Orienting and declaring in eduMOOC 2011

The concept of MOOC really appeals to me as a way to organize learning.  It apparently appeals to others as well, judging from how so many sign up for them.  When MOOCs are announced, the news spreads across overlapping PLNs like a swarm of locusts and thousands are attracted like moths to a flame.  There's one on now at: https://sites.google.com/site/edumooc/ for 8 weeks starting on June 27, 2011.

I was wondering how to get myself writing about EduMOOC. It was natural that the impetus should come from this thread on the eduMOOC Google Group forum: http://groups.google.com/group/edumooc/browse_thread/thread/6d264a22386f7b99#. 

The thread relates to the optimal amount of time such a course should run and how much time participants should spend with it.

B.D.Boardman asked:

As I find myself checking in with the various discussion threads, 

posts, online articles, and misc content throughout the day I notice
that I'm beginning to "chunk" my MOOC time into small 5-10 minute
segements that perhaps, by the end of the day, may add up to an hour
or more. I am wondering if other participants are having a similar
experience, and what the larger implications are of this approach to
learning. 

In addition, as my attention wanders a little throughout the day, I am
also wondering if 8-weeks is the most appropriate span of time for a
MOOC? Given the content and online dynamic, I wonder if a more
"concentrated" time span (like 2-4 weeks) might be more effective for
this particular learning model? 

So, does anyone have any comments or thoughts on the topic that they
would like to share? 

I've dabbled in MOOCs before and use Dave Cormier's videos in a course I teach on Multiliteracies at http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/w/page/33070377/Week3EVO2011. I have lately modeled my approach in this course on the MOOC model, only there I call it miniscule open online course, on the assumption that the approach scales downwards nicely.

That course is a part of the TESOL Electronic Village online sessions, http://evosessions.pbworks.com which also run for a similar length of time.  The first round in 2001 was just for 4 weeks, but apparently the coordinators thought that amount of time was not enough because in 2002 they went up to 8 weeks.  In 2003 however, they decided they had overstepped and the time was reduced to 7 weeks. For a while after that we ran them for 6 weeks, but the last couple of sessions have been reduced to 5. The feeling is obviously that when the session goes on for too long, people get worn out toward the end of it.  Eight weeks is intensive for the volunteer moderators, a long time for them to have to sustain momentum.

But in a MOOC it really shouldn't be up to the moderators to have to drive the course for 8 weeks like a 20-mule team.  A course that is set up nicely around provocative aspects of a topic can run itself, especially once you get people interacting.  Dave Cormier for example points out that the over-riding take-away from such a course is not a certificate, as you would expect from a 'formal' learning situation, but the network you develop through participation in such a course. This dovetails nicely into the idea of learning and knowledge being essentially connectivist. As George Siemens told me once, in answer to the last question I asked him at the end of this recording: http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com/entry/eg/2009-01-28T03_19_19-08_00, it is the moderator's job to provide a coherent structure to the course. After that what can you do with 2000+ participants? They learn by constructing their own coherence in their run-up to the end of the course, based on what they are learning and how they are restructuring their knowledge and perceptions of the part of their world they are exploring in the course, and an important part of that is not relying on the moderators to do this restructuring for them.

Nellie Deutsch tweeted a question on the #edumooc tag asking " I wonder if it's necessary to stay to the very end of a MOOC. What will you gain by completing a MOOC?"  I replied "asked another way, what will you gain by starting a MOOC or lurking in one? The answer is 'whatever is gained' :-)" to which Nellie muses: "Maybe there's more learning in quitting before the end. Would it be the same if the MOOC were not free and for credit?"  (an aside to Nellie, see https://twitter.com/bnleez/status/86976985615708160 who posted this also on the #edumooc tag).

This reminds me of a line in one of my favorite Rush songs, "the point of the journey is not to arrive."  http://www.metrolyrics.com/prime-mover-lyrics-rush.html

Anything can happen

From the point of conception, to the moment of truth

At the point of surrender, to the burden of proof

From the point of ignition, to the final drive

The point of the journey is not to arrive

Anything can happen

The double meaning here is either that arriving at the destination is not the reason we travel, or that the point of traveling is to stay on the road and never end the journey.  The question of 'arrival' is what Nellie seems to be getting at.  However B.D. Boardman brings up the amount of time we should spend on the journey, and asks for insights on that question, which is what I am addressing here.

