Virtual Interconnectedness:Potentials and Limitations for

Communication and Cooperation

Renate MotschnigResearch Lab for Educational Technologies,

University of Vienna, Austria

renate.motschnig@univie.ac.at

Overview

• Goals• Experiences from “teaching“ and learning• Personal experiences from international

cooperation• Communities of Practice (CoP)• Significant Learning Communities (SLC)

– goals, structure, online-support

• Relevance for the ADPCA community?– Do we want to become a SLC?

Workshop Outcome

• Broadened perspective on online communication

• Understanding of the concept of a significant learning community (SLC)

• Optional: requirements and initial steps towards becoming a SLC

Experiences from Teaching/Learning (1)

• Face-to-face phases are more effective, if students can loosely prepare themselves in advance– Transparent goals, expectations, gross idea...

• Face-to-face phases are (finally) more effective, if they can be continued online.– Continued does not mean finilized!

• “effective“:– leading to further thougt or sharing – offering perspectives that have meaning

• Is “more effective“ solely a cognitive issue?

Experiences from Teaching/Learning (2)

• Writing makes issues persistent, you can return to them as often as you like, thus iterating towards more meaning and insight.

• Writing things up often makes them clearer.– Explicit expression, wording, required– Need to put ideas in a sequence to make sense.

• Most students generally prefer to meet personally with their team, if time allows for this.– In particular in the beginning

Experiences from Teaching/Learning (3)

• Students tend towards having “public“ reaction sheets (e.g. on a learning platform)

• Students tend to favor non-anonymous reactions and comments

• In workshops, face-to-face discussion of online reaction sheets is a significant aid to furthering the process, to improving the climate in a group.

• With modern technology, contact can continue between sessions. Some issues may be resolved in this way.

Experiences from Teaching/Learning (4)

• ...any mix means more time investment. • Blending ways of expression seems to be more

acceptant of the individual preferred ways of expression:– Many more quiet students write insightful reactions.– Those who miss a session can catch up more easily– Intentions, observations, feelings? tend to become more

explicit and conscious. Sharing them has a similar tendency like sharing face-to-face.

• Blended ways of expression appear to accellerate the group process. Hypothesis: More sharing more trust?

Experiences from blended cooperation

• Alternating phases are supportive• Initial personal contact makes a huge difference• Face-to-face meetings can be used more

meaningfully• Structured, interactive space tends to be helpful,

in particular, if more people cooperate• There is a need for notification or constant

interest or habits one can rely on

Participants‘ experiences

Communities of Practice (CoP)(Lave and Wenger, 1991)

• " a set of relations among persons, activity and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping CoPs".

• Typically, members of CoPs have a shared set of interests and are motivated to do something about them and are self-generating. “

• A CoP is organized around a "practice."

Communities of Practice

Qualities that define a "practice": • Joint Enterprise.

– The members of a CoP are there to accomplish something on an ongoing basis;

– they have some kind of work in common and they see clearly the larger purpose of that work. They have a "mission." 

• Mutual Engagement. – The members of a CoP interact with one another not just in the course

of doing their work but to clarify that work, to define how it is done and even to change how it is done.

– Through this mutual engagement, members also establish their identities at work.

• Shared Repertoire. – The members of a CoP have not just work in common but also

methods, tools, techniques and even language, stories and behavior patterns. 

– There is a cultural context for the work.

From CoP‘s to Significant Learning Commmunities

• The idea of a Significant Learning Community (SLC) is to further long lasting, significant relationships of persons who want to learn from each other in some significant way. The members of a SLC may follow some shared mission (in the minimal case to significantly learn from one another) or some subject matter of common interest to them. Each might have their specific goals, yet learn from the personal as well as professional experience of the other.

• An SLC is organized around a “way of becoming“

Significant Learning

• “Significant learning combines the logical and the intuitive, the intellect and the feelings, the concept and the experience, the idea and the meaning. When we learn in that way, we are whole.” (Rogers, 1983) S. 20.

getProfile on Learning

What is you major source of learning? Select 0 to two fields. (208)

15 %books

20 %courses, workshops

39 %colleagues, teamwork

4 %others

22 %Internet: tutorials, forum, etc.

Towards Significant Learning Communities: current observation:

• Source of initial idea: – Students who have participated in encounter groups tend to

build good working relationships, write excellent theses as single persons or cooperate on shared topics.

