Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Social Media and Learning Institutions in the Digital Age: Rolling Your Own Communities for Learning

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How has the definition of community changed over the last twenty years?

The Digital or Information Age is about economical, technological, sociological, historical changes (Feather, 2003). These changes have led to ubiquitous access to information and ubiquitous communication. Combined, these two trends lead to a new society, one slightly different from the one we grew up in. Combined, these two trends lead to new understandings of how people learn and work, which in turn leads to a new understanding of community.

Shirky sums it up well in Here Comes Everybody (2008). Given these new tools we are afforded the opportunity to build groups with ridiculous ease (Paquet, 2002). We can now share, communicate, collaborate, and act online in ways heretofore seemingly impossible.

[But you know this already or you wouldn't be here today. This conference was planned, organized, and coordinated using digital tools.]

What's important here, is that while the ability to gather information, to learn, communicate, and build communities has advanced rapidly, educational systems have remained tethered to the Industrial Age (Reigeluth, 1994).

And that's another reason why we are here today. We all see the need for this to change. But being educators or working in educational institutions and settings, we recognize that turning this behemoth in a new direction will take effort, understanding, leadership, communication, and community.

Change is going to come, but on who's terms? Will it be mandated? Will it happen organically? What are our options? How will we decide?


Innovation and Smoking

Shirky (2008) had the presence of mind to notice that real innovation comes when we take the technology for granted.

Today, educational institutions still see technology as a new innovation, a disruptive innovation (Bowers & Christensen, 1995).
Thus, if my logic is correct, schools, for the most part, are still a few years off from real innovation.

Instead of focusing on what is standing in our way, I am going to focus my talk on paths we may consider.

I come from an institutional background where I worked in a university office affectionately known as the Division of Continuing Exceptions. It was our job to know how to overcome obstacles, to navigate the seas of institutional red tape, to find solutions to our clients dilemmas, all way keeping everything transparent and perfectly legal. How's that for a mission statement?

I titled my presentation rolling your own, because I come from a tradition of doing things myself, of not expecting others to do it for me.

I also smoked cigarettes for many years and came to enjoy the ritual of placing the tobacco into the paper, and carefully rolling into a bone.

In fact, this process of rolling my own helped me to quit smoking.

How? By rolling my own I slowed down the process.

I became more conscious each time I had a desire to smoke. Each time I wanted a cigarette, I had to stop what I was doing, go outside, pull the pouch from my pocket, pull out a paper from it's packet, place the papers back in the pouch, select the right amount of tobacco, etc.

I had to concentrate on what I was doing to the exclusion of all other things. There is no such thing as multi-tasking when rolling your own cigarette. And during this process, I began to start reflecting on what I was doing to myself, what this smoke was doing to my lungs, my health.

As delicious and euphoric as the act of smoking was for me, I began to calculate its total effect on me, my friends, my family, the cigarette industry. I began to reflect on how I didn't like seeing cigarette butts that collected in the ash tray or on the street.

Rolling my own caused me to be more attentive, more reflective, and in the end, more sensitive to the bigger picture that was my life.

I tell the story of rolling my own cigarettes as a way of illustrating these important notions:

• Rolling my own allowed me to slow down and pay attention to a destructive process.

• Through slowing down and paying attention to what I was doing I was able to make changes that had an impact on me and my community.

• This change affected me personally, economically, and socially.

• This change was innovative in that I could not innovate/change until I took smoking for granted.

What does it take to create a successful learning community in a Digital Age?

When you step back and look at your own learning institutions, what are you seeing?

Big creativity? Everyday creativity? Social/group innovation? Shared innovation?

Each of your institutional colleagues has a computer on his or her desk.

Each has access to the Internet, the World Wide Web, and hundreds of applications and tools that can enable and support sharing, communication, collaboration, and action.

We know that community, creativity, and innovation are possible, so what do we need to make them happen?

Let's slow down a minute and see....

My first impulse when talking about design for learning communities is to pull from the work of Etienne Wenger.

How do we design to make an institution alive?

In Cultivating Communities of Practice, Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder (2002) derive seven principles. These principles are not recipes, but embody an "understanding of how elements of design work together" (p. 51). They are:

1. Design for evolution.
2. Open dialogue between inside and outside perspectives.
3. Invite different levels of participation.
4. Develop both public and private community spaces.
5. Focus on value.
6. Combine familiarity and excitement.
7. Create a rhythm for the community.

It is important to note that not one of these elements are about creating predetermined outcomes.

Hmmm....

Is this what we want in a community for learning? What about our learning objectives? What about our project goals?

Community design is really about "energizing participation" (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002, p. 64), is it not?