To me it's transcendental.  The point of the journey is to be on it.  It doesn't matter how much time you spend on it or when or where it ends, if it does.  YOU could focus on EduMOOC for 2-4 weeks if that's right for you, or 5 min. a day for whatever duration of time will benefit you.  That's why I said to Nellie that you gain "whatever is gained." Whatever that is, it's quantums over gaining nothing by not participating at all.

As Ken Robinson says in "The Element" (see his TED video at http://blog.ted.com/2009/01/08/sir_ken_robinso_1/), there are 6.93 billion different intelligences on the planet, a number that he would have to revise upward as people are born (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population). Accordingly I would say there are 2000+ approaches to coping with this particular MOOC, and the same number of opinions on how much time would be optimal for it.

I glanced over the reading on Disrupting College suggested for this week, and I'm reading the book by Clayton Christensen et al. on Disrupting Class http://www.claytonchristensen.com/. There, the point is made that the book is researched and written partly to counter the notion that education is often construed as one-size-fits-all (or 'no child gets ahead' as I like to call it). People learn differently, evincing 6.93 billion different intelligences or learning styles, to use Ken Robinson's rough figure (and I was amused by "Clay's" recollection of being involved in distance learning in the mid-70s when distance in the huge auditorium at BYU was anything past the 5th row, where the teacher was reaching the students only asynchronously, e.g. Clay slept while the teacher lectured, and the teacher slept while Clay read the coursebook.)

I'm participating in EduMOOC by blogging around the topic, tweeting, trying out a Scoop.it on the topic at http://www.scoop.it/t/edumooc/, and working whatever and whomever I encounter in this course into my summer workflow.  This post is one salvo among many being inspired by EduMOOC 2011 as we speak, with slim chance of my reading many of those other salvos, or of a significant number reading this one ...unless we consider that one person changed through encountering the opinion of at least one other is a significant number, which it is.

Learning is change; which is to say that if nothing changes, then nothing has been learned.  Ergo, as we learn we change and as we encounter one another in that process of learning we change one another.  The idea of a MOOC I think is to create one cauldron into which you pour a heap of ideas and stir, and change emerges.

Stephen Downes was once asked why he put himself in the position of having to support such a huge endeavor, and he said, because he would learn from it.  What is clear from the premise of Christensen's books for example is that there are many aspects of education that need to change, and what we are doing here is coming to grips with that.

The questions of how long or whether to see the course through to the end are good ones to be asking, but the problem with the answer(s) is that there are 6.93 billion of them.

The suggested reading for Week 1:
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Louis Caldera and Louis Soares Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/02/pdf/disrupting_college.pdf

Proposed chapter on Online Distance Training for ESL/EFL teachers: Case Study of a Community of Practice and its Distributed Learning Network

Have you ever submitted a proposal for something and sent it off and then forgot where you'd put it, so when your proposal was accepted and it came time to act on it, you couldn't retrieve it or remember exactly what you had proposed?

I have just submitted a proposal for a chapter which might appear in a book on teaching ESL online, assuming the book proposal itself is accepted.

In writing the proposal I realized that it answers succinctly in 300 words what people frequently ask me, how did Webheads come about, and what is Webheads anyway, and how does it fit into a framework of professional development? I have referred to this 'fit' as 'teacher autonomy' in this post here, for example, and also in the Slideshare presentation embedded below.

So here's the proposal. It would be useful if it attracted feedback, but apart from that, since it's here, I'll be able to retrieve and remember it later, and in case anyone asks me again about Webheads, this will be a convenient place to point them.

============

Webheads started in 1998 as an online community of EFL students and teachers learning together how technology facilitates language learning through computer-mediated communication. By around the turn of the century it was being dominated by teaching practitioners who in 2002 came to see themselves as a community of practice (CoP) known as Webheads in Action (WiA). As communication over the Internet expanded rapidly into voice and video, and with Web 2.0 making it possible for many users to create content online and share it in cyberspaces promoting social networking, many such communities arose and began overlapping in multiple memberships. This paper explores the concepts of groups, communities, and networks, and relates how WiA evolved from a group to a community (specifically, a CoP), and how this CoP developed contacts with others to function as part of a much wider distributed learning network (DLN) of teachers training one another.

