the emerge show01
DESCRIPTION
A general presentation about the Emerge ProjectTRANSCRIPT
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 [email protected]
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