– Some of them stay in contact long after the group has ended. They send emails, appreciate meeting person to person and have sincere interest in repeating the encounter experience.

– This appears to be a decent basis for mutual, informal, but significant learning from one another as well as the group processes.

• Argumentation, reasoning:– Given the encouraging research and personal as well as

professional benefits of both encounter groups and virtual knowledge communities, such as the open source movement, it appears only natural to put these two together in to a combined framework.

Significant Learning Communities:basic idea and motivation

• This proposal builds on the ideas of the PCA in suggesting an effective way that may help humans of the knowledge society to develop as whole persons with feelings as well as meanings, personal and professional interests, demands on sharing as well as privacy, in settings of presence and distance, both real and virtual.

• In a society in which there is less time for social family life and yet the demands on social skills at work are rising, this contribution aims to suggest an initial approach towards what we chose to call “Significant Learning Community” to be evolved while it is lived and discussed with interested participants.

Significant Learning Communities:characterisation and distinction

• centered in persons as whole organisms• combine the personal with the professional, the intellectual with the

intuitive, cognitions with feeling, meanings and skills • governed by the participants’ dispositions of congruence,

acceptance, and empathic understanding• openness, resourcefulness and skill/competence with respect to

some common purpose, mission, or (typically transdisciplinary) field of interest.

• central component are encounter groups for allowing personal growth. Yet, SLC have a longer life period than typically short or time-limited encounter groups

• Participants in SLC typically are virtually connected and can share meanings, ideas, feelings, experiences, any time and anywhere

• persistence, virtual connectedness, and common purpose are the main distinguishing criteria with respect to encounter groups.

• central focus on Person-Centered attitudes and a “way of becoming” are the main distinguishing criteria regarding other kinds of groups and communities.

Significant Learning Communitiescharacteristic features

• Long lived; open to members of any nation or culture;• Members or participants are first of all whole persons;• Congruent, acceptant, and understanding exchange of

meaning, feeling, significant learning;• Having some purpose/goal/mission in common, at least

to provide significant learning for their members;• Regular encounter group or special purpose community

meetings and virtual interconnectedness;• Interdependence of members: they support one another

in their respective interests;• Reflect their practices and processes, develop as

persons as well as community.

Significant Learning Communities:role of the web

• Sharing of facts, circumstances, situations, processes: what is going on; this may form a basis or landscape for coming meetings

• process reflection; locating where we are;• provision of continuity of contact between encounters;• coming back to group situations and enriching them with

current meaning, consider them in their relevance and transfer to practice outside of meetings;

• encouraging the contact/expression of persons who tend to be more reserved in spontaneous expression or who have missed a meeting;

• provision of shared, “materialized” resources that can be attended to and complemented, improved cooperatively.

• Fast surveys are possible fast orientation and reaction

Do we need more than email?

• Parameters: size of community, tasks, goals• What gets complicated with mailing lists?

– Working on one task concurrently, e.g. Collecting addresses, making agreements, collecting materials

– Working on several issues, following and coming back to multiple threads of discussion

– Issues that interest some but not all– Heavy email traffic when having little time

screenshot for peer evaluation

Relevance for the ADPCA community: participants‘ view

Relevance for the ADPCA community

• Better and faster information flow • More and more effective sharing• Intercultural communication and connectedness• Facilitative relationships between subgroups of

participants between meetings; networking• Support for distant cooperation between

members• Common knowledge base

ADPCA community as SLC

• What do you think?• Can you think of any benefit for you?• Would you like to try it out? • Which dangers/risks do you see?• Which features and information should the

interactive webspace have?• What needs special care?• What are the next steps to take?

ADPCA community as SLCpersonal view

• Cost: time• Benefits: accelleration of PCA research

– On encounter groups (compare Jill Jones questionnaire and paper)

– On new media in and approaches to learning– On organizational development, ...

• Fast surveys, questionnaires• Feedback and discussions on your work• Mutual support, responses to questions, starting

cooperations, planning and organisation of workshops

Finally...

• Thank you for your attention!

• Every viewpoint or contribution is welcome!

Questions

• Are there any problems that writing between face-to-face sessions (learning, counseling, encounter groups) might have? E.g.– undesired effects – effects that diminish personal growth

• What do you think about encounter-groups with online process reflection and sharing?– What could be compromised thereby?– What could be improved thereby?