Category: Community of Practice (CoP)

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course

I am planning to attend this fall’s Connectivism and Connective Knowledge online course, that runs from September 8 – November 29, 2008. With instructors George Siemens and Stephen Downes, it is sure to be an interesting and exciting experience that can be taken for credit through the University of Manitoba or free without the credit. Interested in joining over 1000 (at recent count) people in this MOOC (Massive Online Open Course), then you may want to do some background reading that George has gathered together.

In true online format, here are some of the course materials (over two months early!):

Course wiki ~ Connectivism Wiki
Course blog ~ Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Blog
Course email list ~ Connectivism Google Group
Different conversation aggregation ~ Pageflakes page

While I met George when he was in New York this spring, I have never met Stephen, so am looking forward to this learning experience. With the amount of preparation that has already been done, and the online materials and systems that have already been put into place for this course, I think I am already learning the best way to prepare for something like this.

With our networked world, I believe this may be part of the future of distance education.

LinkedIn Funding in Today’s NYTimes

There is an interesting article in today’s New York Times about LinkedIn, which seems to be making enough money to get $53 million in funding. They seem to have some plans for expanding professional services to firms, rather than following the Facebook / MySpace entertainment and purely social networks.

Having been convinced recently to spend more time using LinkedIn, I cannot say I have been able to leverage it to achieve anything yet. Can anybody share a success they have had due to using LinkedIn, so I can get some ideas how to maximize it?

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Networking and T&D’s Uncovering the Unconnected Employee

The May issue of T&D (Training and Development, the ASTD monthly magazine) had an interesting article on networking and the value of establishing and promoting business networking. While the article is not online, there is a related podcast for this).

The article by Anne Baber and Lynne Waymon focuses on the phrase “unconnected employees,” by which they mean “employees who lack the skills to build effective business relationships.” As I find business and academic networking a challenge, I thought at times they were writing this article about / for me!

They describe 8 ways that employees who do not network can hurt a business:

  1. They get off to a slow start as new hires
  2. They are less productive
  3. They don’t make it their business to recruit
  4. They don’t know how to make their expertise known so it can be used, and so they can advance in their careers
  5. They are less successful as managers
  6. They make poor decisions
  7. They aren’t creative and innovative
  8. They fail to bring back business intelligence from conferences

Wow, do I have a lot of work to do, especially having just returned from the ASTD conference last week!

While I am not sure how the authors created their list (there was a mention in the article about the literature, yet I would like to have seen something a bit more methodological so I can read more about this, especially from an evidence-based perspective), the list does in fact seem to make some sense to me. The authors speak briefly about each of these, though I hope they consider writing a follow-up with more concrete suggestions for how to address each of these.

To take a concrete first step in addressing these issues in my own professional practice, I revised my LinkedIn profile and am committing to try to leverage the system. Take a look at it; any suggestions are most appreciated!

View Jeffrey Keefer's profile on LinkedIn

 

CP2Tech01 Has Concluded

Our CP2Tech01 workshop has ended. It was one of the fastest five week experiences I can recall. I am certainly a bit sad to have such an active few weeks of posting and reading and searching come to an end somewhat abruptly (and now I am forced to further it all on my own), so thought I would reflect a little on the experience.

  • I struggled to keep up. Reading, posting, new tools, conference calls, and lots of wonderful new people, many of whom I only started to know on a very high and almost surface level. With all that said, I wish there would have been some way that more of a sense of community and (dare I say?) friendship begin to develop? Yes, it takes time, but with so many interesting and generous and wonderful people out there in the area of communities of practice, I think I will need to make more of an effort to remain in touch with some of these fine people. This has always been a struggle for me (out of sight, out of mind), but here is a new opportunity to work toward improvement.
  • I learned that I am not alone in not understanding or processing things at times. When I feel overwhelmed, perhaps (as I learned) others feel the same way but just do not say it as loudly. While this is not misery loves company, it is nice to hear that I am not as alone as being overwhelmed makes me feel at times.
  • I also learned that I do not have to master every new Web 2.0 tool out there. We looked at lots of programs and technologies out there, and while some people gravitated to some and others to others, I do not need to know everything about all of them to use one or two that I did not use before. Look at the buffet, and choose what works best (rather than stuffing on everything!).
  • Finally, I learned how generous people (colleagues) can be when we are sharing toward a common purpose. The amount of time John Smith and Bronwyn Stuckey and Nancy White and Sus Nyrop and Caren Levine and LaDonna Coy and Shirley Williams and Nick Noakes and Sylvia Currie and Steve Gance and Barbara Dieu and numerous others helped me to understand my own learning, communities of practice, technology stewardship, and working collaboratively on such important areas between scholarship and practice. I appreciate all of them making me feel welcome and part of the conversation.

Always looking for the practical application, I am wondering where all our work will lead us all?

WordPress Upgrade and into a Vortex

I upgraded my blog to the most current version of WordPress at the beginning of this week, primarily because I was inspired to approach technology with a new emphasis after being inspired by Nancy White’s facilitation skills in the Connected Future (CP2tech01) workshop that is now in its fourth week.

While the upgrade went well, what I did not expect was to get slammed at work and with teaching and preparing for a conference and academic stuff, etc., so that I would need to take a few days off from following my colleagues’ posts, Tweets, and discussions.

As I will not have Internet access over the long weekend, I will instead catch up with everything tonight. Here comes my responses and thoughts!