Download a PDF copy of the report

How do you show that a network’s activities have changed the performance of its members in their practice? And, how do you use that information to feed into a vision of where the network should go next?

That’s how we used a new version of our value-creation framework for a learning network whose members come from different countries in Southern Africa.

For this network one project cycle was coming to an end and a new one was beginning. Not only had we collected many value-creation stories to show the connection between network activities and changes in public finance management in their respective countries, but we also used the value cycles in the framework to look at what the project had aspired to in the beginning, what happened, and what should happen in the next phase of the project.

The report I produced for the project summarizes the new version of our framework (based on the original framework, but now substantially expanded) and demonstrates how this new framework can be used to provide a strategic tool for evaluating and shaping a big social learning project.

Highlights on using this updated framework:

• What was really powerful in this session was the combination of value creation stories and indicators at each cycle. This is what the framework is about – not just value-creation stories as is often interpreted.
• In a meeting that was potentially fraught with political tensions the framework gave a shared language for understanding what had happened and for negotiating the way ahead in a productive and transparent way. In particular the strategic and enabling value cycles helped to surface some of the most serious places of disconnect in the functioning of the project.
• We collected value-creation stories for nearly four years. During this time most network members felt that collecting these stories was a hoop to jump through to keep project funders happy. But when they were put together into a strategic document based on the framework, network leaders finally realized the power of their stories for their own network learning.
• The idea of feedback loops was extremely helpful for showing how learning comes from talking about successes and failures and that both need to be integrated into the discourse of the network.

Cautions

• It is very time and resource intensive to collect and refine good value-creation stories and the data for the different cycles. We collected hundreds of partial stories; it took persistence to follow up with people to complete them. There were only about fifty stories that went through all cycles (often at a stretch) and around twenty stories that were really good.
• Next time it should be easier because people will now have some good models of stories and see the value of collecting them. But it will take discipline to turn the telling and recording of stories (and the feedback loops) into a regular network practice.
• In the real world – certainly the one I live in – the process of collecting data is much more messy than people realize. And it’s certainly not linear. It was more of a bricolage as we went back and forth between people, stories and indicators, scraping out time, improvising, and making up tools as we went.

In my visiting professor position at Manchester University and during the course of social theories of learning I co-teach there, I have often been challenged to articulate how my own theorizing relates to other theories, such as Activity, Structuration, or Actor-Network theories, or the work of people like Bourdieu, Foucault, Gee, and Holland.

I have also been challenged to explain why certain issues of traditional interest in social theory are not directly addressed, for instance, socio-political and organizational structures, class, gender, or race.

Recently the Manchester group invited me to reflect on what I have learned from these questions in a chapter for a book they were publishing.

The result is a kind of meta-theory of progress in social theory. I call it the discipline of plug-and-play. The idea is that in the social sciences, the real challenge is to have theories run through each other rather than to replace each other in a quest for some grand unifying theory.

While plug-and-play suggests something easy for the user, it is in fact a very demanding discipline for the designer. Applied to social theorizing, the plug-and-play metaphor suggests that theorists have to work hard to define the essence of their theory so that people can understand its modular place in the broader system of social theory. This way researchers can apply some rigor to combining theories when it serves their purpose, rather than looking for everything within a single theory.

In my chapter I suggest three dimensions of theories to pay attention to for more pug-and-play rigor: purpose, stance, and technical language.

My chapter is called “The practice of theory: confessions of a social learning theorist” and you can download the last draft in my possession:

Download plug and play paper here

P.S. As the comment below suggests, I forgot to include the citation in the original post:

Wenger-Trayner, E. (2013) The practice of theory: confessions of a social learning theorist. In Farnsworth, V. and Solomon, Y. (Eds.) Reframing Educational Research: Resisting the “What Works” Agenda. Routledge.

