Paranoia and the public blog
The Chronicle forums have a somewhat popular thread in the job hunt category in which someone asked whether search committee members read candidate's blogs or check their records on RateMyProfessor. I'm not generally paranoid about my online persona - as evidenced by the "me on x" links in the navigation - but I sense a higher level of paranoia among academic job seekers.
When I think about what about my blog sends the wrong or an undesirable message, I tend to focus on how the Kiwi WordPress theme I use doesn't actually work. I've made some adjustments to the theme, but I haven't spent hours making sure the "Recent posts" section on a blog entry page is providing some useful set of links. Yes, I have the technical skills to fix that. No, I don't think doing so is worth my time. A mistaken calculation? Time will tell. Maybe when I'm more explicitly on the job market making my blog work perfectly will be a higher priority for me. I hope that the rest of my blog demonstrates that I care about things such as civil rights, gadgets, collaboration, sustainability, and travel (not necessarily in that order). I do care about those things, and I write about them occasionally.
I expect to see an increase in the pace at which I blog, and I wouldn't be surprised if I start to blog more about my dissertation than I have to this point. It's tough to decide how much of the proverbial sausage-making to describe here. I don't want my blog to dangerously oversimplify the process of dissertation topic-selecting and eventual research, but I'm also pretty sure search committees don't need to know every time I doubt myself or my research. I'm human, and that much is clear from my work - whether on my blog, in the classroom, or in peer-reviewed publications and conferences.
Happy Halloween!
Update: I removed the "Other Recent Posts" part from the single post view. Apparently blogging about my irritations with the Kiwi theme gets me to edit it.
Creative Commons licensing gets me on the short list
I got an email today from Schmap!! letting me know one of my pictures on Flickr had been short-listed for inclusion in the next Schmap guide to Philadelphia. All my pictures on Flickr are licensed under a Creative Commons license - specifically Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike.
What I find most exciting about this particular picture-event is that the picture they may use is one I snapped with my Blackberry while Jude and I were leaving the Mutter Museum to go get our first cheesesteaks of the trip. I find it fitting that I was in Philadelphia for an iSchool doctoral student conference, toured a collection we study briefly in SI's required curriculum, was using a mobile device, had chosen a copyleft license, and now may have contributed to a city guide (resources I love).
Learning Sciences should be about more than learning science!
My research group (Stephanie Teasley, Eric Cook, and Jude Yew) and I are proposing a workshop for the International Conference for the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2008). We're hoping to get a group of people together to discuss learning as it occurs outside classrooms and other formal and semi-formal instruction environments. I've been frustrated with learning sciences events and publications in the past because they seem to focus too narrowly on classroom learning - especially middle school science and math classrooms. Thinking of learning, rather than instruction, seems an important distinction, and the learning sciences community ought to stake a broader claim. Not only are we studying learning outside the laboratory, we're studying it outside contexts explicitly established for learning.
For example, I consider myself a learning scientist; I elect this moniker because I'm interested in how adults learn in their professional environments.
- How do civil engineers learn to design with a new building technology?
- How to doctoral students learn the lay of the land in their new schools?
- How do communities capture and represent the knowledge that resides in them?
- What does the way organizations use wikis tell us about what knowledge they value?
These questions and more ought to be part of the Learning Sciences even though I didn't mention minors, teachers, curriculum, or standards once. Hopefully our workshop will get accepted, and it will become a welcome respite and energized conversation for others frustrated by the science classroom focus of today's learning sciences.
Transformation of practices
Here's some text from a recent proposal draft (I'll add citations later). I'm still editing the document from which these are excerpts, but the people have spoken, and they asked for drafts. So here you go. This is what I'm working on now.
Much of the research on practice focuses on how it may be transfered from one firm to another, from one
person to another, or from one group within an organization to another part of the same organization.
This study builds on those literatures, but asks a different question - how do networked practices change when
one or more parts of the network change? Instead of exploring a sender-receiver model of transfer of practice,
this study explores scenarios in which the source and target of a new practice are the same. Instead of focusing
on practice within a single community of practice (CoP), this study explores how multiple, interacting CoPs
influence one another. To refer to the set of changes that occur in the network, I use the term transformation
of practices. The following describes relevant terms and literature and proposes a study designed to produce
data necessary to describe the processes involved in transformation of practices. The plural of ”practices” is
necessary here; that I explore the relationships among communities of practice and their impact on one another
sets this study apart. The goals of the study are to describe the network of actors in such a way that enables us to understand the
practices in which those actors engage and how those practices relate.
The transformation of practice seems like a learning and coordination problem. First, someone must develop a
new material or method - broadly a new technology - that is a candidate for adoption by the network. Then, the
technology must be successfully adopted by a number of communities within the network. This sounds much
like Rogers’ diffusion of innovation work, but there still he described the uptake of innovations by people
engaged in the same kind of work. Here, the problem is a little different in that many communities are pursuing
a common goal, a technology with the potential to change how that goal is achieved is introduced, and each
of those already distinct practices must adjust to account for the new technology. This proposal describes a
study that focuses on a case of a transformative technology - engineered cementitious composite (ECC) - and
the resulting transformation of practices within the civil infrastructure building network.
Notes:
I want to be able to talk about something like a network of practice (NoP). Brown and Duguid characterize
NoPs as members sharing a common practice but not needing to coordinate their work. I’d rather think of
an NoP as members needed to coordinate work but whose practices are not the same. The members have a
common goal (e.g. build a bridge) but none of them do the same thing (e.g. design bridge vs. pour concrete).