The case of WiA models professional development through connectivism. At each node in the DLN, there is a person who is passionate and knowledgeable (and wants to learn more) about some aspect of teaching through technology. Collectively the nodes comprise the knowledge-base to which each member in each overlapping community has access. Connectivism provides a framework by which the development of pathways of access to that information is of primary importance to the information itself. Professional development then becomes a matter of educators blazing pathways to create channels through which each other's knowledge can be shared and made to flow in all directions, creating a dynamic system conducive to informal, just-in-time learning.

This paper describes how members of WiA utilize such connections to maintain conversations that enable everyone to learn about and practice with latest innovations in educational technology, and contribute to innovative and transformative teaching practices.

Let's start with teacher autonomy: Multiliteracies and Lifelong Learning

View more presentations from vances.

Global and local visions: Webheads and Distributed Communities of Practice (Denver TESOL 2009)

Updated May 11, 2021

This posting encapsulates, but in May 2021 updates, my remarks at a colloquium entitled: Global and local visions: Evolving communities of practice Panelists: Vance Stevens, Suresh Canagarajah, Jane Hoelker, Yuko Goto-Butler, Takako Nishino, Perin Jusara, Golge Seferoglu, and Toni Hull, presented March 27 at the annual international in TESOL conference in Denver (Stevens, 2020)

The abstract for the colloquium was: Whether learning or teaching English in the EFL context, the model of Communities of Practice moves individuals and groups forward in their development. Examples of shared practices implemented in elementary, secondary and tertiary institutions as well as in programs of teacher professional development conducted on worldwide communication networks are discussed.

My contribution was entitled "The Webheads and Distributed Communities of Practice" 

Abstract for my presentation: In these times of globalization and worldwide communication networks, distributed communities of practice (e.g. any CoP that cannot rely on face-to-face meetings and interactions as its primary vehicle for connecting members) are becoming more common. The concept of distributed CoPs has been addressed by Etienne Wenger. This presentation discusses CoPs implemented for educational technology specialists, many particularly concerned with language learning, in ongoing teacher professional development, foremost through Webheads in Action and in various other communities and offshoots from these, such as TESOL-sponsored EVO (Electronic Village Online). How Wenger’s concept of CoPs has evolved after his encounter with the Webheads online will also be discussed. 

In my talk I didn’t rehash a definition of communities of practice except to mention that they are most frequently understood, as defined by Etienne Wenger, to:

• promote knowledge of a domain 
• revolve around a practice
• form spontaneously, voluntarily, in communities

Wenger further characterizes distributed CoPs as, among other things, having a particular space to interact in. Not many of Wenger’s writings are available (for free) online, but these include: 

• Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice Learning as a social system. Retrieved May 12, 2021, from https://thesystemsthinker.com/communities-of-practice-learning-as-a-social-system/ 
• Wenger, E. & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Communities of practice: A brief introduction. Retrieved May 12, 2021 from https://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/

The ostensible purpose of my talk was to explore where Webheads intersects with these characteristics of communities of practice. Webheads in Action, http://webheads.info, was formed as a 2002 session of EVO (TESOL sponsored 6-week courses given free each year via Electronic Village Online, http://evosessions.pbwiki.com/). Webheads membership has since increased to many hundreds of educators who engage in helping each other pursue lifelong, just-in-time, informal learning through experimentation in use of social-media and computer mediated communications tools. Among its accomplishments, the Webheads community has already mounted two free international online conferences, the Webheads in Action Online Convergences (WiAOC 2005 and 2007) with a third coming up this May 22-24, 2009 - see http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/wiaoc_index.htm and http://webheadsinaction.ning.com/ (free no longer supported but content from 2009 ported to Wordpress and stumbled on unawares May 12, 2021 :-)

