BEtreat Workshops in Penticton

It's hard to believe that two years have passed since I completed the Cutting Edge BEtreat workshop, facilitated by Bev and Etienne Wenger-Trayner at their home in Grass Valley, California. When I looked back in my blog history (tag: betreat) I was alarmed to see there were only 3 published blogs posts. Of course, there are still a couple in draft mode, as per my usual habits. But my memory tells me that there should be many more. It was such a rich experience, and I learned SO MUCH!

My colleague, Leva Lee, completed the State of the Art BEtreat as an online participant. She also continues to rave about the workshop experience. Which is why we decided to bring it to British Columbia...

What is BEtreat?

BEtreat workshops are designed for leaders in social learning, communities of practice and networks. You bring your projects and challenges to the 4-day workshop that most closely match your experience and context. Is this your world? Then register!

State of the art

October 7 – 10, 2014 
This workshop is for people who want a systematic overview and firm grasp of current principles and practice applied to their context. We will explore best practices and work together to review and apply established models, approaches and techniques to your challenges – from starting up, to cultivating, and to monitoring the value.

Cutting edge

October 14 – 17, 2014 
This workshop is for people who are familiar with existing models and practice and want to develop more pioneering aspects of the field. We will explore emerging issues in social learning – as it applies to your case – as well as models and approaches we are still developing.

Who?

You, along with 10 – 15 other learning practitioners and administrators

Facilitators

Beverly Wenger-Trayner is a learning theorist and consultant specializing in communities of practice and social learning systems. Her expertise encompasses both the design of learning architectures and the facilitation of processes, activities, and use of new technologies.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner is a  globally recognized thought leader and consultant in the field of social learning and communities of practice. He has authored and co-authored seminal articles and books on the topic, including Situated Learning, where the term “community of practice” was coined.

Together, they are furthering the theory and practice of social learning leadership.

Where is BEtreat?

You may choose to participate online or on location. Grapeseed Guesthouse, Penticton, British Columbia.

In keeping with the Grass Valley California BEtreat, we thought it only made sense to host the workshop in the Okanagan Valley and combine good conversation with a little wine tasting  :-) 

Registration and details:

http://wenger-trayner.com/betreat/

Early bird registration ends August 30, 2014.

Scholarship

We are offering scholarships of $600 toward workshop tuition to two individuals. To apply, send email to Sylvia Currie (scurrie@bccampus.ca) by July 31, 2014 with the subject heading “BEtreat Scholarship” and include 1 – 2 paragraphs that respond to this question:

Why is participation in the workshop is important to your project?

Questions? Just ask! Also, if you are not in a position to register at this point but would like to be kept in the loop, add your name to the Expression of Interest form.

Grab the brochure and pass it around!

BEtreat from BCcampus

Facilitating at the Leadership Summit

Drawing by Hilda Anggraeni

Earlier this month BCcampus hosted a one-day Learning, Teaching and Ed Tech Leadership Summit. The purpose of the summit and subsequent steps was to bring together provincial leaders to collaborate, innovate and solve problems. The day was organized as a participatory and emergent process to:

• identify issues and challenges
• begin to think about solutions
• discuss how we will work together as a consortium
• begin planning our first open event
• discuss how decisions are currently being made with respect to Ed tech choices and implementation
• gain feedback on a proposal for a new provincial teaching with technology award

The Challenges and Solutions participatory graphic wall anchored the discussions throughout the day. Ultimately we wanted to situate ourselves in the landscape of working as a collective -- system wide.

My facilitation role was around the "how we will work together" piece. Here are my prep and process notes, along with some reflections on how it all went.

Collaborating as a consortium

Key questions guiding this activity:

• What are the results/outcomes we want?
• What do you want from each other? 
• From BCcampus? 
• How do you envision the group working? 
• Who will lead? 

In this visioning session, I used the Purpose to Practice Liberating Structure (P2P). The focus is on what we can do as a collective, so P2P seemed like an ideal choice. We worked together to define what our collective goals might be, and the essential elements of our future collaborative work: purpose, principles, participants, structure, and practices (and more photographs of the output)

I created a large, colourful poster for each group of the 5 groups, along with discussion questions on index cards for prompts.