This kind of activity seems more networked to me than Brown and Duguid’s characterization. However, I don’t
want to use NoP if a big name already did and means something different from what I mean. What else could
I call it? I’m thinking of practice at a higher level of granularity, maybe? Maybe I mean ”system” and not
”network”?
Back in TV Land – Big Break for Hem?
I'm sure none of you who know me are surprised to find that the Major League Baseball playoffs have brought me back to TV land. What may surprise you is that my favorite part of re-entry is a Liberty Mutual Insurance ad - watch it here. Hem is one of my favorite bands. I love their music, their vibe, the feel of their shows. They supplied the music for that ad, and it's my favorite ad of the playoffs. If you haven't checked out Hem, please do. You can download mp3's from their website.
Turns out I'm not alone in liking the ad or in liking Hem. Scrivener likes Hem and appreciates the ad too. Let's hope that the ad, and maybe Mandy Moore liking "All That I'm Good For" give Hem the boost they deserve. Go buy their music!
I've seen Hem twice - once at Schuba's during a blizzard and again at the Ark on a perfectly nice evening. I've introduced a number of friends to their music, and I remained indebted to Elizabeth for introducing me in the first place. Sometimes I try to decide which song is my favorite, but I can never choose just one. Rabbit Songs wins for best Hem album though.
Update: The song in the commercial is "The Part Where You Let Go" written by Dan Messe. Dan wrote the wonderful "Half Acre" as well, but that's not the song in the commercial. There you go, emailers, the answer. Enjoy!
Phenomenologist = me?
I had an interesting meeting with Gina Venolia this morning during which she used the term "phenomenologist." I haven't heard that term in a while, but it was a welcome utterance for sure. Gina and I were talking about knowledge - how it is used in teams, how it moves among people, how it gets captured and embellished in boundary objects. I was somewhat surprised to have an 80 minute conversation with a Microsoft Researcher and not have the topic of software developer (as a researcher's objective, not as an area of study) come up. I have tremendous respect for much of the work in which Microsoft Research people I know engage, but I've always read it as having an eye to what Microsoft might develop for sale next. Not in a bad way, just in a way that's very different from the product agnostic approach of academic research. Gina seemed welcoming of my phenomenologist tendencies (to study phenomenon with an eye to describing them) and unphased by my explanation that I no longer spend much energy thinking about systems I could build. The idea that I wouldn't have to spend all my energy thinking about how to build a technical system using the knowledge I learned studying a phenomenon makes me more excited about doing just that. Funny how reverse psychology (or something like it) works, eh?
Gina's work with and about software development teams and their mental models of code and my work with vaccine developers and civil engineers had a number of remarkable similarities. We both had stories to share about the development and use of boundary objects and how they require embellishment by a human in order to be useful. We both focused on the knowledge activities in these domains - those activities where knowledge is used, shared, clarified, developed, transformed.
Those 80 minutes were another welcome occasion for me to talk about my work with someone outside my lab, and that activity always serves to help me refocus and refuel. It's easy to forget why something is interesting or significant when one is in the thick of it, but such meetings provide opportunities to talk about the forest through the trees. Sigh. Lovely.
From May – a found post (networks, communities, practice)
Here’s a little blog post from a couple months ago that hadn’t made it off my laptop and into the world. I’ve edited it a bit, but most of the text is from May. I was reconsidering the communities of practice literature.
The project I’m currently funded on is ostensibly about facilitating the implementation of civil infrastructure. When I was first presented with the project, the part that seemed most interesting to me was the “transfer of practice” (TOP) problem. The TOP problem goes something like “it’s difficult to move practice from research labs to the real world.” Sure is. I looked forward to working on that problem. As I got into the project more, my focus changed. It seems like now the problem is not so much how do we move a practice from over here in research land to over there in construction but rather, how do the practices of civil infrastructure design and construction change when the materials available change?
Engineered cementitious composites (ECC) have the potential to change the practices of civil infrastructure design and construction. I don’t know enough about that design and construction to yet know what the possibilities are, but I get the sense that they are big and dramatic. Iron and steel certainly made a big difference. Concrete, the rigid kind, is sure important. Imagine what happens when you change the tools again! At least, that’s what I’m imagining. With a little help from my colleagues, I’ll do some more definitive imagining.
So what does any of this have to do with communities of practice (COPs)? The problem of TOP is something like moving a practice from one community to new individuals. Here, I’m describing what happens when new people learn about ECC and start to learn how to work with it. It’s tough to make – the recipe is incredibly precise and the underlying theory is important – and it’s deceptively similar to regular concrete. To solve TOP, you simply send that newly trained person off in to the world, much like a PhD from the lab at Michigan is now off in the world getting his company to use ECC. Obviously I’m oversimplifying here, but you get the idea. By characterizing the problem of developing new infrastructure as a TOP problem, we make the research lab and its practices the goal, and the “real world” and its practices the target. This could even be a transfer practice from one community to another problem.
However, that’s not what I think is going on. Rather, I think the communities of practice involved are a little broader than that TOP conception allows. I don’t think the problem is one of trying to ease the problems with throwing ECC over the wall between lab and field. The really interesting problem, I think, is how does a change in practice within the civil infrastructure design and construction community happen? Much of the existing COP literature is about moving practice from a community to an individual. What about changing a practice within the community? How does that happen?
To start to answer those questions, I’m off to explore a variety of literatures including innovation (generally), innovation (in construction), organizational change, apprenticeship, public policy and infrastructure, and standards development and negotiation. That’s just to get me started. I’m likely to blog about this quite a bit in the near future as I try to figure out what I think is going on, or rather where I think something interesting is going on. In doing so, I hope to avoid the plague of reductionism against which Latour warns. Instead, I’m looking for the details of the network of forces at work in these communities and affecting their practices.