Day: December 15, 2011

Bringing Home Beauty and Wondonga Friends

Thanks to Geoff Young (@gsyoung), the vibrant and ever perapatetic host a few weeks ago at Wondonga TAFE, my Christmas presents will soon be moving from Australia to the US.

What I love about these two paintings, beyond their beauty, is that we found them in the student gallery at Wondonga TAFE as part of an Aboriginal show. So not only will our home be blessed by their beauty, but we have the pleasure of directly showing our gratitude to the students by buying them. I can think of no finer way to spend my travel money, and more important, ongoing time and attention than to the beauty of their art. Thank you Geoff for getting them to us and send our deep gratitude to the artists.

Our two new paintings from Wondonga TAFE students.

Instagram.

I might add a word about Geoff. Not only is he a Tweet-Meister, but he clearly is working social media and open education magic at his TAFE. Way to go, Geoff!

Planning and Evaluating Your CoP (amplifying and other good stuff)

Today JeffJackson tweeted an embedded link to this YouTube video from the USAID KM Impact Challenge video I did with them earlier this year.  I know – I posted this already, but Jeff’s note gave it a twist. And having hung out recently with Alan (aka cogdog) Levine in Tasmania last week, I am attending to his principle that in social media, we ADD value. We don’t just retweet, rebroadcast, etc. Jeff added value.

Here’s his note: “Check out @nancywhite ‘s Full Circle Associates on Communities of Practice (CoPs). Great way to review and consider how you develop your #PLN and #AltProDev.” Wow, I had not thought about this from the perspective of a PLN (personal learning network) but it sure does work. Thanks Jeff, for helping me see another perspective.  I used the same communities of practice framework the last three weeks in my workshops in Australia about teaching and learning online. We weren’t talking about CoPs, but the framework is useful. (More on that in a subsequent post, currently in edit stage!)

For a refresher, here is the video.

Nancy White discusses various aspects of strengthening CoPs, mechanisms to measure their effectiveness and improve our understanding of how people are participating in CoPs.

To access the two items referred to in the video, please visit:

Promoting and Assessing Value Creation in Communities and Networks: a Conceptual Framework:
http://wenger-trayner.com/resources/publications/evaluation-framework/

The Activity Spidergram
http://fullcirc.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/SpidergramWorksheet2011.pdf