Friday, March 03, 2006

Technology: blogging memes

Nancy White refered to me in relation to Paul Currion's meme

So here’s my meme: what five resources - online or otherwise - would you point people to, if you wanted to give them an entry into your field of expertise?

Though I'd been tagged before, I did not realise I had to respond too till I saw the others responded, so that's why I'm a bit slow. Secondly. Oef. Your field of expertise.... I hope this is not going into my field of irrigation engineering as I lost hopelessly touch with irrigation. So let's take communities of pratice (for development). 5 resources.. (now I'm thinking back on the way I learned about communities of practice):

1. Participate in communities of practice and observe! Try to work in different roles, I'm still often thinking back on how I felt and experienced my community of practice when I was an ordinary member of a CoP for advisors in Western Africa. (officially this disqualified as a resource, but what do I care)

2. The basic theory in three offline books: Situated Learning, Communities of Practice and Cultivating communities of practice of which the later is a much more practical book.

3. Participate in the seven-weeks Online Foundations Workshop, there will be one in May and September, it takes you about 1-2 hours per day. In September we will organise a parallel workshop in Dutch. Though the name foundations might suggest that it's only for people who know little about CoPs, I find it is even more useful if you have experiences in/with communities of practice and have clear-cut questions.

4. Join com-prac, a yahoo discussion group, which is public and free and knowledge board which has a SIG on communities of practice. You can also add it to your aggregator.

5. Read blogs which talk about communities of practice. I don't have an overview of all people blogging on this topics but Nancy White provided a good entry point. And yes, we are awaiting the blogroll of CPsquare (a community of practice on communities of practice) to be coming soon.

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