These opportunities raise issues for those of us involved in the learning profession as content developers, advisors, accreditors, evaluators, and, well, as learners ourselves.  How do we evaluate informal online learning experiences writ large – and for what?  How does evaluation of informal learning differ from assessing more formal online and face to face opportunities? What are emerging practices? How do we measure successes and how can we facilitate deeper learning? How do we understand learners’ experiences? In what ways do these opportunities and assessments interact with more formal learning?

What are your questions? How have you addressed these challenges? What experiences and resources do you have to share?

Already immersed in evaluating informal and self-paced adult learning? Starting to dip your toes into this domain? Just plain interested in some good learning-based conversation? … Well, come on over and join  SCoPE’s upcoming 3-week  seminar, Evaluating Informal and Self-Paced Adult Learning. We look forward to your participation in a community exploration of this topic, which launches on Monday, April 13th.

Below is the official description:

Informal learning is a key part of our personal development. It is also becoming a larger part of our working lives. But in an era of increasing accountability, we begin to question the role of evaluation for informal / self-paced adult learning…

• What are existing rationales for evaluation of informal / self-paced adult learning (for the learner and the provider/developer)?
• What accountability do we have to learners / providers/ funders?
• What’s different about evaluating informal learning vis a vis formal learning?
• What are emerging practices for evaluation informal / self-paced adult learning?
• What are some challenges in the field?
• What are the opportunities in the field?

During this 3-week seminar, we will begin to address these and other questions as we informally learn about the role and practice of evaluation in informal learning.

The seminar discussions are hosted on the SCoPE site – and be sure to join us on Friday, April 24, 21:00 GMT; 3pm ET for a live webinar (click here for time zone calculator). [updated to reflect correct time]

The seminar is coordinated by SCoPE’s Sylvia Currie, and is facilitated by William Owen, University of Northern British Columbia, and yours truly, Caren Levine, education consultant.

In many ways, this seminar relates to a previous SCoPE seminar on Informal Learning, which was facilitated by Sarah Haavind and Nancy White in 2006.

The seminar is free – just register on the SCoPE site to participate.  We look forward to seeing you there!!

Something felt odd about the question and, at first, I was not able to pinpoint what it was.  I mentioned a few conferences I had attended in the past year or two, but again, something kept nagging at me.  And then the lightbulb finally went off.

Over the past few years, I would say that my participation in professional development and learning has increased exponentially.  No exaggeration.  Not only that, but I have been able to create my own personalized menu of learning opportunities based on my various interests.

I am involved in communities of practice with other educational and job-alike/interest-alike professionals (which tend to cross professional boundaries, actually), and I have built up an incredible professional learning network through membership organizations and conferences as well as through online communities.

Most if not all of my more “formal” professional development activities recently have been mediated through online events – webinars, elearning, virtual enviroments (Second Life) and of course, ye olde conference calls. Admittedly, my professional life takes place mostly online, so I do not represent the typical educator. But I am seeing a growing trend toward the integration of online community and learning in the educational, nonprofit, and business worlds. And many of those people who are online are in fact people who are in the trenches, who turn to online communities for their professional and emotional nurturing in addition to face to face opportunities.

I’m not sure what this all means, except that I have been able to access people and resources that otherwise would have been difficult if not impossible to interact with. And I have been able to customize my own learning agenda and tap into experiences that are personally and professionally meaningful to me. Maybe this is the educational equivalent of the “Long Tail.”

[Note: a version of this post was published on jlearn2.0]

(cross-posted on jlearn2.0). A few posts ago, we wrote about personal and organizational “friending” policies on social networks like Facebook.

Many thanks to Shayna Kreisler, BBYO’s Director, Education and Teen Initiatives, and her colleagues for their willingness to share their organization’s social networking policy. BBYO is a provider of identity-building and leadership development programs for Jewish teens with over 80 years of experience, serving communities, alum, staff, and volunteers worldwide.

BBYO’s policy for staff and volunteers on social networking sites, internal to BBYO and external:

Staff/Volunteer Presence on Social Networking Sites

The bullets below provide guidelines for professional staff, advisors, summer staff, and volunteers coexisting with BBYO participants on social networking sites (b-linked, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger,
etc.):

