«
»

Lurking and Participation

I missed attending the first CCK09 Elluminate session on Tuesday evening (past my bedtime here!) and only just caught up with it today.
I picked up on the short discussion on lurking, views on which hosts George Siemens and Stephen Downes seemed to differ slightly. As it appears this year’s students include a few self-confessed lurkers from CCK08 (who seem resolved to participate more this time), it might be interesting to hear their views. But when does a lurker stop becoming a lurker? Through participation it would seem, but how do we quantify participation and who measures it? George and Stephen? The individual student? Or is it collectively determined somehow by all the students within the course?
Lave and Wenger’s notion of a linear trajectory from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘centre’ of a community (of practice, if you like) through increased participation and identity formation is one way of conceptualizing this. My PhD is partly concerned with how increasingly distributed learner-centred networks may be challenging such community-based concepts of learning. Wenger recognizes most of us engage in (often overlapping) multi-membership, but when the networks of participation and discourse we create become so numerous, complex and disparate, do models such as communities of practice still hold true? Whilst encouraging individual tool selection and distributed communication, it strikes me that the proposed CCK09 processes of identity tagging and aggregation also reinforce Wenger’s community-based principles of mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire.
The next seminar is at the more Eurozone-friendly time of 4pm CST on Thursday September 17.

I missed attending the first CCK09 Elluminate session on Tuesday evening (past my bedtime here!) and only just caught up with it today.

I picked up on the short discussion on lurking, views on which hosts George Siemens and Stephen Downes seemed to differ slightly. As it appears this year’s students include a few self-confessed lurkers from CCK08 (who seem resolved to participate more this time), it might be interesting to hear their views. But when does a lurker stop becoming a lurker? Through participation yes, but how do we quantify participation and who measures it? George and Stephen? The individual student? Or is it collectively determined somehow by all the students within the course?

Lave and Wenger’s notion of a linear trajectory from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘centre’ of a community (of practice, if you like) through increased participation and identity formation is one way of conceptualizing this. My PhD is partly concerned with how increasingly distributed learner-centred networks may be challenging such community-based concepts of learning. Wenger recognizes most of us engage in (often overlapping) multi-membership, but when the networks of participation and discourse we create become so numerous, complex and disparate, do models such as communities of practice still hold true?

Whilst encouraging individual tool selection and distributed communication, it strikes me that the proposed CCK09 processes of identity tagging and aggregation also reinforce Wenger’s community-based principles of mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire.

The next seminar is at the more Eurozone-friendly time of 4pm CST on Thursday September 17.

References

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning and identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Lurking and Participation”

  1. Virginia Yonkers Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 3:24 am

    Overall, I agree with the theory of connectivism, but I feel it is too one dimensional. I believe the relationships are more complex that belonging to one or two communities of practice. Rather, a person will decide which community to access at any given time or place.

    I found Skitka’s social identity model (Skitka, L. (2003). Of different minds: An accessible identity model of justice reasoning. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7(4), 286-297.) is a good explanation of the complexity of the relationship between the individual personality, the group, and the community. I strongly recommend you read it (don’t let the “justice reasoning” aspect turn you away) as it might give you some direction on the individual/group/community interaction.

  2. andy Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 10:46 am

    Thanks for the recommendation Virginia. I’m unable to access a digital version of Skitka’s paper through my University subscriptions. Do you know of an open access version on the Web or do you have a soft copy you could send me? Thanks.

  3. Virginia Yonkers Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 7:17 pm

    I found it here on the internet in Pdf form.

  4. Andy Coverdale Says:
    September 19th, 2009 at 4:38 pm

    That’s great. I look forward to reading it. Many thanks.

Leave a Reply