There's a dance between high standards and variance at the heart of every practice, and putting on the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop is no exception. Workshop particiapnts bring high standards, but the variance in backgrounds, work settings and perspectives are always a delightful stretch for all of us. The workshop guests and mentors do the same thing. It's as if "high standards" is getting redefined and renegotiated every time we run the workshop. When we've done a re-design or experiment all of these questions about what's "the standard" and what's a variant come tumbling out.
On the occasion of an offering of the workshop in Dutch, Beverly Trayner looked at a bunch of issues related to this subject a couple years ago in “Babel in the international café”, In Communities and Technologies, Huysman, M. Wenger, E. Wulf, V. (eds) Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (2004). A lot of those questions are still open.
Currently, there's a team of people who are working on presenting the Foundations of communities of practice workshop in German. It's a huge project underntaken by CPsquare members Marco Bettoni, Christina Merl, Franziska Borter, Patricia Arnold, and Ueli Scheuermeier. There are many questions ranging from technical vocabulary and jargon about communities of practice that have grown up in English all the way to metaphors that serve us well in English even when they are a bit of a stretch ("front porch" for a semi-public social space doesn't really make much sense in the UK, for example). Anyway, the group is hard at work translating and inventing. They're aiming to offer the German workshop in tandem with the English version starting April 29th, 2007.
Posted by smithjd at November 21, 2006 12:45 AM | TrackBack