Here are my personal and rough notes to guide my own facilitation. I like to use Evernote on my iPad for that -- it fits with my habits of updating the outline at the last minute, inserting notes as I listen to conversations leading up to the session.

11:10 set up

• Clearly have a lot to work on
• Many great discussions, creative solutions.
• How can we work together
• We already have a good start on getting our heads into this
• Just first steps in thinking about this.
• Next 50 minutes generating ideas about how to accomplish what we want to do
• This is going to be rapid and definitely unfinished
• Sharpen later
• Liberating structures - a variation on purpose to practice
• 5 elements - lots of overlap
• You can choose to think out one project as proof of concept, but don't get too hung up on details. We're talking about many projects and potentially many years
• Work through one together - purpose - then in 4 groups

11:20 Purpose

• Guiding questions. Read them
• Individual
• Table
• Report out one statement from each table
• One person write on flip chart

11:35 Elements

• Short description of each group
• Guiding question / add your own questions on cards
• Feel free to move around to other tables to see their questions
• Jot down your ideas and thoughts on post it notes
• Individual
• Table
• Capture capture capture on post it notes
• Start: one person from each table pick up your element package

11:50

• Take what's on the table and display it over lunch
• Encourage you to visit each element and zone in on some of the details
• Promise to capture and report back
• Promise to organize next steps

Purpose

We worked through the Purpose activity together (individual, each table, report back). Key questions:

• Why is this work important to you? 
• What is our core reason for working together? 
• Why is this work important to the larger community

Principles

Key questions:

• To fail, what must we do? 
• To succeed, what must we do? 
• What are the things we don't want to repeat? 
• What is one BIG thing on the "must do" list? 
• What is one small thing on the "must do" list?

Participants

Key questions:

• Who should be included?
• Who will move things forward at your institution?
• Who can contribute?
• Where do you see yourselves (as a group) in terms of your participation?
• At the end of the day, where will you pin your name on the landscape?
• What is the role of BCcampus?

Structure

Key questions:

• How is work distributed?
• How do we organize ourselves?
• What important conversations do you need to have to make things happen?
• What do we need to support our work?
• How is control distributed?
• Where do YOU fit in? 

Practices

Key questions:

• What are our milestones?
• What will stand in our way?
• What will we do and how?
• What are the outcomes of our work together?
• What will have changed one month from now?
• What will have changed one year from now?

How did it go?

There were some excellent discussions! It seemed well paced, and the invitation to transfer and arrange the notes over lunch was well received (that's always a risky request!). This Liberating Structure activity tied in well to the rest of the day as we moved forward to discuss personal commitment and next steps. 

As with any implementation of a new facilitation structure, it took careful planning -- it seems so easy on paper, but in the moment you realize the importance of clear explanations of the process. If you send everybody off into groups without a solid understanding of tasks, as well as the purpose of those tasks, it can get a bit chaotic. Making the table rounds helped to clarify any confusion. 

I've never been able to follow "recipes" completely. I always invent variations, which isn't such a bad thing, but there is something to be said for following the design as written. Ha! I might try that next time. 

Intellectual Estuaries

I take no credit for the use of this excellent metaphor for thinking about new spaces for productivity and learning, but Alice MacGillivray has been engaging people in conversations related to intellectual estuaries and boundary spanning for years. Next week I have the honour of co-facilitating the Intellectual Estuaries workshop with Alice and Nancy White at the 2014 Canadian Network for Innovation in Education conference in Kamloops. I'm excited to be collaborating with these fun and amazing women!

Nancy spinning the agenda, photo by Alan Levine https://flic.kr/p/ceCVGb

Alice engaging the twitterverse during a Community Enthusiast event, photo by Hilda Anggraeni

I was fortunate to be Alice's Dissertation Fest "host" at CPsquare in 2008 where she invited us to explore ideas around boundaries, the topic of her dissertation: Perceptions and Uses of Boundaries by Respected Leaders — a Trans-disciplinary Inquiry.

Later, Alice co-facilitated the Vancouver Gathering of Community Enthusiasts events in May 2010, May 2011, and June 2012 and each time introduced new metaphors, technologies, and ways of thinking about engagement.

