TEX2ALL

In my last post I left the reader in a bind–what are we supposed to do in the face of an unresponsive hierarchy? Here are some thoughts in response to Dave Snowden, a grander thinker than I could ever hope to be, in response to my prayer.

Cognitive Edge: Communities of Practice:

I was an observer in a debate recently on the question of whether a community of practice had to be self-organising, or if it could be directed. My own view is that communities can evolve, but cannot be designed top down.

So begins one of my favorite education writers although I think he might be more appropriately thought of as a learning advocate. So how do we learn? By ourselves and in groups, but Snowden is more interested in how we learn within communities. I suppose that technically no one is outside of a community when he or she learns, but much of what we call education these day seems isolating and by oneself.

My own view is that communities can evolve, but cannot be designed top down.

I agree with him. But the fact is that most of us work in learning communities that are hierarchically organized. We work in communities which we have had no part in helping to create or evolve. Yet most of us in edblogging circles continue to be surprised that our systems are so hidebound and controlling and reactionary. This institutional imperative to survive runs counter to the change needed to evolve and successfully survive. What the hell do we do? LIke the Internet, we try to route around the obstacle. We create alternate, parallel, subversive learning nodes, sometimes with individual students, less often with colleagues, and almost never with the keyholders in the Central Office. We evolve our own communities. How do we do this?

I think it is correct to say that Wenger and others in their initial work study the outcome of an evolutionary process. …this is a characteristic of management science, which bases itself on retrospective coherence.

Look at the extraordinary phrase, “retrospective coherence”. This is more than hindsight being 20/20. Snowden points out that most successful communities have been studied bassackwards. Etienne Wenger, the granddaddy of community of practice (CoP) research, studied various successful communities at the tail end of their success and extrapolated backwards from those end products to generalize on what has made them successful. Snowden posits that “… you can not replicate the end point of an evolutionary process.” Successful communities do not follow set formulae. They are not retrospectively coherent.

Snowden outlines two “disastrous” courses that rise from this mistake. First, we create an

organisational template for communities of practice, with a full roll out plan, dedicated staff etc. etc. This is the classic engineering approach which assumes that there must be a top down, designable RIGHT answer.

Why is it a disaster? Because we make the classic mistake of creating predictive models from complex systems. Communities grow “differently in different ways in different times.” This is not a truism, but reflects what should be perfectly obvious. Ready, fire, aim, not ready, aim, fire. How did the marksman learn to hit the target? Speaking retrospectively, was it focus? Yes. Good eyes? Yes. An excellent and well-calibrated sight? Yes. All of those things, but more than any of those is the first ten thousand rounds in which all of those came to bear on the final result–the bullseye.

Better to create the right ecology in which different types of collaboration can take place, and then consolidate successful experiments when (and only if) they or the organisation can benefit from formalism.

Create an ecology, evolve, consolidate, formalize. I suppose the current hierarchy is at the far end of the formalization process. Those of us working in a Web X.X world are working to create a new ecology within the old one. Small pieces loosely joined to use Weinberger’s phrase. What does that mean? What are we teachers to evolve into? I think of myself more and more as a witch doctor working the hoodoo and voodoo of the net to magic this new learning ecology. I prescribe old magic like stories and mix it with new magics like weblogs and wikis. On its face that seems preposterous, but considering the pace of invention surrounding the new mashup innovations is it any more absurd than von Neumann’s computer?

What’s the second disaster?

Taking a paternalistic (or maternalistic approach) in which people are held to be children or kids needing help or assistance.

This is even more disturbing. We are being asked to give up the abiding premise of our school experience: the product of teaching is learning. As curriculum designers, lesson planners, syllabus makers we practice a form of retrospective coherence. Snowden in effect says down with that. In the beginning at least we must give up this hierarchical structure in lieu of “an environment in which people can play with multiple tools, moving some of the results to a formal environment, when and if needed.” Sounds like improvisation to me. I have used a country saying for years that argues the same point, “Put the food down where the goats can get to it.”

Create an ecology, evolve, consolidate, formalize. Is that all? No, Snowden takes the last and inevitable step,

Formal communities need to have a cycle of destruction and rebirth built into them otherwise they will be come a force of conservatism.

To quote Gramsci, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.“ There are many extensions to the metaphor of “learning as ecology”, but I think that this last one is potentially the most disturbing: are we trying to occupy the same ecological niche? Must the old dinosaur die off before the new ones can spread their memes? All I can say is that sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

tellio :: Nov.26.2006 :: Good Reading :: No Comments »