HEA, Technology to enhance professional development, Birmingham, 14 May 2009

the use of next generation technologies to build sustainable communities of practice

Next generation technologies to build sustainable communities of practice

• Emerge

• Next generation technologies

• Benefits realisation

• Sustainable communities of practice– Sustainability– Community, networks or something else?– Practice(s), activity, actors

The Emerge Project used Web2.0 technologies with a user-centred, research-led approach based

on Appreciative Inquiry, which was explicitly intended to be productive of positive change.

Based on real individuals, not abstractions or learner profiles or models but actual individual

people, who kick back, re-interpret, resist, subvert, play and work in many ways, often unexpected

It is important to recognise that the community itself is multi-modal, and not conflate “community”

with any one mode, e.g. the “platform”

A model of software development

adapted to community development

transformative, investigative approach

Where we started

Professional Standards Frameworks

• HEA• ALT• SEDA• PCTHE• CMLP• PRINCE2• Chartered Institutes• Societies: BCS

European and Global mobility

GATSFree and/or Fair Trade?Movement of capital and people

Protected/shaped markets/exchanges in education?

Members join closed community

Groups form around shared interests

User engagement

Aggregation of communication

Benefits realisation

Synthesis and capacity building

Passing on, sustaining

Appreciative Inquiry

Real change starts with underlying models

Finance

Implementation

Systems

Profiles

Disciplines

Sectors

Roles

Standards

Locations

Institutions Open?

Here be dragons

Maps can solidify pre-formed conceptions

Or clarify vision

Activities• London Launch, April 07

• Online Activity Days, June 07

• Manchester Community Consolidation, July 07

• Nottingham Project Development (Dragon’s Den), Sept 07

• York Programme Launch, Jan 08

• Digital Communities & Digital Identities, April 2008

• Exploring User 2.0: the shape of future users, June 08

• Live at Leeds, ALT-C Sept 08

• Altered States, Nov 08

• Benefits Realisation events

• Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar internet radio shows

• Second Life conference socials

supported by a Moodle and Elluminate…

Pro-social networks around programmes (curricular lead bodies)

• Emergent, semi-formal and pre-formal networks

– alongside the more formal networks of funding bodies, projects, institutions, constituted associations, and individuals

• Semi-formal networks do not have explicitly declared intentions

– do exhibit tacit rationales (F-ALT?), suppliers to Becta, etc

• Pre-formal networks

– e.g. special interest groups, the blogosphere, or more narrowly the “Eddies” or annual Edublog Awards, UnLtdWorld, critical friends network, JISC evaluators, etc

• Constituted associations

– are, or are becoming, institutionalised, e.g.: ALT, UCISA, AUDE, disciplinary and professional bodies, Subject Centres, etc, etc

• Individuals are important actors in all these networks, not only projects, institutions or, constituted associations

Self-selected (autonomous, self-directed) individuals build networks to meet broader social objectives beyond the ‘daily-me’ ...Networked individuals can move across, undermine, and transgress boundaries of existing institutions. This provides the basis for pro-social networks: neither personal nor institutional.

These self-selected, internet enabled, networked individuals often break from existing organisational or institutional networks that are themselves being transformed in Internet space... The ability that the Internet affords individuals to network beyond institutional arenas reinforces communicative power.(Dutton 2008, 5th Estate, 5-6 my paraphrase)

A Connected Commons

Acting in British constitutional history

Radical, user-centred, Freirian approach to

community formation

activities authentic to the participants’ cultural context

… participants in the proto-projects, projects and the community of practice are themselves a user group working in a user centred environment, modelling the user engagement development cycle and applying asset-based community development processes

It is an actor network, not a software platform or an institution– There is a question about human/non-human agency

• Corporate citizenship, even machine intelligence

The Future of Emerge

• User-centred social learning media hub where networks of networks of individuals: the human internet, a connected commons, is made visible to participants and the wider community

• Amplifying outputs, connections, impact – presence – of people

interested in emerging technologies for, e.g.:o Learning & teachingo Research with … and intoo Community / User / Institution engagemento Administration (MIAP, LLL Records, etc)o Blended, pervaded, physical, virtual and mobile learning

spaceso “Green” ICT

• Modeling and supporting effective use of emerging technologies

Developing projects in a context where there is

awareness of the wider activity in a field and an

understanding of the alignments and gaps in that field

will lead to better projects being developed.

By using community development processes and social

networking in the field the general quality of educational

(learning) technology development projects may be

improved, bringing benefits not just to the JISC but more

widely to all agencies and stakeholders.

