Indiana University is  hosting this one!

2006 International Conference for the Learning Sciences
http://www.isls.org/icls2006
June 27 - July 1 2006
Indiana University, Bloomington IN

The official deadline for proposals has been extended to November 15, 2005.  This is a great opportunity for those working in research and development in the learning sciences to join world renowned experts and to 'talk turkey' in this field. Some significant effort has been made to make this an International conference and maybe your work can contribute to that. If you want to contact me for further details please don't hesitate.

Blackboard and WebCT Announce Agreement to Merge

Woohoo - How cool is this?

Learning TRENDS by Elliott Masie - Oct 12, 2005.
Updates on Learning, Business & Technology. 
http://www.masie.com - The MASIE Center.    
 
WebQuests: An Idea from Schools for Corporate Learning
  
WebQuests - a simple and powerful learning method that has become quite  popular in elementary and secondary schools that can be leveraged and  adopted for corporate learning.

You can enjoy the read yourself on the Masie Center site.

Today I watched a program on the possibility (grown beyond possibility) of the Avian Flu pandemic. Australia is well in the path of the bird flu and stocks of Tamiflu are flying off shelves here. At the same time I received and email to tell me that the designers of World of WarCraft were wrestling with an infectious disease that had been introduced into the game. Mmmm...does that make the people who introduced the disease bioterroists? How real do people want these games to be? It is interesting to reflect that while we are worried about a virus mutating and crossing species, we do have situations where a virus can cross worlds - virtual to lifeworld and back again. The affect of the virus in the gaming world does impact on the health of its players. Maybe we could almost consider such games as models for disease processes if gamers were content to take the virtual reality to extreme and their characters stay dead, but where's the fun in that :-(

A birthday seems an appropriate time to make a new start on this whole blogging/journaling thing. While this blog sat unattended for several weeks/months I was reflecting on how poorly I managed to do the same thing as a teenager. I was so intermittent with my teenage diary entries. I bought new diaries every year and I really wanted to record idea and activities, so the will was there. What kind of habits of mind have I still not acquired that I have done the same things here? Maybe blogging is not for everyone? Maybe I don't lead an interesting enough life to make it part of the virtual world? Maybe   But here I go again opening the diary and making my best effort (fingers crossed and advice welcomed).

I was challenged in another forum to explain how the groups I have cased studied in my doctoral research could be considered CoPs. It came down to two things. To me the most practical definition of a CoP is: ‘Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis’ (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002 p. 29).Beyond that it is really meaningful to test whether you can define the domain, community and practice of the group. Wenger (199 these are the three key components of the CoP. If you can readily state each of these then I think the group can be deemed a CoP.  It often galls me when people define a classroom, consisting of a teacher and 30 students  as a CoPs. If you asked yourself what the shared practice is then you see that this might be a community but it is not a CoP. Many might say that learning is the practice, but think about that for a moment, isn’t learning part of every CoP?

Interesting to note that of the 12 Internet-mediated Communities of Practice, that I have case studied in my research, one has closed, one has closed its doors to the public, another has changed management and still another appears from the public side to have grown dormant. Seems you have to be very quick in this game to be able to case study living communities. As Wenger et al, (2002) suggest there may be a natural development to CoPs, that includes an end or death, but from my research it appears to have less to do with the success or otherwise of the community but changes in priority for the funding bodies, sponsors and the core group (leaders).

Etienne Wenger (father of the concept community of practice) is in Australia over the next two weeks for various conferences.  Educators may be particularly interested in a seminar that he is presenting July 18th for education.au at the Sydney Hilton. 2005 education.au National Seminars - Transforming Learning through ICT: Building Thriving Learning Communities. This could be a really good networking opportunity for those of us working in educational CoP development (all going well I hope to be there). We also have a Friends of CPSquare dinner with Etienne Wed 13^th  July in Sydney. Anyone interested in joining us should email me for details.

 

I am working to promote a strong Communities of Practice strand at next year's AERA Conference in San Francisco in April 2006. I hope to organize a pre-conference meeting on the Monday before the start of the conference proper and to map out a community journey through the conference, acknowledging and promoting relevant papers The deadline for proposals is August 1st, less than one month away now. People in the research community studying or working in design research in CoPs might contact me to find out more about this effort and/or to have their proposals become part of our promotion of CoP research.( bstuckey@intraceptives.com.au )

Another project on the agenda this week has been the conference submission system for the 2006 International Conference of the Learning Sciences. We are using a tool developed by Precision Conference Solutions and it has been very interesting; setting a priority of keywords that allow the system to allocate papers to appropriately experienced reviewers. It is interesting because learning sciences cover so many disciplines, settings research methodologies, instruments and technologies. It is certainly no mean feat to boil that down to sets of keywords that even approximate the field. Still working on it...