• here https://webheadsinaction.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/looking-ahead-to-wiaoc2009/ 
• and https://webheadsinaction.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/all-over-but-the-shouting/ 
• and in related posts at the bottom of those pages

The question I addressed in my talk was, is Webheads a group, a community, or a network? In formulating my arguments I made a distinction between groups, communities, communities of practice, and networks, as illustrated on the diagrams in slides 6 through 10 in my slide show: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/the-webheads-and-distributed-communities-of-practice 

(To see these effectively, go directly to https://www.slideshare.net/vances/the-webheads-and-distributed-communities-of-practice/6 in the slide show above and then scroll through to https://www.slideshare.net/vances/the-webheads-and-distributed-communities-of-practice/10)

Groups 

A group is a gathering of people. It could be a mob or a friendly gathering at a pub. The impetus for its formation is chance or convenience; e.g. people walking near one another in a park, people who come together to observe a sporting event, or students who are grouped in furtherance of class logistics. Downes makes further distinctions in a presentation anticipating my progression here of configurations from groups --> communities --> communities of practice --> and then to networks.

From Stephen Downes’s slide show “Groups vs Networks: The Class Struggle Continues” at https://www.downes.ca/presentation/53
(This is an image; the buttons are not clickable here, though clicking will enlarge the image)

The slide cites his posting “Sudden Thoughts And Second Thoughts” from Stephen’s Web, September 21, 2006, http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=35839, where these points are contextualized. Downes's slide show covers each of these dichotomies in more detail. 

Communities 

Communities have more cohesion and permanence than groups. A community could form around a place where people live, or other groupings might consider themselves communities as they develop social bonds and identity to distinguish themselves from groups. 

When Webheads in Action was started in 2002 it coalesced around a Yahoo Group. As people started to join the group they identified themselves as such until they started taking on characteristics that made them think of themselves more as a community than a mere group of teachers. What would some of these characteristics be? 

• Photographs and voice/webcam communications enable group members to see the human behind the text message and enhance bonds leading to a sense of community 
• Not only helping one another’s practice by answering each other’s questions, but also showing evidence of caring, such as interest in personal vignettes, individual accomplishments and setbacks
• Developing and defining a group culture through various forms and modalities of communications

Communities of Practice 

Shortly after its formation as an EVO session in 2002, participants in Webheads in Action were exploring their interactions and sense of cohesion in the framework of communities of practice, leading to two subsequent presentations at the 2003 TESOL conference examining the community in that light 

• EVOnline workshop: Reflection through experience and experiment with a communities of practice online: http://vancestevens.com/papers/tesol/baltimore2003/copractice.html#workshop 
• Colloquium: "Case study of a community of practice": http://vancestevens.com/papers/tesol/baltimore2003/copractice.html#colloquium 

More rigorous examinations were conducted by several PhD candidates who sometimes joined Webheads in order to study our dynamics. Chris Johnson, who joined Webheads in order to study the community as a possible example of a distributed CoP, tested WiA rigorously against nine of Etienne Wenger's precepts. Johnson found that Webheads fit (all) nine characteristics unique to distributed CoPs except on one independent variable associated with “emergence with respect to boundary practices;” meaning, Webheads tended to neglect boundary members and expected them to bring knowledge into the community on their own (Johnson, 2005)

Meanwhile Etienne Wenger agreed to be a keynote speaker at our 2007 WiAOC (Webheads in Action Online Convergence http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/wiaoc2007keynotes.htm). His keynote took the form of a conversation moderated by Susanne Nyrop. When Cristina Costa entered the conversation, Etienne asked her when she felt that she was a member of a CoP. Cristina replied that she realized this when her practice began to change. 

Etienne referred back to this later when, during the question period, I asked him whether his concept of CoPs had evolved after his encounter with the Webheads online. He said indeed it had. He said that the fact that Webheads met in so many spaces while clearly being a CoP was a revelation to him. He now realized he could relax his previous thinking on constraints on SPACE occupied by a distributed CoP. We took this to mean that since Wenger's own thinking on CoPs was in flux, and he was thinking of us as an example of a CoP, this might have nudged us over that 9th hurdle.

