27 November 2007

What gives life to our community?

Criteria

Conditions

Aims

Background

Stance

Position

Platform

Activity

Future

Emerge is an innovative, 28 month, user-centred, investigation-led, consortium-based project, funded by the JISC and guided by the principles of appreciative inquiry. There have been about 28 institutions, 45 project teams and 210 individual participants.

The aim is to support the formation of an "effective and sustainable community of practice” around the Users and Innovation Development Model, using Web2.0 technologies (def 1, def 2).

Emerge is the support project for the JISC Capital Programme, Users and Innovation strand

The wider aims of the U&I programme are for the JISC to receive a pool of high quality bids from which to be able to select for funding those that have the highest chance of producing projects which,

• with agile development techniques • and end-user focus

deliver value for money.

Communities cannot be magicked into being

We do not know how to make a CoP

see, e.g.: http://elgg.jiscemerge.org.uk/neilw/weblog/109.html

It has to be enquiry-led

It has to be fun

The opening stance

Was, in part, a stance …

• Team active in many communities

• Typology of communities

• Experience with community of practice, theory and practice

• User-centred development model (UIDM) and user trials

experience

• Open source software community model

• Appreciative inquiry evaluation from the start

• Working hypotheses

• Understanding of actor networks

• A site model based on aggregation

• A software platform

• Deep events experience & unconferencing approach

Emerge has a position

Communities of Practice and PurposeCommunities share learning, interests, goals, tasks, values, adversity, place, identity …

A model of software development

Explicitly adapted to community development

The act of research has a transforming effect on the subject of research. The aim of research is to bring about change.

Appreciative Inquiry attempts to get beyond the essentialism, ethical foundationalism and hierarchies of identity politics to embrace a more radical constructionism in relational theory. (Gergen, 1999)

By applying a rigorous, anti-essentialist, critical theory-led approach, appreciative inquiry can provide a firm foundation as a research method and evaluation methodology.

Appreciative inquiry

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 the general quality of educational (learning)

technology development projects may be improved,

bringing benefits not just to the JISC but more widely to

all sectoral funding agencies and stakeholders.

Working hypotheses

Activities

• London Launch

• Online Activity Days

• Manchester Community

Consolidation

• Nottingham Project Development

(Dragon’s Den)

• Community-generated events

supported by a Moodle and Elluminate…

and… (here)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/josiefraser/tags/community/

Conditions for success

• Bounded openness• Heterogeneous homophily• Mutable stability• Sustainable development• Adaptable model• Structured freedom• Multimodal identity• Serious fun

Criteria

• Multiple• Contextualised• Relative

• Real users involved in development teams

• Projects have real impact in institutions

• Ongoing, reflexively self-aware, purposeful community of collaborators

• Affectionate recollection

• Wider adoption - and adaptation - of the model

• Positive return on investment indicators

The Future of Emerge

In the future, Emerge (or its successor/inheritor) will be a community of – and a front-end for – people working on cutting-edge educational technology systems integration and development, realising the potential of academically-focused social-networking with a light-weight personal profiling system, community map and address book, which becomes an international resource, anticipating standards.

The Future of Emerge

Emerge (and its platform) aims to support :

• the bazaar: project funding and funded project development: the ideas factory

• unconferences: blended events of centrally orchestrated, community generated activities on and off line, sharing ideas, disseminating results, exchanging knowledge and artefacts

• the dragon's den: a peer-review culture – critical, appreciative and reflexive, self-aware and aware of the network of actors and relationships in the CoP

Strengthening • the present community through showcasing projects and providing active

face-to-face and online fora for all the funded projects to keep communicating with each other

Continuing • to continue as a space to share practice, interests, thoughts, ideas related

to learning and learning technologies

Sharing• a ‘repository for the exchange of ideas’, finding potential research partners,

to feedback on experiences

Focusing• A series of smaller communities where the users have a higher profile and

the community architects fade into the background.

Widening/including• to include groups and individuals outside the original community

Encouraging • projects teams and individuals and to seek funding through other calls and

lines of activity which can again feed back into the Emerge community

• Thank youThank you

George RobertsProject Directorgroberts@brookes.ac.uk

http://jiscemerge.org.uk

Josie FraserSteve WarburtonMarion SamlerRhona SharpeJoe RosaChris FowlerIsobel FalconerGraham AttwellBrian Kelly

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