CPsquare education news

The community around the workshop

Two papers at the First International Conference on Communities and Technologies drew upon experiences in the Foundations Workshop:

• Adding Connectivity and Losing Context with ICT: Contrasting Learning Situations from a Community of Practice Perspective by Patricia Arnold and John D. Smith
• Babel in the international café: a respectful critique by Beverly Trayner

In addition to giving the papers, several workshop alums and friends did an all-day workshop on phase change in a community of practice on Friday, September 19th. We also took walks and ate together a lot:


Beverly Trayner, "Babel in the international café: a respectful critique" in Marleen Huysman, Etienne Wenger and Volker Wulf, Communities and Technologies; Proceedings of the first International Conference on Communities and Technologies; C&T 2003 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003) ISBN 1-4020-1611-5

Beverly Trayner
Escola Superior de Ciências Empresariais, Portugal
btrayner@esce.ips.pt

Abstract. This paper reflects on the case of participants with different first languages conversing in “The International Café” in an online workshop about Communities of Practice. It describes the context of the café within the workshop and an informal translation experiment designed to bring together community members with different first languages. In the light of this experiment the paper critically reflects on the effectiveness of translation for negotiating meaning in international community conversations. It discusses the value of cultivating global literacies where language is considered not as a technical issue requiring translation equivalence, but as something that shapes individual and collective worldviews, where the fine-tuning and exploration of situated meanings of people with different first languages is viewed as integral to the process of interacting, learning and sharing knowledge in an international community. The reflections highlight a connected issue of time: for participating in, facilitating and designing for such conversations. Finally, international conversations in the café are contextualised as part of a broader issue of clarifying the purpose and principles behind cultivating a truly international online community workshop. Four key issues arising from this reflective critique are tentatively offered as inter-connected design factors for international online community environments.

---

Patricia Arnold and John D. Smith, "Adding Connectivityi and Losing Context with ICT: Contrasting Learning Situations from a Community of Practice Perspective" in Marleen Huysman, Etienne Wenger and Volker Wulf, Communities and Technologies; Proceedings of the First International Conference on Communities and Technologies; C&T 2003 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003) ISBN 1-4020-1611-5

Patricia Arnold
University of the Bundeswehr Hamburg, Germany
patricia.arnold@unibw-hamburg.de

John D. Smith
Learning Alliances
John.Smith@LearningAlliances.net

The promise of information and communication technologies is that it increases connectivity. By providing a spectrum of technologies such as email, web conferencing, telephones, and chat, ICTs bring people who are geographically dispersed together in community. Such communities can provide a new context for learning; at the same time, the social, physical, and technical context of the community's members risks getting lost through computer-mediated communication. Design for online communities, especially design for learning in online environments, tries to find ways of re-inviting participants' contexts, as context has a great bearing on learning, in fact is inextricably linked to learning. In this paper we investigate the complex relationship of context, technologies and community design issues. We present three case studies of online learning communities and analyze the interplay of context and technology for each situation, using a community of practice perspective. Each case balances the demands of time, the need for context, and the demands of practice in a unique way. The insights gained can inform both educational design and design of community technologies.
Posted by smithjd at September 26, 2003 11:32 PM | TrackBack