Networks 

Meanwhile I’ve moved in my own thinking beyond the CoP model, following on the work of Stephen Downes (2001-2008) and George Siemens (many of whose writings on connectivism are cited in Downes, 2001-2008). Downes has written and presented much on the concept of diffusion of knowledge within distributed learning networks, and Siemens of course has long espoused the notion of connectivism, famously summarized as “The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe.” Siemens (2004). Here, Siemens means that it is more important to nurture a system of connections between knowledgeable people (the pipe) than to be concerned with what these knowledgeable people know (the content within the pipe) since this content can be directed to anyone with appropriate connections with the pipe. 

Distributing knowledge is what communities and networks are all about. Downes has a simple illustration of what it means to ‘know’: Where’s Waldo? Once you know where Waldo is, you can’t not know. 

But these days it seems, there is too much information available, and it seems we need increasingly to get our minds around more of it in order to keep up with and ‘know’ how to perform competently in our work. Wenger et al. (2002:6) promotes the CoP model as an anecdote to the fact, as he puts it, that “increasing complexity of knowledge requires greater … collaboration; whereas … the half life of knowledge is getting shorter.” Dave Cormier (2008) suggests a rhizomatic model of learning to deal with increasingly rapid obsolescence of knowledge. In this model, knowledge is seen as springing up wherever the tendrils, given its rhizomatic nature, are able to reach. 

Downes often expresses himself in analogies, and one oft repeated is that no one knows how to get a plane from London to Paris. Engineers must design the plane, someone has to build it, pilots are trained to fly it, but they in turn need an infrastructure of crew working in the plane as crew and outside as mechanics, and all those who work in airports and weather and navigation, etc. No one can actually on his or her own take a plane full of passengers from one place to another; this requires a network and all the knowledge within that network. What these notions, theories if you will, suggest is that connection with others in a network is of prime importance in having access to a repository of knowledge. 

On a personal level we experience this when we turn to Google or Wikipedia to answer in minutes if not seconds a question that in the past might have sent us to a library, but more often than not would have remained unanswered due to the logistics involved. Of even greater importance in this day and age, another available resource is direct (and indirect) contact with many people in one’s network, each possessing a reservoir of knowledge which contributes to the entire pool of knowledge residing in the network. This can be accessed through listservs or sometimes almost instantaneously through Twitter or RSS feeds, or instant messaging. Thus the knowledge possessed by any individual, or node, in the network, is the sum total of all aggregated knowledge within that network. It is to this that we ascribe the incredible power inherent in distributed learning networks which often comprise to some extent communities of practice. (Downes, 2005; Siemens, 2006)

I conceive CoPs as bubbles overlapping in a Venn diagram. The total of all the bubbles would be the network as conceived in connectivist terms. The CoPs are themselves important to sharing of information within a community, but the fact that nodes within the CoP are connected with nodes outside the CoP in essence brings infinitely more knowledge into the community. I think it is something along these lines that Wenger is trying to accommodate in re-envisaging the notion of space in which distributed communities of practice work. This has tremendous implications for professional development. 

Just before we held our colloquium in 2009 in Denver, Jack Richards delivered a video plenary address at a distance at a plenary in which he touched on what teachers need to know in order to practice effectively. He said research indicates that teachers often tend to revert to traditional methods rather than activate what they are exposed to in training curricula. Derick Wenmoth (also from NZ) mentioned similar research findings in his keynote at the K-12 Online Conference in 2008: 

Wenmoth (2008) implies that the key to success in keeping current is in expanding productive contacts within a network. One problem is that teacher-trainers without sufficient experience with technology and who are rooted in old-school methodologies are simply not modeling new age learning behaviors for the trainees. The increasingly inadequate model of reliance on face-to-face exchange of knowledge is apparent in the way that many annual conferences are organized and structured. Many such gatherings do little to encourage connectivity for either presenters or participants. 

There was just recently a very interesting online conference, AACE's Spaces of Interaction: (perhaps here, https://www.aace.org/review/getting-ready-for-ed-media-2009/), which suggested that face to face conferences were falling ‘unacceptably’ short on utilizing networking potentials for participants. This was acceptable in the past because participants who relied on having the opportunity to touch base with each other once a year traditionally might have only been able to exchange letters or emails during the intervening months between conferences. But the new dynamic suggests that connectivity where contacts only meet face to face falls far short of interacting with them in online environments as well.