As I was digging into the workshop planning with Alice and Nancy, I was transported back to the 2010 Community Enthusiasts event where, thanks to Alice's facilitation and Nancy's excellent visuals, we harvested quite a collection of thought-provoking ideas and questions related to working across boundaries, and informal and formal learning and meeting places. It's a great example of the power of metaphors for thinking about, and rethinking, communities of practice and social learning. I'm capturing it here in point form (partially because I don't trust Flickr will be with us forever!):

Sticky comments by participants:

- Reflection:

* group still together?

* getting big pictures?

* check in

* change leadership?

- Time to strategize

* Are we going in the right direction?

* check gear - are we ok?

- Places of discovery

- A landmark

* charts the course

- Time to slow down (deliberate)

* look around (back and forward)

* a luxury (build it into the project!)

* do it when things go wrong...reframe the problem

- Can be treacherous

* current flow changes...could dump!

* tough to get out of eddy

* Is that where you want to go?

Sticky comments by participants: 

- understanding the value of not trying to bring together things that don't mix

- Too much diversity too soon can be a problem. Need to grow organically.

- Things from 'outside' are sometimes seen as having more value

- Narrowing too quickly can be a problems too

- Keeping history and noting significance so that later-comers can understand value of confluence

Sticky comments by participants:
- History of community
- Mutualism = give and take
- Community: time, goal, project durations
- Power players
- Partnership?
- Goal is mutualism
- There are builders, users, and mutualizers
- Communities across boundaries

Sticky comments by participants:

- Individual vs communal migration

- hibernation, going dormant for awhile...allows new leadership to take over

- Difficult to report on metrics

- How to measure vibrancy?

- Are there scenarios of over population in online communities?

- Migration pathways...what they tell us of needs/habits of communities

- Migration as a cycle...re-energize with change of season...return, journey between communities

- Collective of smaller communities -- allows for more movement

- What are the attributes of a community that encourage you to stay or go?

- Migrating can break cliques

- Something to be embraced...constant growth sustainable?

- Carrying capacity

Sticky comments by participants:

- Keep people and situations focused

- Interpretation of what $s are for

- Leaders can be the less likely!

- Different world views

- Personal comfort levels -- what is good for one is not necessarily good for another

- Resource management

- Don't all look the same

- Nurturing place of socialization

- Place for establishing community

- Protection

- Tendency to interfere -- knowing when to, or not!

- History and change...collision vs opportunities

- # Beavers -- food source, protection, MAJOR accomplishments

- Provide a safe place, risk management, experimentation

And finally, I included this one because the little people pulling Alice to the edge of her boundary is such a good example of how crossing it make a difference: "Alice goes public!"

For the Intellectual Estuaries workshop at CNIE, we want to support this same type of energy, using metaphor to encourage rich conversations. In a nutshell, we hope participants will think about their own contexts, and how intersections of groups, disciplines, cultures, locations, age... whatever... can create new synergies. As Alice puts it, these intersections are not a guarantee for success, but they can make space for unplanned successes.

Workshop Details and Plan

We didn't prepare slides for the workshop. Rather we gathered some resources and outlined the activities on Nancy's Full Circle wiki. I'm copying it here because it's always good to have a backup!

Intellectual Estuaries

In nature, estuaries are meeting places. Fresh water, salt water and land come together, enabling productivity and biodiversity that is greater than the sum of its parts. Similarly, university faculty members and learning and development professionals may be able to create—or enable the creation of “intellectual estuaries.” These spaces bring together often-unlikely groups of people for learning that can be greater than the sum of the knowledge they bring.

Design of these spaces involves boundary spanning or blurring, openness to possibility, productive tensions and inherent ambiguities. Intellectual estuary design is to traditional instructional design what the un-conference is to the conference.
(Full description on Sched.org)

Overview from Alice MacGillivray

Alice is unable to join the workshop because of a scheduling conflict, so she prepared this video for us. Now she has a workshop presence without being there. Good boundary spanning, eh?

Estuaries: Community Meeting Places

An image to help us get our heads into estuaries as a metaphor.

Organizational Charts - Why is this model so tenacious?

Underneath, workplaces look like this

What Alice has to say about that

The Problem? 

Creative work and progress in communities of practice doesn't filter back to the centre.

From Gerald Midgley et al: Theory and Practice of Boundary Critique

Our challenge

Interesting Stuff happens at the boundaries. How can we pay attention to that?
How can we apply these ideas to our own contexts?
What are the boundaries we have set up? How can we make them more permeable?
How can we bring together unlikely groups of people? Who would they be?