Whether we're talking about designing communities for learning or designing communities of practice, the design goal centers on adaptability, on an awareness that things that last (or have value) have the ability to evolve as our aims evolve.

The value members get from a community is what drives a community. People need to see how their participation will translate into something useful.


Communities and innovation

In a recently published article Keith Sawyer (2008) spends time examining different kinds of group flow.

Drawing from his work with sports teams, jazz combos, and business organizations, Sawyer (2008) identified 10 key conditions that enable dynamic expertise and ultimately group flow (adapted from Csikszentmihalyi, 1990):

1. A shared goal,
2. Close or deep listening to each other,
3. Complete concentration,
4. Being in control of the group's actions and environment,
5. Blending of individual egos,
6. Equal participation,
7. Member's familiarity with each other,
8. Constant communication,
9. Elaboration of each other's ideas, and
10. Frequent failure and learning from frequent failure.

Active listening, familiarity, participation, constant communication, elaboration of ideas, the checking of egos at the door, strike us as common sense and seem obvious when someone is describing a successful community or committee.

How might these conditions impact your decisions to use social media in communities for learning?

From a designers perspective, knowing how learning communities function well is of critical importance. What social media tools you use, in what combination, for what activities, in which environments, for which audience, and for what purpose depend largely on your strategy, design skills, and the knowledge of available applications (tactics).

In developing an environment, time and space were once the two major facets to consider. Today, it is about the ease with which sharing can take place and the rules or guidelines that establish and govern the group and its activities.

That's right. I said it. We need rules in order to effectively operate in this open, flowing, socially mediated context. That's the one piece I keep seeing left out of the research on communities of innovation. Can these rules emerge organically? Can they be imposed from a top down model?

I actually got a chance to ask Etienne Wenger this question earlier this year. As I understand his seminal work on communities of practice, such learning communities were bottom-up enterprises, i.e., formed and sustained by those people interested in participating -- that a community of practice could never be "built by management."

He reminded me that his book was written over 10 years ago and that indeed his mind should be allowed to change over time!

Wenger noted that a learning community cannot be completely engineered by expertise. He said a strong, working learning community is a lot like falling in love. It starts as a budding relationship and it builds with time, engagement, commitment, trust, recognition, respect, emotional availability. When these elements are missing, the community falls out of love and the relationship of its members dissolves.

However, he suggested a learning community can be built top-down by management to support the worker bees.

He also noted that when a learning community is over-engineered, either by participants or management, it can be absolutely meaningless and soul-crushing to its members.

"Does a learning community need a leader?" I asked. Wenger replied that managing membership is clearly an important role that serves a learning community well but that management should not be the focus of the community. This leader/facilitator can be a pre-determined or an emerging, organic one.

According to Wenger (1998), learning within a community of practitioners is about helping each other accomplish tasks, share challenges, passions, and interests.

In this sense, managing a learning community is a matter of keeping members motivated, interacting regularly, and creating conditions that allow members to learn from and with one another to improve their ability to do what they do.

It is important to keep in mind that such a learning community is good for all members. A learning community can also be a complete mess, self-reproducing blindly for better or for worse. Thus, in a larger sense, leadership/facilitation in a learning community is about nurturing conditions that allow members to learn; conditions such as trust, the feeling of safety, and mutual respect.

During our conversation, Wenger described this type of learning community leader as a “social artist,” that is one who can create spaces for learning, one who uses their identity as a leader to elicit social energy; someone like an anthropologist who knows how social systems work and who can create the conditions; someone willfull, collaborative, social, but not manipulative; some one who’s passion is contagious.

While there are many instance where learning communities emerge organically, our institutions and businesses are demanding more and more that someone help design such an environment.

Innovative communities for learning require some guidance, scaffolding, and structures that will permit participants the autonomy to share, communicate, collaborate, as well as space for them to reflect on activities and outcomes associated with participation.

As you think about all of these conditions and factors associated with both developing and participating in a learning commun ity, you may, like me, by struck by the sheer complexity involved.

If we simply want a place to hold discussions, that's great. We can use a tool that supports discussion. If we want a place to hold discussions, as well as share and store artifacts, that's great too. But that will require a different set of tools. The more we expect our learning community to do, the more complex it will be to manage.

If we want to create change we need more than tools: we need a strategy.


More than tools/tactics

It's more than about the technology, tools, tactics; it's about a combination of strategies, tools, and the habits of mind associated with shared innovation. Playing in a jazz combo is like having 3 or 4 artists painting on the same canvas at the same time. Now draw that analogy out to a working committee of 12 or a classroom of 25 students. Or in the case of Michael Wesch a classroom of over 100 students all being asked to paint on the same piece of canvas at the same time.