Fortunately there are many venues for doing just that, and for many practitioners these are taking on greater importance in professional development than interaction in face to face environments. At the very least, one could say that interaction in online spaces facilitates greater productivity when the interactants eventually do meet face to face. The bottom line is that it does not hurt and most likely maximizes productivity to interact with colleagues as frequently as possible in online spaces, and this is where distributed communities of practice interacting with each other through greater networks is key to practitioners’ keeping current and confident in their level of competency at work. 

Some means for keeping current (at the time this was originally written) were participation in: 

• Social networks: Ning, TappedIn, EVO, WiAOC 
• Social bookmarking: Delicious, Diigo 
• Groups: YahooGroups and GoogleGroups
• Microblogging: Twitter, Plurk 
• Instant messaging: Yahoo Messenger, Skype
• Blogging and podcasting: keeping currect via RSS 
• Wikis: PBWiki, Wikispaces 
• Aggregation: Pageflakes, Netvibes, Protopages \\

An example PLN diagram from Jane Hart (2009), Slide 25 here: 
https://www.slideshare.net/janehart/ilta-keynote/24-ExamplePLEPLN_Social_Social_File_networking 

I finished my talk by asking which construct of knowledge distribution was more productive, communities or networks? I answered rhetorically that perhaps this was a matter of scale, where networks can handle an almost infinite number of participants. The evolution of Webheads is instructive. Seen as a community, members interact within the domain of practice. Networks imply more widespread, perhaps opportunistic, contacts, with looser characterization of domains and practices. So which is more productive? Given the spontaneous and voluntary nature of such constructs, the answer is ‘whatever works’ and therefore probably moot. 

References

Cormier, D. (2008). Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum. This paper in another one for the lost and found. When Innovate: Journal of Online Education went 'out of print' Dave moved it to his blog: http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03/rhizomatic-education-community-as-curriculum/. If can also be found on Research Gate with forthright  coda regarding what Graham Davies used to call 'link rot': https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234577448_Rhizomatic_Education_Community_as_Curriculum (both articles retrieved as indicated on May 11, 2021).

Downes, S. 2001-2008. E-learning 2.0. eLearn Magazine, retrieved May 11, 2021 from https://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=1104968

Downes, S. (2005). An Introduction to Connective Knowledge. Stephen’s Web, http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=33034 Johnson, C. 2005. Establishing an Online Community of Practice for Instructors of English as a Foreign Language. Doctoral dissertation. Nova Southeastern University. Retrieved from NSUWorks, Graduate School of Computer and Information (614). Sciences. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/gscis_etd/614.   Retrieved May 10, 2021

Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. This paper disappeared temporarily when Elearnspace did, but it is easily found on online. Here's a version with a 2005 update of an accompanying website, https://www.academia.edu/2857071/Connectivism, retrieved May 11, 2021. You can use ctrl-F to find the 'pipes' quote; to hard to track in-text as the papers move about).

Siemens, G. (2006). Knowing Knowledge. Ebook available via Creative Commons license, but no longer on eLearnspace. On May 11, 2021, you can try here, https://amysmooc.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/knowingknowledge_lowres-1.pdf, or the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/KnowingKnowledge/page/n127/mode/2up

Stevens, V. (2009). Modeling Social Media in Groups, Communities, and Networks. TESL-EJ, 13(3). http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/past-issues/volume13/ej51/ej51int/

It received positive feedback from Russell Stannard who commented

This blog post was an precursor version of the article that appeared in the Dec 2009 issue of TESL-EJ, above. The TESL-EJ article is more refined in prose, though for obvious reasons, not updated in links as has been possible in May 2021, in the blog post you are reading here 

Stevens, V. (2010). Webheads and Distributed Communities of Practice. In Canagarajah, S., Stevens, V., Nishino, T., & Hoelker, J. (EFLIS Academic Session 2010). Global and Local Perspectives: Evolving Communities of Practice in EFL. EFLIS News, 9(1). https://www.tesol.org/news-landing-page/2011/11/08/eflis-news-volume-9-1-(march-2010) 

