I have had this blog at elgg for ages and never posted anything (assuming that noone else wanted to read what I would post).

I have spotted that others use their blogs  to save them retyping or cutting and pasting ideas that they want to share in more than one place.  As I am currently engaging in two online discussions (with some overlap), that is what I am going to do in the seocnd post of this blog.

On the HELP network at CABWEB, we have found using social network and community of practice theories is helping us to understand how our participants can share ideas within and across networks.  Here is an extract from a paper I am currently writing with two colleagues where we are puzzling over the balance between using technology to keep people in touch with what is happening (so they can join in if they wish) and overwhelming them with messages (that might put them off).  This raises questions of how we can make it easy for people to find what interests them (something I find quite difficult on elgg ;-) ).

"Contextualisation becomes a particular issue in distributed communities of practice where the ‘ties’[1] between members may be weaker than in local or co-located communities of practice. Haythornthwaite (2002) argues that the relative strength of a tie is related to how and why people communicate.  Strong ties are characterised by frequent exchanges using multiple media. Weak ties, which are often dependent on organisational media for communication, may be lost if the media are changed or removed.  Having alternative media under personal control can help ties to survive media failure.  While strong ties are important for emotional bonds and confirmation within an individual’s private network, weak ties play a part in the dissemination of ideas between private network communities such as communities of practice, thus facilitating information exchange between networks of strong ties (Haythornthwaite 2002).  In effect, those who maintain membership of multiple communities can in this way act as what Wenger calls “knowledge brokers”.  It is crucial to consider the way in which information is exchanged, in order to avoid the ‘boundary object’ being communicated like a reification, that is, lacking the all important contextual information that will make it useful to the receiving community of practice (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder 2002). Furthermore, Haythornthwaite (2002) notes that for an individual, the maintenance of weak ties is not without cost:

“The lower the overhead in terms of technical know-how or social exposure, the easier it is for individuals to use that medium to activate and maintain weak ties.”

Illich wrote of learning webs as a way of reconfiguring learning around learners goals rather than around curricular goals see  http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm.

A current conversation on moodle.org on learning webs chimes quite nicely with one we had a few months ago on CABWEB HELP when Jan Visser led a discussion event on " To school, or not to school: is that the question?" , particularly to this thread.

I was particularly struck by this example  http://www.shef.ac.uk/mirrors/tandem/

I don't know how it works out in practice but it seems to me to be a good example of Illich's learning webs, with its use of skill exchange and peer matching.