View of landscape after

I've honed my twittering skills, realising what twitter tags are. That's practical.

The learning is through reflection on what I do in my roles as Associate Lecturer or research student, arriving from earlier practices in teaching and computing.

The workshop on Landscapes of Practice has drawn my attention to the different practices of the different people on IT projects, the different practices in public and in private sector. They exist, but they're not always explicit. Boundaries aren't always visible, and you wonder what's stopping you, but you can't see what's stopping you.

There're boundaries between research students and supervisors. My supervisor was at the Landscape of workshop, where his group did a brilliant sketch on the different landscapes of teachers, parents and school children. At one point, as parent, he turned to his acting teenage daughter and said, "I'm always available." She exploded with complaints about him being available at 9.30 on a Sunday morning when she was recovering from a night out till after midnight. The funny thing is, that he's used that line to me, about him and fellow supervisor: "We're always available, at least electronically." There's an equally possible sketch about the different landscapes of research students and supervisors, the sort of thing that PhD comic is always getting at. As the PhD student participates at the periphery of the academic researcher's landscape, how does the supervisor enable the student to identify, and move centre of the landscape. That is the supervisor's job, isn't it?

Whose job is it to help the different people in a public sector IT project to cross the boundaries? Is crossing the boundaries how people transfer knowledge?

Landscape of Practices

One of the participants has set up an archive of the twitters here from the Landscape of Practices workshop.

There were two strands to work on: keepers of themes, and groups to discuss a particular problem, such as interprofessional communication, or parent-teacher-student boundaries. The OU Practice Based Learning Centre has a blog on the four keepers here and on ten working groups here.

Landscapes of practice workshop

About fifty people here. My eeePC is playing up - won't recognise my password sometimes. People are twittering. See the tag #oulop09. e.g.

#oulop09 Etienne Wenger talking about 'identity as curriculum'

We've had to explain twittering to some people who don't yet practise that.

Feel there is fundamental misunderstanding in the room ca. wikis, blogs & twitter - questions being asked are irrelevant to me! #oulop09
kind of just get frustrated when folk dont understand that practices are diff in web 2.0 space - thats kind of the point #oulop09

We have a blog (private) at Wordpress, and we're creating a wiki. Did you know that 'wiki' comes from a Hawaiian word meaning fast?

The morning seems a bit disorganised. We don't know quite what we're doing. This video's Etienne telling us what the first activity is supposed to be.

Landscapes of practice

I am attending a workshop tomorrow on Landscapes of Practice. It's being led by Etienne Wenger, he who wrote on Communities of Practice, and Legitimate Peripheral Participation. It's mentioned on the OU Platform, which warns me, to bring technical equipment. I'm packing eeePC, FlipVideo, digital recorder and camera. I've done my homework: mapped my professional landscape, and made notes on landscapes, professional practitioners and explaining my job to others.

What's it got to do with my research? I came on Etienne Wenger's work through reading the literature on engagement, which lead me to literature on collaboration, and hence to communities of practice. Of all the uses of the word 'engagement' I like Wenger's best - it means the way I understand engagement between different groups of people to mean.

Also, I think my research is about different practices of different groups, and how they overcome challenges of communicating between each other. To begin with there is the public sector meeting the private sector world of consultants, and perhaps of IT contractors. Each world brings its own culture, values and language. Then there are the professional groups that meet: IT professionals, whether programmers, analysts, testers or IT project managers with/ without PRINCE experience, and management professionals, and business professionals, whether librarians, social carers, teachers, policemen, employment advisors, immigration officials - all the businesses that you find in the public sector.

So this workshop must be worth my time out on Friday and Saturday.

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WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
J. Lave, E. Wenger. Situated learning : legitimate peripheral participation /