The team created a great video report of our visit, including extracts from our keynote and workshops, as well as thematic snippets from a formal interview. (You have to click on “Next page” to see the videos – took us a while to see it!)

You can see this report on their website here.

They set a high bar for the careful editing and presentation of the videos!

Jacquie felt she got a lot out of it and we really enjoyed taking a deep dive into specific aspects of her projects, triggering new ideas, helping to consolidate dispersed ones, analyzing texts and situations, and being a critical friend to others.

It got us thinking how much we enjoy the creativity involved in customizing our frameworks and approaches to diverse situations and people. We have now widened our offerings of BEtreats (Bev Etienne retreats) to private and custom ones as well as our regular annual workshop in Grass Valley.

And let us know, if you would like to consider one for yourself or your team.

Learning to make a difference: a framework

The value created by learning in communities of practice or networks is not always easy to articulate in ways that make sense to participants, sponsors, and stakeholders. Yet it is something that needs to be done, not only for monitoring and evaluation, but also for optimizing the learning of the community.

We have developed a “value-creation framework” that focuses on how social learning makes a difference in the world via its effect on practice. The framework helps structure convincing accounts of the value of social learning by framing learning in terms of different cycles of value creation and loops between them. It integrates quantitative and qualitative data and can be used by professional evaluators as well as participants.

The framework is relevant through the lifecycle of a community or network. It can be used for articulating aspirations/conditions and risk/mitigation pairs for planning purposes. Closing ongoing value-creation loops between activities and practice then helps members fine-tune their learning as they go. And combining value-creation stories with monitored indicators brings rigor to the process of showing the value to participants and stakeholders. While originally developed for social learning in communities of practice and networks, the framework has been adopted for other contexts where social learning takes place, such as projects, workshops, and conferences.

We will present the framework and then take people through each of its cycles in relation to a project they are working on (or are about to start). It will be a chance to experience the usefulness of thinking of social learning as cycles of value-creation by applying the discipline of the framework to a familiar context.

Here is the text of my remarks:

Professor Kelley, distinguished guests, graduates, and friends of the University

It is a great honor to be here with you today to accept this honorary degree; and thank you, Mark, for your good words about my work.

And I am especially honored that this honorary degree is from the Open University, given the vision this university has of its function in the world: its commitment to offer higher education to everyone – and in many cases to teach in connection with practice.

And what a surprise! As Mark mentioned, I am mostly known for my work on social learning theory. I remember participating in an online conference and the organizers had high-school students introduce the speakers. We had a preparatory teleconference with these students and they asked me how one becomes a famous learning theorist. Well, you don’t.

You chug along, taking one step after the next, trying to pursue a question that you find important. For me, it was making sense of how we learn as human beings, given that we are fundamentally social beings. At the time, learning was mainly viewed as putting stuff in your head. But for me it was, how do we make meaning with all that.

And then you happen to do something that is just right for the time. For me it was articulating the concept of a community of practice as the keystone of a learning theory. A community of practice is any group of people who interact and negotiate an area of human competence – a group of engineers in a company, academics in an area of research, or members of a street gang. And from that perspective, you can think about the human world as a complex landscape of a myriad of different and interrelated communities of practice.

Since then, this theory has had an amazing career because it has changed the way people think about learning. Viewed this way, learning is much more than simply the acquisition of information and skills.

Let me give you an example. The age of the universe is about 13.8 billion years. For most people this is a fact. Part of the basic curriculum.

But it is a bit more complicated than that. For instance, in the southern US, there are people who claim that the universe is 6000 years old.

Why do I think that the universe is 13.8 billion years old? I know something about how each community achieves its result. And I choose to be accountable to the products of the astronomers community of practice.

I also choose not to follow my own intuition about this result, which says that it should be a lot more. 13.8 billion is not all that large. It’s about 2 years for every human on earth today. Which is not that much. Much less that the budget of the department of defense.

So according to our learning theory a fact is a lot more complicated than a fact. It is an orientation to a landscape of practice. And there it becomes part of who I am to subscribe to this notion that the universe is 13.8 billion years old.

And I hope this university experience has helped you orient yourself in this complex world. Know who you are, where you are, where you can go, what you can do. What has been put in your head that can be tested in exams, this is stuff you can find by googling. But this perspective on the world, which expands the meaning of who you are, this is something precious that can’t be achieved so easily.

Developing this kind of knowledgeability about our world is really important today – because we have important work to do, to avoid misery in this world, and to avoid a total disaster. Nothing it guaranteed. It is up to us to make sure this human experiment is not a failure. And each of us has to orient ourselves in this complex landscape of practice to figure out how to do our part.

Thank you very much.

• State-of-the-art for principles and practice – July 7 – 10
• Cutting-edge to explore emerging issues – July 14 – 17
• Academic for theory and research – July 21 – 24

We keep the numbers small so we can work on each workshop member’s case together. And we keep the ratio of face-to-face:online at 2:1. So register for a place soon if you are sure you are coming!

And if you don’t want to commit yet, but want to stay in the loop, then just register your interest here.

Registration is now open for online or face-to-face participation

Early bird registration until April 30. Spaces are limited as the workshops are small and focused on working with the cases you bring.

• July 7 – 10: State-of-the art professional for a solid grounding in the practice
• July 14 – 17: Cutting-edge professional for exploring emerging issues
• July 21 – 24: Academic for theory and research

See a summary of previous BEtreats here.

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Lovely surroundings, delicious food and warm hospitality at the Estate was a wonderful way to launch our first BEtreat workshops outside our home in California.

As well as professionals and academics from South Africa we also had people participating from Sweden, France, Nigeria and Tanzania. Joining us online was someone from New York who was getting up at 3:00 a.m. to join us each day (applause) and someone from Italy.

It was a great mix of people and some deep dives into interesting cases. We were happy (and relieved) to know that we could reproduce the BEtreat atmosphere conducive to a sharp collective inquiry in another part of the world – both for face-to-face and online participants.

Hopefully this is the first of more to come…

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A primer BEtreat – July 9-13:

By popular demand we are holding a “State-of-the-art BEtreat” Primer BEtreat for people just venturing into this field and want to get a head start in knowing what to do. It will take place just before the regular BEtreat for anyone who wants to do both. The Primer is an introduction to the state of the art in cultivating communities and networks for social learning. It would also be good for people who want to review the basic principles of the field.

BEtreat 2012 – July 16-20:

As usual we’ll have our cutting-edge BEtreat for community and network leaders. The theme is Social Learning, a term that is getting traction recently.

Academic BEtreat – July 3–August 3

As promised we’ll also hold an Academic BEtreat on social learning theory for researchers and students who can bring their work in progress for some collective thinking and inspiration.

Certificate program – July 2012-July 2013:

Finally in response to a number of requests we are offering a year-long professional program which includes participation in two BEtreats and orientation throughout the year with a specific project – starting July 2012.

Sign up before February 15 to get the early-bird discount.

• excited to share some of the resources we’re creating and to hear how people are using them;
• keen to answer some frequently answered questions;
• looking forward to thinking out loud as we reflect on what we’re learning from specific events;
• happy to publish news updates of events we’re organizing or places we’re going;
• considering some general ramblings.

You’ll be able to subscribe – by RSS or email – to all blog posts or to a specific category.