Our Stories

Alice has some excellent examples demonstrating Intellectual Estuaries based on her own experiences at Royal Roads University (RRU) and CPSquare, and also Fielding Graduate University.  The story I'm most familiar with is collaboration between RRU and CPSquare, where members of a course KM 650 (can't find the title!) participated in the CPSquare Foundation of Communities of Practice workshop as part of their course requirements. 

Activity: 25/10

(from Liberating Structures)

1. Write down your bold idea
2. Mill around, pass your card to someone else, quickly review

BELL!

3. Stop passing cards and pair up with someone nearby. Exchange thoughts.
4. Rate the idea on the card you are holding using a score of 1-5 (5 is high). Write the score on the back of the card.

BELL!

5. Continue to pass cards around

BELL!

6. Repeat 3 more times | Exchange > BELL > Exchange > BELL > Exchange > BELL

7. Add up the score on the card you are holding

8. Report out from those holding a score of 25, then 24, and so on until top 10 ideas have been shared

9. Comments on process?

Next Steps

I plan to take photos and report back on this session and others at the CNIE conference. Here's the full schedule.

UPDATE: Nancy White and I had a debrief with Alice about the session. Here are summary notes from the conversations, notes from the cards, and process comments:

Trio conversation

What emerged -- brief conversation about intellectual estuaries and what's happening in your workplace?

• There are out-of-necessity barriers rather than out-of-necessity innovation
• The challenge can be what is perceived as necessity
• What new metaphors can we offer that will help people to break out of silos?
• Network structures don't get useful until they're used and the don't get used until they're useful
• Incentives are like invasive species
• Sometimes there is a natural balance
• Sometimes meeting of edges is deliberate
• Semiosis - ideal if it can be seen as natural benefit
• Often this is evolutionary, so need to understand where we are
• There are so many amazing practitioners who don't know how amazing they are. How to discover these people?
• Often with the right leader can make silo issues disappear
• Someone new in a leadership position can make all the difference
• People who do the bridging, know and understand the social fabric, can be in a position of influence (different than authority)

Notes From Cards

Ideas from top ranked to lower ranked:

• Invite students into course design
• Encourage interdepartmental communication
• Bring more students into our design processes
• "Faire" for sharing ideas among departments
• Bring in an Aboriginal elder to plan diversity MED course
• co-op existing event (executive) or volunteer to design
• find language to bridge differing perspectives
• bring writing, research, design, development to disciplines for students
• energize our university-wide social network
• Pair ID in projects - mix experiences
• meet as many people as possible
• add a F.G. student to my thesis committee
• do a hallway plan for a learning event
• conference
• provost task force for learning tech. Reps from 14 faculties and library and IT and Ed. Dev + ... Students union, grad student assoc. Cross pollinate. Intentional edge effect

Reflection on Process

• Time was too short
• Good stuff on what. now want to talk about HOW
• liked the 25/10 process
• See the book "What the Robin Knows"

See Share Create Visual E-Interviews

Webinar: See Share Create Visual E-Interviews

Monday May 12 17:00/10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT

Must interview questions be asked and answered with words? Learn to use videoconferencing, web conferencing technologies for elicitation techniques with graphics, photos & media and collaborative methods to generate visual data within the online interview.

More information and resources here: http://bit.ly/1i7W73j. No registration, just log into Blackboard Collaborate for the webinar: 

http://urls.bccampus.ca/scopeevents

This is the final live event of the book launch series hosted by the SCoPE community to celebrate the release of Qualitative Online Interviews http://www.sagepub.com/books/Book241778

Qualitative Online Interviews

Last week we kicked off a 2-week SCoPE seminar on Quality in Online Interview Research. Although the discussions coincide with Janet Salmon's upcoming book: Qualitative Online Interviews, the purpose of the seminar is to have a conversation and share resources, so anyone involved in online interview research (isn't that most of us?) will be able to dig in.

The asynchronous forum discussion is anchored on 2 webinars:

Webinar: Fair & Good? Ethics & Quality in Online Interview Research
When: Monday May 5, 2014 at 10:00 am PDT (see your time zone)
Where: SCoPE Blackboard Collaborate Room http://urls.bccampus.ca/scopeevents
Description: When reflecting on your own design or completed study, when reviewing student work-- or serving as a peer reviewer-- what should you look for in qualitative studies that use data collected online? What ethical questions should be considered?