It can be done well and not so well; hence the need for shared goals, clear rules of participation, a solid strategy, and the right tools for the right purpose.

More importantly, rolling your own community for learning requires careful reflection. Sawyer's (2008) 10 key conditions offer a useful framework for designers in terms of offering a clear and communicable set of rules that a learning community can start with and modify as needed. Ground rules or norms are critical for groups that plan to work together cooperatively over time or on complex issues. Establishing such norms builds a sense of trust among group members permitting the clarification of individual and group expectations (Wentworth, no date, retrieved 9/9/07). These norms help inform participants as a learning community (Buysee, Sparkman, and Wesley, 2003). wherein the community becomes a “negotiated enterprise” (Wenger, 1998, p. 78) involving mutual engagement, a shared repertoire, and where the community’s members can participate in a meaningful way through the sharing of voices, stories, ideas, activities, styles, and concepts. In order to function as a learning community, an agreed upon set of norms points individual members and the group as a whole toward a state of equilibrium (Piaget, 1950) to keep the community from drifting aimlessly without purpose or cause. Finally, in terms of organizational design, the guidelines and ground rules create fixed points around which participants can negotiate their positions, understand what they are expected to share, when to participate, and what to expect from others in the community.

To paraphrase marketing/media crackerjack Seth Godin (2009), new digital media "creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities" for educators. Many of these opportunities "cost nothing but time, which means you don't need as much approval and support to launch them."

So while these new mediums/media present lots of opportunities, many educational professionals struggle to formulate a meaningful strategy to meet their goals and needs unless they're sure it's going to work. Instead, we most often see people focus on tactics. Tactics describe actions. Strategies describe results. Thus we stay away from strategies because we risk failure to get it right. And no one likes to fail, unless you're a research scientist where failure is something you examine and learn from.

The result of working from a tactical position gives us little room for addressing our larger needs and goals. What happens when tactics fail? We begin to question our overall strategy which we never defined in the first place.

New media, social technologies, social networks, are mostly tactical. It is important for designers not to get too obsessed with tactics before we embrace a strategy.


Summary

Given the economical, technological, sociological, historical changes taking place all around us, educational institutions have been slow to adapt. These changes have led to ubiquitous access to information and ubiquitous communication. Combined, these two trends lead to new understandings of how people learn and work that, in turn, leads to new ways of thinking about community. Research suggests that real innovation comes when we take the technology for granted. Yet, many of today's educational institutions still see technology as a new innovation, a disruptive innovation (Bowers & Christensen, 1995), thus learning institutions by and large are still a few years off from real innovation.

When we examine the idea of communities for learning, instead of focusing on tactics to bring about meaningful growth and change, we need to better define our strategies--we need to know where we want to go, talk openly about them, reflect on them, refine them, and test them out. Creating meaningful communities for practice is an iterative process.

Designers can help foster change by designing communities for learning that recognize the key conditions that allow for creativity and innovation to happen. Designers can also help communities for learning by helping community leaders develop rules for engagement that allow for strong, meaningful exchange and reflection.


References:

Bower, J. L. & Christensen, C. M. (1995). Disruptive technologies: Catching the wave. Harvard Business Review, January-February 1995. Retrieved from http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/1995/01/disruptive-technologies/ar/1.

Buysse, V., Sparkman, K., & Wesley, P. W. 2003. Communities of practice in educational research: Connecting what we know with what we do. Exceptional Children, 69(3), 263-277.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: HarperCollins.

Feather, J. (2003). Theoretical perspectives on the information society. In S. Hornby & Z. Clark (Eds.), Challenge and change in the information society (pp. 3-17). London: Facet Publishing.

Godin, S. (2009). When tactics drown out strategy. Seth's Blog. Retrieved from http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/08/when-tactics-drown-out-strategy.html

Paquet, S. (2002). Making group-forming ridiculously easy. Seb's Open Research. Retrieved from http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2002/10/09.html.

Piaget, J. 1950. The psychology of intelligence. New York: Routledge.

Reigeluth, C. M. (1994). The imperative for systemic change. In C. M. Reigeluth & R. J. Garfinkle (Eds.), Systemic change in education (pp. 3-11). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.

Sawyer, R. K. (2008). Group genius: The craetive power of collaboration. New York: Perseus Books Group.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Books.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wentworth, M. (no date). Forming ground rules. Retrieved from www.nsrfharmony.org/protocol/doc/forming_ground_rules.pdf

West, R. E. (2009). What is shared? A framework for understanding shared innovation within communities. Educational Technology Research and Development, 57: 315-332.