineffective instructional methods that many instructors implement, perhaps through lack of understanding of a better approach, or perhaps through anxiety about allowing their students to take the drivers seat in the classroom. Instructors want their students to learn, and students want to engage, but there’s a wall that separates those to desires and prevents them from coming to fruition. Instructors need to “wise up” and re-situate themselves as classroom facilitators, and get away from the “sage on the stage” or dominant authority figure in the classroom. To tie this back to Wenger, meaningful experience in the classroom must come from a negotiation between the instructor and the student to establish a place where participation results in learning, and where learning is reified through instructional practice and the outcomes of student participation.
*Theses 82-83
– Your product broke. Why? We’d like to ask the guy who made it. Your corporate strategy makes no sense. We’d like to have a chat with your CEO. What do you mean she’s not in?
– We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.
These two echoes several other theses and some sentences in the Forward, speaking in a human voice and the metaphor of tearing down the Berlin Wall. Being a customer, we all hope to talk to “real people” instead of polite but distant statements. If companies continue to lock themselves behind corporation walls, we’ll never have new conversation, a conversation with human voice. This fits to any communities that if we want to negotiate meanings we may have to hear human voice from each other.