Webinar: See, Share, Create: Visual E-Interviews 

When: Monday, May 12, 2014 at 10:00 am PDT (see your time zone)

Where: SCoPE Blackboard Collaborate Room http://urls.bccampus.ca/scopeevents
There's also a tweet chat Tweetchat #NSMNSS scheduled for Thursday, May 8, 2014 at 7:00 am PDT: 5 Tips for Teaching E-Interview Methods

Go to the SCoPE seminar forum for all the details and conversations.  The book will be released May 13, 2014 from Sage Publications.

MicroSCoPE: A closer look at what's happening in SCoPE

Cross-posted from SCoPE

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MicroSCoPE: A closer look at what's happening in SCoPE

Still Time to Register!

Thompson Rivers University, in beautiful Kamloops, British Columbia, is the venue for the year's Canadian Network for Innovation In Education (CNIE) conference, 13 - 16 May, 2014. The theme is "Confluences: Spaces, Places & Cultures for Innovative Learning".

May Activities

Seminar: Qualitative Online Interviews
1 - 16 May, 2014
Facilitator: Janet Salmons
Get ready for an interactive, multi-platform online world book launch and seminar! A Tweetchat, a discussion forum, and webinars will allow for discussion and exchange about strategies for teaching online qualitative or mixed methods, designing and conducting online interview studies, e-research ethics and topics you suggest.

Join in the forum discussion and mark these dates and times for the synchronous sessions:

• Webinar: Fair and Good? Ethics and Quality in Online Interview Research, Monday, May 5, 2014, 17:00 GMT 
• Webinar: See, Share, Create: Visual E-Interview, Monday, May 12, 2014, 17:00 GMT 
• Tweetchat: 5 Tips for Teaching E-Interview Methods #NSMNSS Thursday, May 8, 2014 at 14:00 GMT 

Special Interest Groups

British Columbia Deans of Arts and Sciences Programs (private)
Facilitator: Steve Eccles
A big welcome to members of this group committed to the values and practices of sharing, openness, and innovation.

Educational Technology Users Group - Let's Talk
Facilitator: Leva Lee
ETUG is grassroots group of British Columbia educators interested in teaching, learning and edtech in higher education.

PeriSCoPE - Monthly Web Conferences

• Tuesday with ETUG Lunch 'n Learn
• CIDER Sessions
• eCampusAlberta online professional development

About SCoPE

SCoPE brings together individuals who share an interest in educational research and practice, and offers opportunities for dialogue across disciplines, geographical borders, professions, levels of expertise, and education sectors. Our activities are facilitated by volunteers in the community, and membership is free and open to everyone.

SCoPE members receive these email updates automatically. If you prefer to read MicroSCoPE on the web or via RSS, log in and change your settings by clicking onforum administration. Professional learning events and highlights are captured via Scoop.it.

We welcome requests to host or promote professional development activities and projects related to teaching and learning. SCoPE is supported by BCcampus. Contact: Sylvia Currie (scurrie@bccampus.ca)

Please spread the word about SCoPE!

Vancouver Workshop: Deepening Your Facilitation Practice

This is a workshop I don't want to miss. Sadly, I will, because of a scheduling conflict. However, I highly recommend it to YOU. 

Photo by Alan Levine

I was first introduced to Group Works at the 2012 Gathering of Community Enthusiasts in Vancouver, British Columbia. Dave Pollard led us through an activity using the card deck. I had looked at the deck prior to that, but there's nothing like experiencing it. There are endless possibilities, and this upcoming workshop is an opportunity to explore them. Go!

DEEPENING YOUR FACILITATION PRACTICE: Workshop in Burnaby BC, Sat. May 24

Calling all project leaders, teachers, facilitators, coaches, public engagement practitioners, non-profit board members, and others whose work involves empowering people to participate in groups, workplaces, and communities in a more dynamic and effective way!

We invite you to attend a professional development session where you will have the opportunity to: 

• Reflect on your practices
• Share dilemmas with colleagues
• Get support on upcoming meeting designs
• Storyboard events (past and future) to identify opportunities for more effectively employing the patterns of excellent group process
• Integrate exemplary patterns into your professional life (and start to speak the shared “pattern language” of facilitation)
• Engage with others who care about these things!

