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My journey through a landscape of practices

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(Activity 3.29)

“Learning can be viewed as a journey through landscapes of practice” (Wenger, 2010, in Blackmore, 2010, 185).

Ever since I read it, that phrase has been eating away at me – triggering connections all over the place…

It has given me a sense of dissatisfaction with the way I wrote my post about being part of communities of practice.

I have also made connections with an exercise we had to do in the first assignment for the course, plotting our individual trajectories, the journey that led us to start TU812.  At the time that had value in understanding the importance of our history to our approach to the course.  I wrote my post called Legacy as a result of that exercise.

Finally I was reminded of the way I pictured the C-ball in Reflection on juggling as a sack full of concepts, methods and techniques and my responsibility to keep renewing the contents of that sack.

Making the connection between a journey and the sack made me start thinking…as I have taken my journey through landscapes of practice, what have I learned – in other words what concepts, methods and techniques have I gathered to fill my sack.  This has made me think very differently about my connections with communities of practice.

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CoP out?

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(Activity 3.22, 3.23, 3,24)

It felt clever giving this title to a post about Communities of Practice (CoP).  However, as I am not sure where I am going to go with the post I don’t really know whether it is relevant or not!

I have covered a little bit of ‘community of practice’ theory before – when  I studied Managing Knowledge.  In that field they were seen as a refreshing change to an information management approach as they focused more on human interaction.

Then there is my more recent experience – I think the phrase ‘community of practice’ is getting over-used and applied to entities that don’t really fulfill the essence of what Wenger describes – he and Lave coined the term to describe something very particular

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. [source E Wenger, http://www.ewenger.com/theory/ , accessed 27 February 2011]

but it seems to get used to refer to any type of group network, especially when internet based social networking platforms are used.

Seems a pity that we participate in things we think of as ‘communities of practice’ but in reality they are not CoP and therefore we may overlook the opportunity to take part in a ‘real’ one.

Perhaps I need to explore my experiences some more….

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Natural resource management, health and wellbeing: drawing parallels

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Woodhill (2002) describes the development of natural resource management over time as:

– a technocentric era – where it was seen as a “technical problem requiring technical solutions” (page 69) and primarily the responsibility of government

– a localist era – focussed on community participation and local level change.

However, his work challenges this localist perspective and says it needs to be complemented by “broader scale institutional change” (page 70).  He says that NRM is entering an institutional era.

He advocates that a paradigm of social learning is central  to “overcoming such institutional constraints and engaging with the deeper causes of the ecological unsustainability of modern society” (page 70).

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Self-organisation

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I have been pondering the concept of self-organisation and feel the need to pull the threads together.

I have mentioned the term in posts before but never felt I have a real grip on it.  Then the other day, I was at a workshop to do with community empowerment which not-surprisingly discussed the notion of the “Big Society”.  One of my voluntary and community sector colleagues spoke and referred to a handout he had written on “Kauffman’s essential preconditions for self-organisation”.  He had my attention immediately…

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Links between paradigm of social learning and juggling

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Woodhill  (2002) identifies three elements for facilitating the development of social learning.  He points out that these are the three defining features of a paradigm for social learning.

– A paradigm is defined by its philosophical assumptions – a paradigm for social learning includes philosophical reflection.

– A paradigm is defined by its methodological approaches – a paradigm for social learning includes methodological pluralism.

– A paradigm is defined by its institutionalised practices – a paradigm for social learning needs institutional design.

As I read Woodhill’s commentary on what he experiences in the here and now and what he advocates is needed for a social learning paradigm, I saw a number of parallels with what we learned through the juggler isophor in part 2.

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What does ‘critical’ mean?

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I have been reading about critical social learning systems and it has set me thinking – what is the difference between social learning and critical social learning.  Or perhaps more specifically, what did Bawden and his colleagues seek to emphasise and draw attention to when they chose to use the prefix the phrase with the word critical?

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Identify

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Just a short quick note about the word ‘identify’ or maybe I mean the practice of identification.  I want to put it here as it is an understanding I have gained from the stream of posts on the course forum, and, well, I just don’t want to lose it.

In a world of objects, identify seems to be about pointing out, labelling and naming.  It assumes tangible-ness.

So how does the practice of identification work with systems?

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My experience of appreciating the NHS and public health reforms

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(Activity 3.12)

As Blackmore (2010, 20) explains in an editor’s note, Vickers did not represent his idea of an appreciative system in a diagram or model.  However, Checkland and Caser did produce a model based on their understandings of Vickers work in 1986.  This is reproduced in Blackmore (2010) on page 21.

I struggled with this diagram at first – mainly because of its title “Diagram of Vickers’ appreciative systems model”.  After posting about this to the course forum, I was helped by one of the tutors (Jitse) who said that it may be better to think of the diagram as a “conceptual representation of the process of appreciation”.  I found this much more helpful as a trigger to understanding my own experience.  I am still not sure about the diagram itself but I can now use it as a springboard for reflecting on a recent experience  of appreciation.

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