Update: This article was updated at the invitation of Jane Hoelker on behalf of the editors of the EFL IS Newsletter, who published a summary of the EFL Academic Session from Denver TESOL 2009. The article is at this link (on May 11, 2021) https://www.tesol.org/news-landing-page/2011/11/08/eflis-news-volume-9-1-(march-2010), though the bookmark to "Articles: EFLIS Academic Session 2009. Global and Local Perspectives: Evolving Communities of Practice in EFL"  does not work.

My part of the article (October 2009) resides online at http://tinyurl.com/vance2009denver

Wenger, E. Richard McDermott, R., & Snyder, W.M.. (2002). Cultivating communities of practice. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. 284 pages. 

Wenmoth, Derek. (2008). Holding a Mirror to our Professional Practice. Keynote address given at the K12 Online Conference 2008, http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=181

Further update May 11, 2021 - links checked and updated as indicated

Will online facilities at conferences kill off smaller, more localized events where people are within travelling distance of the venue?

I hope I can say in a nice way that I disagree that online components to conferences will kill off localized events. I think the opposite, that online access to any professional development opportunity enhances it for everyone involved. I have given many presentations at normally closed on-site venues where the participants have said afterwards that the demonstration of what it was possible to do online was eye opening for them. So at the site itself, appropriate techniques for interaction are modeled, and the people at the on-site location can see first hand how to set up and use the technologies that can bring the world into their classrooms.

It could be argued that the opportunity to learn more about how to do something truly useful like that would draw people to conferences. People might conceivably in the very near future become less and less interested in conferences where this kind of thing doesn't happen.

People in the audience ought to be able to choose their preferred modality, not have things set up so that coming to the site was the only option for them. Constructing learning environments so that users have choices according to individual differences and learning styles is a major premise of individualized learning which ought to underpin what appears in an independent learning center as well as in real-life professional development. I have argued elsewhere that online participants might benefit more from such occasions from a purely technical point of view by having to DO what was talked about in presentations (about technology) rather than just sitting passively, nodding, taking notes, and then returning to work in the same old way.

I have heard it argued that sitting at home online is isolating and that people participating in conferences in this way are missing out on all the social interaction. Again, as someone with over a decade of experience working with people online, I find the opposite to be true. If all your interactions with people you admire in your profession are done face to face on those rare occasions you are able to coincide in the same physical space, then I hope you do savor the moment. Online, you can interact with such people more or less continually. You find that personalities and intellects are much more accessible over time in this mode, that people get to know one another better and more deeply online, and that when face to face meetings do occur, the benefits of having laid all that groundwork are immediately apparent. Ask anyone who has met an online professional acquaintance at long last – in most cases, it’s a milestone in a friendship that has already formed.

I’m not arguing against the importance of attending live conferences. I go to several in person every year and I find that they feed an important aspect of my professional development. But online venues multiply such opportunities, and it is crucial that we share and share alike in this regard – if I benefit online from a conference given in Minsk or Fujairah then I should give my colleagues in Minsk and Fujairah a chance to benefit in kind when I make my presentation, even at my local conference.

As someone with experience in both face to face and virtual events, I can speak with familiarity and some authority on each. But I find that many people with whom I discuss the benefits of interjecting more opportunities for online interaction in areas that are normally face to face (ranging from conferences to meetings at work) are not particularly experienced in online interaction, might try it once, decide they don’t care for it, and never really move cross that threshold where the benefits start to become self-evident.

That is one great contribution of the Aberdeen IATEFL conference I think, that it seems to have been a mostly positive experience for all concerned, and has got people a few steps closer to that all important threshold. I’m trying here to encourage continued movement to the edge, and counter tendencies toward thinking that, ok, it worked there, but it wouldn’t work here. There are many reasons why the example of Aberdeen, and so many others as well which I could get into if anyone is interested, can and absolutely SHOULD be pursued locally - and thanks to the Internet, globally in the same fell swoop.

Smiles and kind regards,

Vance