Learning 2012 Day 2

Today's focus: Professional practice and building a centre of competence

Today I focused on learning more about what others are doing and have been thinking about around building communities of practice in the field of learning.

The CIA (yes, THE CIA) has taken an interesting approach to developing their learning pros and also their new learning people and SMEs. They are creating a program that pairs masters with novices to work side by side in a kind of apprenticeship/ mentoring program that they call "tradecraft". They have taken this approach with their other  employees in transferring and mastering field, ahem, techniques that can't effectively be taught in a classroom or a lab setting. This way, the long held 'secrets of the trade' can be passed along to the people who will need to know and will need to use them.
Another interesting thing the CIA is doing is applying action based learning to their development team to help them capture lessons learned and grow in their own governance of the learning professional practice. Cool!

Along the same lines, I also had the opportunity to listen to Richard Culatta from the US Dept of Educational Technology talk about developing local communities of innovation to build better collaborative opportunities in developing people 'outside the box'. Richard recommends having an entrepreneur in residence to give you another way to think about scale and other ways of looking at your audience.

According to Culatta, Michael Porter says that regions that work together as a region work better together than groups that are geographically distributed and increase innovation hugely - you need education innovation clusters. To increase your innovation opportunities, you need to invite people who aren't in your workspace and partner with developers and entrepreneurs to see what you can do to help each other support and develop innovation for your area.

The last piece of today's quest to find information about professional practice is about growing online communities. The best advice I got in this respect is to:

• Take it slow. Communities take time to grow organically and you need to have patience. To help with managerial expectations of instant success, keep the bar low on the number of adopters at first.
• Give your community members something to look at and interact with right away. People don't have a lot of time these days and to have to imagine where they 'may' hang out later, its hard. Populate and encourage people to contribute. 
• Keep your audience and their location and their interaction styles in mind when selecting and developing a platform for hosting your online community. If you don't go where your audience is, they won't 'get' your community and you'll have an empty neighbourhood!