• BBYO professionals, advisors, summer staff and volunteers are not prohibited from appropriately communicating with teens via general instant messenger programs.
• BBYO professionals, advisors, summer staff and volunteers shall refrain from any proactive one-on- one communications with teens on social networking sites. They may accept invitations to profiles, groups, and events, but may not initiate any type of communication with teens. Responses to teen-initiated communications should be limited to those that are BBYO-related. Public one-on-one communications (i.e. posting a comment to a wall) are discouraged at all times.
• Mass (one-to-many) communication from these sites is not prohibited provided that the content is appropriate and BBYO-related. However, since BBYO is a youth-led organization, staff should utilize teen leaders to broadcast virtual messages to teen online communities before issuing any type of information online (message board posts, group messages) themselves.
• BBYO professionals, advisors, summer staff and volunteers must recognize that they are role models for Jewish teens at all times, and should limit their public profile to information, comments, photos, etc. that are appropriate should a teen or parent view them.
• BBYO professionals, advisors, summer staff and volunteers agree to be respectful of BBYO, its teens and its policies in all postings in profiles, blogs and other mediums of Internet communications.
• BBYO professionals, advisors, summer staff and volunteers agree not to use a social networking profile, group page, blog, or other Internet medium to discuss behavior that is prohibited by BBYO policy or the Code of Conduct, including, but not limited to, alcohol or drug use, sexual behavior, delinquent behavior, etc.
• All official BBYO and BBYO program related correspondence must be initiated via email or through the BBYO dashboard.
• Official BBYO program websites must be maintained on www.bbyo.org and www.b-linked.org, however teens may (and are encouraged to) use non-BBYO sites to market and promote their programs. All non-BBYO site publicity should push other teens back to www.b-linked.org to register for the program. BBYO staff may neither initiate non-BBYO website program promotions nor use the non-BBYO site for post-event follow up.
• Should a professional, advisor, summer staff or volunteer choose to maintain a virtual presence and see something on a teen’s profile that is immoral and/or illegal, it is the responsibility of the adult to notify their field services supervisor. The supervisor will provide guidance on any next steps (to possibly include notifying the online community, the teen’s parents, appropriate state agency, and/or law enforcement). Representatives of BBYO have a legal and moral obligation to protect BBYO teens and acts of omission, in this case, are considered far more detrimental than acts of commission.

Note how their online policy is consistent with BBYO’s teen leadership values and culture in general and social networking strategies. For example, teens are encouraged to share and market programs and events that are meaningful to them on other sites where they reside and have influence.

On a related topic, check out Beth Kanter’s recent blog posts. Beth writes from another perspective, looking at managing digital identities on social networks here and social networking strategies for organizations here.

How do we welcome people into our communities of practice?

Recently I was asked to compile ideas and resources about welcoming new members into a community of practice. The group I am involved with is a meta-CoP of professionals who work in Jewish communal organizations – that is, a community of practice whose members facilitate communities of practice. They represent the fields of informal and formal education, camps, social work, arts, religion, philanthropy, and more – in other words, a mix of dedicated professionals trying to make the world a better place.

Below are ideas that emerged from this assignment – I welcome your thoughts!

Welcoming is a complex process. Cultures have core welcoming narratives that help define and shape who they are. In the Jewish tradition, there is a midrash (Rabbinic commentary) about the biblical Abraham, who, along with Sara, was known for his hospitality. Abraham planted a tamarisk tree – eishel, in Hebrew – in Beer Sheva (Genesis 21:33). The Rabbis interpreted eishel as an acronym for “eating, drinking, and escorting,” the hallmarks of model host activities. The tree is a sign of hospitality; moreover, it is a tree that bears many seeds. Welcoming new members into our communities brings with it many potential rewards.

The role of welcoming
Welcoming is a two-way street; it is a transactional event. We often think of welcoming a new member as a way to introduce an individual to an established group. But it is also a way to highlight new connections between individuals and for the group to learn more about itself through the integration of the new member. Vibrant communities of practice are constantly renegotiating their identities.

Purposes of welcoming

• menschlekeit (being a good person, doing the right thing, the human thing) - hachnasat orchim (the mitzvah – social / holy obligation, deed, commandment – of hospitality)
• build relationships, the cornerstone of communities of practice; create shared identity and values
• facilitate movement from “legitimate peripheral participation” to participation in the culture of practice (Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, 2008)
• first steps toward induction into the community and the community’s initial introduction to member

Community entry and integration

• introduction to community members (who we are as individuals)
• introduction to the community (what we are, what we do, recent topics and events, resources and current discussions, organizational history and archives)
• introduction to community norms (community activities, community roles, netiquette, expectations, confidentiality and community boundaries, models of participation, FAQs)
• “help desk” (whom to turn to for assistance, technical issues)

Challenges in distributed communities

• establishing social presence and creating “conscious community”
• community access (understanding where the community is and how to access it, introduction to community tools, skills orientation to community tools and increased comfort level)

Planning Backwards

As we design welcome protocols for our communities, it is useful to think about the following:

• Looking back, what helped me feel a part of this community?
• I knew I had become a part of the community when…
• What encouraged me most to take an active role was…
  (discussion by LaDonna Coy on CPSquare)

How do we measure success?
What are some of your favorite tips and techniques?

I’ll share some strategies in a future post.

What’s in your welcome basket? How does it relate to the stories your community tells about itself? How does it reflect your community’s values and vision?

flickr credit: tylluan

One of mine is TinyUrl. You know how sometimes you want to include a url in an email that you are sending out, so you cut and paste it into the body of the message? Or if you are on the site, you might click “File” and “Send Link” on your browser to pull up an email message that includes the page address? And how sometimes that url link is pretty gosh darn long?

Like, for example, the link for this post:

http://www.etheoreal.com/techstew/2008/11/03/tinyurl-%e2%80%93-mighty-tool

Let’s wave some TinyUrl magic on it and presto…:

http://tinyurl.com/5m4mkk

TinyUrl is a site that converts reeeeaaaalllllyyyy loooonnnnnng urls into something much more manageable. It’s an extra step for the person sending out the url, true, but it saves on responding to emails from recipients who write back saying that the link that was sent is broken. Plus, it’s a learning opportunity for sharing some “tips and techniques” with colleagues that they can potentially adopt for themselves.

What’s in your bag of tricks?