We’ll be using the deck Group Works: A Pattern Language for Bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings as our lens. While familiarity with the deck will be helpful, it’s not essential — you’ll recognize the patterns from your own practice and pick it up quickly.

If you participated in the last workshop Group Pattern Language Project offered in BC, we expect this session will be sufficiently different to make it worth your while to join us again.  

When: Saturday May 24, 10:30am to 4:30pm. A simple soup/salad/bread lunch (vegan & gluten-free) will be provided.

Where: Cranberry Commons Cohousing, 4274 Albert St (at Madison just north of Hastings), Burnaby BC. 

Cost: Sliding scale $25-$150. 

Registration: Please register in advance so your hosts can plan appropriately; sign up at http://groupworksdeck.org/event_reg/GPL_Reg.php. If you have any further questions contact Daniel Lindenberger at daniel@smallboxcms.com.

Pre- and post-event Work Sessions: The day before and the day after the workshop we'll be hosting work sessions for those committed to supporting this work:  growing the language, articulating potential new applications, and promoting and nurturing the project. Some of the issues we’ll be exploring are developing curricula for self-guided study of how to use the cards,  new “e-versions” of Group Works, and outreach activities to spread the word. If you'd like to participate or learn more about this, please email Dave (dave.pollard@gmail.com).

Led by: Sue Woerhlin, Daniel Lindenberger, & Tree Bressen. To learn more about them, check out the following:

Sue  http://www.antiochseattle.edu/contacts/sue-woehrlin

Daniel http://sourcefacilitation.com/our-team/daniel-lindenberger/

Tree treegroup.info/services

Come participate! and let others know too: This should be a great networking and peer learning opportunity. Hope to see you there!  Please forward this invitation to other people you think might be interested in attending.  

—Daniel Lindenberger and Dave Pollard   Group Pattern Language Project

Drawing on Walls: Opening Up Visual Practice Possibilities

YAY! Here's another visual facilitation workshop to look forward to! Nancy White is coming to the 2014 CNIE conference at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia to facilitate this one-day workshop and blow our minds with a fabulous keynote. :-)

Image by Hilda Anggraeni

Description:

This one day experiential workshop takes place almost entirely at the drawing surface. We'll start by warming up our drawing muscles and silencing those pesky inner censors. We’ll build some basic drawing practices so we can release our minds and attention to how we can use them at the conference, in our work and any place! We will practise a few examples of participatory graphic facilitation activities. You can expect to go away with your own starter set of icons, ideas and approaches which you can use immediately, links to resources and communities of practice, and ideas about how to hone your practice.

The room is small but we can fit in a few more people so sign up! Guaranteed to be an excellent experience you'll never forget and you'll leave with buckets of ideas on how to apply these new colourful skills in your workplace.

Nancy and I are also facilitating a session with Alice MacGillivray called Making Space for Intellectual Estuaries. More about that later...

5 questions

This is cross-posted from BCcampus. I was interviewed by the fabulous Maria Lironi. I say fabulous despite having just met her. You know how you just immediately connect with people sometimes? She listened to what probably seemed like abrupt advice -- present me as part of a team, and no "yearbook" style photos!

I got a glimpse of her life, too. Maria also rides motorcycles and works from home in an environment surrounded by quiet and wildlife. (Ok, so I ride a scooter, but hey.)

Thoroughly enjoyed the process. It was also nice to get exposure for all we do in professional learning at BCcampus.

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5 questions with Sylvia Currie about social learning and open practices

March 6, 2014

As the senior manager of professional learning at BCcampus, Sylvia Currie is part of team responsible for creating and fostering open learning opportunities for educational professionals across the province.

Sylvia Currie

1. Tell a bit about what you and your team do?

Social learning and open practices are at the core of what we do. We create both informal and formal learning opportunities through face-to-face and online activities, and communities of practice.

This includes workshops, webinars and discussions organized though the Educational Technology Users Group and SCoPE, an international community. Right now there is big focus on adopting and adapting open textbooks.

We also build on existing resources, especially those that have made a positive impact in BC post-secondary institutions.  One such example is the Instructional Skills Workshop Online that was originally developed at RRU as an Open Educational Resource.

