John Smith
Biography
John Smith, principal, Learning Alliances, Community
steward, CPsquare.
John is a technologist, developer and coach for communities
of practice. He is the community steward for CPsquare, an international,
multi-lingual community of practice on communities of practice that brings researchers, students, practitioners, technologists and facilitators from many different
social and economic sectors to explore learning from a community of practice
perspective. In collaboration with Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and Kim Rowe, he
is carrying out a study of technologies for communities of practice that
involves novel frames for thinking about social technologies, presents a dozen
case studies of how communities actually use technologies, and describes today’s
landscape of technologies from a community perspective. He has organized dozens
of learning events that combine different technologies and draw people from
different cultural settings to explore issues around community and learning. He
speaks and writes on topics related to communities of practice, including the
design and configuration of technology for communities, community self-visualization,
the use of story-telling and improv techniques in learning, community
self-assessment, and community development. He worked in higher education as a
planner, institutional researcher, administrator and technologist for many
years.
Languages: English and Spanish
Position Paper
Looking at social technologies from the perspective of
active communities is rather different than looking at them from a marketplace
perspective, or the perspective of a vendor. Communities typically straddle
multiple technologies, characteristically carrying out certain activities on
one platform and switching or migrating to another platform for other
activities over time. Their reliance on any one technology (or mix of
technologies) for thinking and being together changes over time, not only in
response to the availability of new technologies on the landscape, but as a
result of evolving membership, the evolution of individual and group
competence, and the evolution of the community’s domain itself.
There is a fundamentally improvisational aspect to this
straddling and it turns out that an improvisational lens on how communities
self-organize and build on available technology platforms is useful and
unconventional. Sawyer (2001) positions conversational improvisation between a
social and psychological level, and that’s precisely this level at which new
learning occurs in a community of practice; it’s as if learning is a
conversation between these two levels. Our thinking about technologies has been
stuck on a psychological level, however. As we (Wenger, White, Smith, and Rowe)
look at actual communities of practice for our new technology study, we find
that they are simultaneously negotiating domain, practice, and community and
that each facet has implications for the mix of technologies that a community
uses to be together. We are finding new social roles in these communities and
new functions that need to be supported by technologies.
Just as a community of practice perspective on learning and
identity has implications for the use and therefore for the design of
technologies (Smith, 2004), an improvisational perspective has implications for
how communities are seen and cultivated. Community leadership in particular
requires new tools for visualizing the connections, practices, and knowledge of
a community. Most of the tools designed for community representation or
leadership assume a one-platform kind of life-style which is easier for a
designer to think about, but ultimately not helpful for community leaders. Without
new tools for visualizing communities, the sense of community identity that a
community leader works to support tends to be more static and backward-looking
than it need be.
The work reported here draws on several different kinds of
contact with communities of practice in very different cultural and
technological settings. As a technologist I have been a tool builder who
observes how new technology resources are appropriated by specific communities
over time. As an organizer of community meetings and learning events in various
communities, I have been careful to mix social and technical innovation without
allowing either one to dominate. As I have recently been systematically
gathering stories from the lives of many different communities who have
switched platforms, brought in new members, or seen their topic morph over
time, my thinking has changed from a technology-centric perspective to a
community-centric perspective.
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