Working hypotheses

Emerging technologydigital storytelling

• Adopted, adapted and implemented parts of the ITILv3 ‘best practice’ guidelines as a framework– IT Infrastructure Library ((www.itil-officialsite.com)

• Used a mix of self-hosted core services integrated (mashed up) with external services

• Making the most of Web2.0 technologies to deliver a coherent set of ‘services’ to the community

1. To act as a conduit and pathway for the range of locations inhabited by participants

2. To channel and enhance the reach of content from existing community members, whether working in single or multiple locations

3. To scaffold the online practice, work and communication of the community

4. To organise, store and aggregate project documentation of all sorts

5. To host support materials created by project staff and community members

Platform spec

Platform

• pro-active IT Service Management (ITSM) methodology for the design, development and deployment of services using Web2.0 technologies to create online social spaces

Service portfolio

Programme systems

• Audio mark-up for feedback & comment

• Personal portfolios

• Google apps

• WordPress

• Mobile services

• Pervasive computing

• Location aware services

User management

• JISC SSBR systems are reliant on network resilience and human agency

• Security:– commercial hosting– cloud computing– distributed back-ups– user-owned content– user maintained profiles (self-validated), componentised– service-oriented architecture

• Limited credentialisation required– Note, this is the core business of universities

• Framework of uri persistence

http://reports.jiscemerge.org.uk

Emerge ReportsBuilt on Joomla

Events NetworkBuilt on Elgg 0.9

http://tinyurl.com/ngtip09-network

2 New Services… model practice, release often…

and… (here)

Benefits realisation

• Benefits Realisation (BR) activities sought to ensure that the outputs and outcomes of the Users and Innovations (U&I) projects went beyond those originally funded and reached the wider community.

BR Activity

• Synthesises results

• Builds capacity

• Increases uptakeo Beyond the scope of the original

project/programme

For individuals and projects• professional development/capacity building

– Extrapolated to the institution/department

• Stimulated & facilitated collaboration

• Improved project planning and management

• Awareness of the relevance of projects in a wider context

Benefits an effective support system

• Visibility, connectivity and discovery? • Or… obscurity, isolation and at times wandering lost.

• The form and patterns of interaction, which develop across a community over time, cannot be predetermined

• The use of participatory social media is multi-modal • The articulation between people and software is not just a

question of interface design (though that is crucial)• The effective use of Web2.0 depends essentially on

human networks.

Benefits unevenly distributed

Conditions for success

• Bounded openness• Enough difference• Semi-stability• Adaptable model• Shared repertoire • Structured freedom• Multimodal identity• Serious fun

• Multiple• Contextualised• Relative

There had to be affective advantage to affiliation. Of course there were also those who though that if it wasn't hurting, it wasn't working.

Innovation needed…

• Learning teaching and assessment• Research and development• Business and community engagement• Learning resources• eAdmin• Institutional ICT services• Physical estates and learning spaces• Mobile, location aware and pervasive computing• Green ICT

Learning, Teaching and Assessment

• Assessment• Course Management• e-Learning• e-Portfolios• Learner Experience• Learning & Teaching Practice• Lifelong Learning• Personalisation• Plagiarism• Staff and Education Development

The Physical Estate & Learning Spaces• Learning Environments

Mobile, Location Aware and Pervasive Computing• Mobile Learning

Research and Development• Data & Text Mining

• Research & Innovation

• Business and Community Engagement

• Business Analysis

• System/Process Mapping

• Web3?

e-Admin• Access & Identity

• Admissions

• Progression & transfer

• Lifelong learning records

Learning resources

• Data Hosting

• Data Services & Collections

• Digital Libraries

• Digital Preservation & Curation

• Digitisation: Image, Audio & Video

• Repositories

• Resource Discovery

Green ICT

• Low carbon power sources

• Demand reduction (e.g. wake on LAN)

• Energy capture and reuse (building design)

• Efficiencies (Shared services)

• Recycling

• User behaviours

• Reduced travel

What is:Sustainable community practice?

• Sustainable

• Community

• Practice

Sustainable community practice

For institutions• to what extent are they comfortable with ceding certain

amounts of control to individuals? • to what extent are they, as established communities,

willing to cede control to new communities?

For individuals• to what extent do they subordinate their autonomy and

self-direction to any community? • And, then, how much do they subordinate and to which?

• There was a perception that Emerge made more demands on participants than had previous JISC support projects

• Some participants commented that Emerge activities were demanding of time and may have detracted from supported project work.

• The community-based support did make demands on people’s time.

– But was it the actual time demands, or

– Did the nature of user-centred, community-based and reflective activities magnify the appearance of time demand

• There is a clear need to support emergent semi-formal and pre-formal networks to reach maturity,

– while recognising that clusters of individuals, as often as not, will start to cohere and then for any number of reasons abandon the effort.

• Only a few semi-formal networks will attain the pre-formal stage

– Few of these will cohere and formally constitute themselves

• The process of emergence is valuable and at each stage may produce useful outputs.

Educational R&D

• Outputs or outcomes?• Producing artefacts or building capacity?• Quantitative or qualitative measures?• Easy answers or the deep complexity of

institutional change?

Through the U&I Programme a real effort has been made to transform practice based on the needs of

individual users working in institutions

• Thank youThank you

George RobertsProject Directorgroberts@brookes.ac.uk

http://jiscemerge.org.uk

Josie FraserSteve WarburtonPaul BaileyEmma AndersonMarion SamlerRhona SharpeJoe RosaChris FowlerIsobel FalconerNik BessisMitul ShuklaGraham AttwellBrian KellyGlenaffric

and all the jiscemerge people, projects, partners, steering groups and teams