2. How does a community of practice benefit post-secondary education?

A community of practice brings together people who share in an interest in education research and practice, and provides opportunities for sharing. Geographical borders disappear online as communities of practice have the ability to connects people who might not otherwise have the opportunity to interact, either as frequently or at all.

3. How is the work that you do influencing post-secondary education in BC and around the world?

Educators say, “I wish I could live in BC!” I think there’s a little bit of open envy. We’ve been nudging the open agenda along for a long time. We also believe there are many advantages to sharing beyond our borders and engaging in dialogue with practitioners around the world.

Good examples are the SCoPE seminar discussions, collaborative partnerships with institutions to offer MOOCs and conferences as well as supporting research projects.

Last year, I travelled to the Universidad de Ibagué in Colombia to give a talk about learning communities and networks at the annual Congreso de Pedagogía y TIC.

4. Why is this work important to you?
This work fits with my philosophies about education—that learning should be a continuous process that invites multiple perspectives, reflective practice, and new, sometimes unplanned, experiences.

I also feel that something very special happens when working with individuals who are motivated to share their time, expertise and work because they want to learn themselves, and to help others.

I came to BCcampus in 2008, and brought with me many, many years of work experience in a variety of roles in British Columbia post secondary education.

It helped that I was already very connected with people across the system— educational technologists, faculty, administrators, and researchers.

5. How does someone access the department’s services?
You can check out our website and calendar. Many of our events are free.

Notable quotes:

Learning should be a continuous process that invites multiple perspectives, reflective practice, and new, sometimes unplanned, experiences. ~ Sylvia Currie

Something very special happens when working with individuals who are motivated to share their time, expertise and work because they want to learn themselves, and to help others. ~ Sylvia Currie

Learn more:

• Intro to communities of practice
• First Steps into Learning and Teaching MOOC
• Educational Technology Users Group
• SCoPE

Visual Practice Community

My awareness of graphic facilitation and recording practices began with Nancy White. As with all of Nancy's passions, she began sharing her ideas and artefacts, inviting others to draw with her, and connecting people who showed interest. I recall at least 3 Northern Voice sessions with Nancy, one where she co-facilitated with Barbara Ganley and we all ended up dancing. You had to be there!

Click this image!

That lead me to others who were exploring these facilitating and recording methods. Rachel Smith gathered a group at Moose Camp to explore working on the iPad just a few weeks after it went on the market. That's where I met Michelle Laurie, who went on to organize many fabulous workshops with Nancy White in Rossland, British Columbia. (Another one is coming up July 17-18, 2014. GO!!!)

Michelle Laurie and I co-facilitated a Drawing on Walls session at Northern Voice, and also practiced by providing a sandbox to record Moose Camp sessions all day. People joined in. Session leaders hugged us. It was fun!

Not everybody got it. I remember showing a photo to my sister of the graphic recording a group of us did of Alan Levine's ETUG keynote. She said "That means nothing to me". Could be a sister thing :-) But that began a tradition of doing graphic recording at every ETUG workshop, so I think it's safe to say that most people get it, and enjoy it!

Anyway, following a fantastic 2-day workshop jointly organized by BCcampus and University of British Columbia back in September, 2013, we decided it's time to think about forming a Visual Practice Community. 

The first meet-up is February 18, 2014 at the SFU Surrey Campus and you're invited! Sign up here, and show up here. 

Professional Learning Framework

As in any organization, at BCcampus we have various report templates to document past activities, and to anticipate future directions. These include strategic and fiscal year plans, and annual reports.

As concise as we try to make these documents, they're not very useful as background reading to support conversations with colleagues about what we do. Last year, for the first time, the Professional Learning Team at BCcampus created this quick 2-page overview. We found the process of distilling the details into a very short document to be very worthwhile. It also helps to have someone to make the document look good. Big thanks to Hilda Anggraeni for doing that!

Anyway, I thought to post it now because I wanted to refer to it and couldn't find it anywhere online. That's a problem!

BCcampus Professional Learning Framework from BCcampus

First Twitter Followers

I joined a zillion other people and ran @currie through Tworiginal. to see my first 10 followers on Twitter. These people are still very important in my life, whether they know it or not! :-) The mystery is @gkoshy. Who are you gkoshy?