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872806

Roadshow Diaries: May 29, 2000 (more)

The new economy is very active in France at the moment. There are many communities developing around the Internet. LinkUAll provides technology for the Net industry: calendars, address books, group messaging, file storage. The important thing is to provide a common platform for the tools so people have a unified set of collaboration tools that can be used separately or together – but organized in terms of activities. If you link people around activities, you can identify who has the right to see what.”

Many more gems like this here.

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Unfreezing the Corporate Mind

Unfreezing the Corporate Mind
John Seely Brown

If you want to change a corporation, you need to change the conversations happening within it. That was the recommendation from John Seely Brown in his address to Real Time participants.
In a good conversation, the whole is more important than the parts, Brown said. A focused conversation is a self-scaffolding structure that has a dynamic aspect to it . Therefore, if you change the conversations of a corporation, you change the corporation.
“All learning starts with focused conversations,” Brown says. “The only kind of learning you want to think about is collaborative learning. But how do you structure conversations to become self-scaffolding conversations?”

Expertise lies as much in the social mind as in the individual mind, Brown said. Knowledge is distributed across people and across artifacts. So the ability to interpret each other — read what is really happening — is tacit knowledge possessed by the group as a whole. That knowledge is brought together when groups share tasks over a substantial period of time, he said.

This of course is from the author of The Social Life of Information interesting to discover that he wrote that key article (see below) in the first issue of The Fast Company back in 1995.

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Community of practice

Communities of Practice – TCM.com DEAD LINK – Saturday, May 8, 2010

In 1997, the Ottawa Organizational Effectiveness Interest Group (OEIG) Book Study Group discussed the article, “The People are the Company” from Fast Company – Handbook of the Revolution. “Communities of Practice” are a central theme in the article. We’ve created a permanent reference for OEIG with the article and some other sources of related information for anyone interested in the subject.
Communities of Practice – References
Communities of Practice
Communities of Practice: Learning as a Social System
CoPs eGroup – Discussion forum – Drafts, working papers, links, and other goodies are shared here.
Collective learning and collective memory
What Should Collaborative Technology Be? A Perspective From Dewey and Situated Learning
Metro Insight: Softwork
Communispace.com
Participate.com
More Communities of Practices Links

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Community of Practice

Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier
by Etienne C. Wenger and William M. Snyder

Note: Tuesday, March 2, 2010 – That link does not work but I just downloaded this: http://www.stevens.edu/cce/NEW/PDFs/commprac.pdf

A new organizational form is emerging in companies that run on knowledge: the community of practice. And for this expanding universe of companies, communities of practice promise to radically galvanize knowledge sharing, learning, and change.

A community of practice is a group of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise. People in companies form them for a variety of reasons — to maintain connections with peers when the company reorganizes; to respond to external changes such as the rise of e-commerce; or to meet new challenges when the company changes strategy.

Regardless of the circumstances that give rise to communities of practice, their members inevitably share knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems. Over the past five years, the authors have seen communities of practice improve performance at companies as diverse as an international bank, a major car manufacturer, and a U.S. government agency. Communities of practice can drive strategy, generate new lines of business, solve problems, promote the spread of best practices, develop people’s skills, and help companies recruit and retain talent.
The paradox of such communities is that although they are self-organizing and thus resistant to supervision …”

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871795

Article – Communities of Practice
(Learning and work as social activities)

by David Stamps
associate editor of TRAINING Magazine.
Copyright © 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Learning is social. Training is irrelevant?

As the end of a century draws near, the air is sure to thicken with prophecies about the future, including the future of work. The “knowledge worker” will be a favorite topic of management soothsaying; so will “the learning organization.”

But for a clear vision of how learning should happen in a business setting, you need only talk to Dede Miller, a customer service representative for Xerox Corp. For two years she was treated to a tantalizing glimpse of the future. Today she finds herself wishing she could go back to it.

To know her story is to understand just how wide a gap still separates learning theory and common training practice – and how hard it will be to apply new approaches to workplace training, even those that make incontestable sense.

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870490

Internet addiction report

URL:s These are the ones that are most interesting in my opinion. More can be found by exploring the collections of links within these sites. These links are not in order of my preference. I drew the line at twenty links, since I think any sane person will find this is enough to read.

useful list of urls.

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866845

The Making of a Virtual Professor
Richard B. Kettner-Polley
Professor of Business Administration
International School of Information Management University

ABSTRACT

The role of the professor is changing dramatically. Lectures endure despite the fact that they were outmoded as soon as books became readily available to students. This is a case study in the transformation of one traditional professor into a virtual professor. On one level this is only one person’s story. On another level it is a sign of the times. Jorge Klor de Alva’s choice to leave one of the most prestigious universities in the country for the University of Phoenix is a signal event. Traditional academia will change, and it is the quiet transformation of traditional professors into virtual professors that tells the true story behind this revolution.

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