Theoretically it represents a new step in the evolution of the theory:

• We focus on landscapes of practice, rather than single communities or networks as a key locus of social learning capability.
• We introduce the concept of knowledgeability as an outcome of learning with respect to a landscape, which includes a lot of practices in which one cannot claim competence. Theoretically knowledgeability is a landscape-level counterpart to the concept of competence, which is defined at the level of communities of practice.

These are significant developments, whose full implications we are now exploring in our current writing.

Practically we identify the role of systems conveners. These are people who work at the landscape level to enable new forms of social learning capability. We involve people we are working with to explore the role:

• We discuss key dimensions of the role: its challenges, the traits of people who do this, and what a social learning approach looks like.
• We co-author two case studies of ambitious systems convening projects.

In addition to our chapters, our co-authors use stories to explore various aspects of living a landscape of practice, including the emotional and political dimensions of boundary crossing, brokering, multimembership, and visiting practices along one’s journey.

Wonder how these developments resonate with you?

Communities of practice and social learning systems:
the career of a concept

This article was written by Etienne in 2009 for a textbook co-published by the Open University and Springer. It does two things. It relates the conceptual framework of communities of practice to systems theory and it reviews the career of the concept of community of practice since its inception in Etienne’s work with Jean Lave in 1987.

Contents

Download

You can download a PDF version of the paper here:

Citation

Wenger, E. (2010) Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Blackmore, C. (Editor) Social Learning Systems and communities of practice. Springer Verlag and the Open University.

Participation in this project crystallized some initial thoughts on social learning capability, which are captured here. The topic is now becoming a major thrust of our work.

Contents

Download

You can download a PDF version of the paper in English here:

A portuguese translation is also available:

Citation

Wenger, E. (2009) Social learning capability: four essays on innovation and learning in social systems. Social Innovation, Sociedade e Trabalho. Booklets 12 – separate supplement, MTSS/GEP & EQUAL Portugal, Lisbon.

In our value assessment framework, published by the Open University of the Netherlands, we identify five levels of value creation of a community or network:

• Cycle 1. Immediate value: the activities and interactions between members have value in and of themselves
• Cycle 2. Potential value: the activities and interactions of cycle 1 may not be realized immediately, but rather be saved up as knowledge capital whose value is in its potential to be realized later.
• Cycle 3. Applied value: knowledge capital may or may not be put into use. Leveraging capital requires adapting and applying it to a specific situation.
• Cycle 4. Realized value: even applied new practices or tools are not enough. A change in practice does not necessarily lead to improved performance, so it is important to find out what effects the application of knowledge capital is having on the achievement of what matters to stakeholders …
• Cycle 5. Reframing value: this happens when learning causes a reconsideration of how success is defined. It includes reframing strategies, goals and values…

For a reliable picture of how the community is creating value we would have to follow the value creation across these different cycles. To do this we collect “value creation stories”. Value creation stories and indicators (qualitative or quantitative) at each cycle are complementary. The idea is to generate a value-creation matrix that combines qualitative and quantitative data into a rich picture of the value created by learning in these social contexts.

Sponsors, evaluators and leaders of communities and networks should be able to use the framework and accompanying toolkit.

Contents

• clarifications about the distinct learning value of communities and networks respectively
• a conceptual framework to understand the value from such learning in terms of five cycles of value creation
• examples of indicators for each cycles
• a template for telling stories that account for value creation
• a toolkit for collecting data

Download

You can download the full text in PDF format here:

Citation

Wenger, E., Trayner, B., and de Laat, M. (2011) Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework. Rapport 18, Ruud de Moor Centrum, Open University of the Netherlands.

See also

There are some resources on evaluating communities of practice and networks on the CPSquare wiki and on the KM4dev wiki. Nancy White looks at three different perspectives on evaluating communities on a video on her blog.

The first four cycles in this framework are an adaptation of the four-level model of Donald Kirkpatrick (1976, 1994), which has become a standard in the training and program evaluation literature (the fifth cycle is an addition we have made specifically for the work of communities). An early version of this adaptation appeared in chapter 8 of the book Cultivating communities of practice.