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A tug of war at our 2009 family reunion: note the lurker in the white sunbonnet
I work for an international public company which is engaged in the stimulating task of adopting an Agile process for software envisioning and development. We have become a community of practice as we share and learn from one another. Together, we are looking at questions such as: What Agile techniques work for us and which don’t? How does the Agile process change the way we work together? What do we know we know? What are our best practices?
This is social learning, or informal learning, and everyone in the community of practice can join in.
However, not everyone participates equally. Jakob Nielson‘s study on participation inequality indicates that on interactive web sites, there is a tendency for most users to participate very little (if at all) and a few members of the community account for a disproportionately large amount of the activity. His research found that user participation generally follows a 90-9-1 Rule:
- 90% of users are “lurkers”
- 9% contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time
- 1% participate very often and account for most of the contributions
Can we apply the 90-9-1 rule to an online environment, such as our company’s wiki, where a community of practice meets every day for social learning? A casual review of who’s contributing to our corporate wiki seems to add credence to the 90-9-1 rule, for it is the same small number of people who are contributing to the wiki, day after day.
But — this begs a couple of questions:
- Does a person’s participatory role change over time?
- Is “lurking” a bad thing?
Does a person’s participatory role change over time?
Etienne Wenger describes five trajectories of participatory behavior in his 1999 book, Communities of Practice: Learning, meaing and identity:
- Legitimate peripheral participation, not fully participating (lurkers)
- Inbound, headed toward full participation
- Insider, fully accepted into the community
- Boundary, sustaining membership in related communities of practice and “brokering” interactions between them
- Outbound, in the process of leaving a community
The implication of Wenger’s five trajectories of participation is that a person’s participatory role can change over time. If so, the designer of social learning systems must think, in Wenger’s words: “…fundamentally in terms of rhythms by which communities and individuals continually renew themselves.”
Is lurking a bad thing?
Wenger describes the concept of legitimate peripheral participation as the process by which newcomers become experienced members and eventually old timers of a community of practice. They start by engaging in low-risk, basic activities (like reading someone else’s wiki post). This is a way that newcomers become acquainted with the tasks, vocabulary, and organizing principles of the community.
As I examine the patterns of participation in our company’s Agile community of practice, my goal is to uncover the rhythms of participation, to see if those newcomers become inbound, heading toward full participation. I wonder if I can unveil the ways in which this participatory role change can be facilitated by the “insiders”. I am interested to discover if we have “boundary” members, and how they behave. And what are the signs that someone is in the process of becoming “outbound”?
Comment on a sugar cane field building, Jamaica, 2009
In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, Al Gore used the occasion to warn us:
“We, the human race, are confronting a planetary emergency—a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. The Earth has a fever, and the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.”
Our noösphere is dis-eased. There are places in the noösphere where interactions are thin and lacking dimension. The connections between agents are sparse. An example occurs with large-scale organization which are not accountable to any civic entity, such as:
- transnational corporations which compete with each other for scarce resources, especially in Eurasia where extreme population growth makes massive demands on technological advance
- transnational churches
- some institutions of global governance, such as the World Bank
These are unaccountable organizations — agents with power which exceeds that of municipalities, provinces and nations. There are no standards for their behavior, and no way that any individual, or any existing civic entity can make it accountable. To use Benjamin Barber‘s language, these organizations are not interdependent with the rest of us. As a result, the energetic flow between these agents and the rest of us is compromised. The overall result is insufficiency in stewardship and distribution of physical resources, and longstanding global conflicts around those issues.
I invite you to visualize, however, a healthy noösphere which regulates the biosphere so that our planet can be sustained. Because I like the Earth, and I want it to be around in good shape for those who come after me.
How can we change those thin and flat interactions in some parts of the noösphere so that they become rich, juicy and lively?
We will have to learn, fast.
But will our current ways of learning support us?
Etienne Wenger argues passionately in his prospectus for Learning for a Small Planet, “Our current ways of learning have fallen behind; they are not up to the task. We need new models about how to proceed and new visions of what is possible. Learning how to learn is a key to taking our problems into our hands and solving them. We need a new blueprint for learning how to learn—as individuals, communities, organizations, nations, and as an interconnected world.”
Fundamental is changing our systems of formal education. Broadly speaking, young people are run through a linear, factory system to prepare them to work in linear, factory systems. Around the world, the design of educational systems reflects the theories of learning available at the time they were built—behaviorism, cognitivism, even the relatively conscious approach of constructivism. These educational systems, however, were not designed with an understanding of how human and non-human agents are interconnected and interdependent parts of the biosphere. In today’s educational systems, uneven or no consideration is given to many of the agents involved in learning, such as collective agents, analytical software, databases, feeds, and user interfaces. Reflecting a materialistic world view, knowledge is viewed as a thing that can transferred from head to head – not as a system or a process that involves the whole person and the whole network, or as described by George Siemens’ book, Knowing Knowledge.
Distance education researcher Stephen Downes has commented that distance education is at the crossroads: “On the one hand, we have developed tools and systems intended to support traditional classroom based learning. On the other hand, we could (should?) be developing tools and systems to support immersive learning. We should be developing for dynamic, immersive, living systems.”
We will have to make basic changes to our learning systems, in order to be able to grow thick connections in our own neural networks, or between persons and in our larger networks.
Patterns of learning: a labyrinth at Kirkridge Retreat Center
Let’s explore the fractal-like, interlaced, and multi-dimensional patterns of evolutionary cognitive behavior which comprise the global noösphere described by Tielhard de Chardin in his 1955 book, The Phenomenon of Man. In other words, patterns of learning.
But before that, I want to establish that yes, I do believe that life is movement, and that we human folk are evolving spiritually. Here is a summary of how it is going in my own family:
- My Wiebe and Funk grandparents had a basic faith in God which carried them from feudal Ukrainian villages, through the Russian revolution, to a bustling and prosperous involvement in Canadian prairie culture.
- My parents caught this faith from them and buttressed it with a system of intellectual beliefs constructed from a dedicated study of contemporary Christian theology.
- Then I came along, not a very faith-ful person, impatient with traditional religious belief systems, but eager to develop my consciousness of myself, the earth and its inhabitants, and the Mystery of this planet, this solar system, this cosmos.
- Someday, one of my great-great-etc-grandchildren will understand humankind’s place and purpose in the universe. So, that’s my own belief system.
This kind of evolution of consciousness is occurring both individually and collectively everywhere around the globe.
A glimpse of the noösphere: Nine Inch Nails tour on Google Earth
The collective part is the noösphere, the layer of consciousness, the self-organizing and evolving system of all the interacting intelligences on Earth, which includes our embodied brains as well as our cognitive artifacts, such as memes and language.
One could argue that the noösphere includes all the multiple human intelligences noted by Howard Gardner: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic and existential intelligence.
Another peek at the noösphere: garden plants at Catcha Falling Star, Negril, Jamaica
The noösphere also includes the intelligences of animals, plants, bacteria, rocks and water. All living systems are different sorts of knowledge working itself forward.
More agents in the noösphere: Power lines and vines on the West End, Jamaica
I also ascribe agency to non-living things, such as networked computer systems, cables, phone lines, wifi, radio frequencies, and so forth, which, (sorry, Marshall McLuhan), are not simply mechanical extensions of ourselves, but alive, too, somehow, as they intimately work with us and the rest of the biosphere in a process of continual restructuring (learning).
If a geography of the noösphere could ever be drawn, it would be like a fractal, in that it would be recursive, and self-referential. But somehow, at the same time there would be lots of novel bits, too. Because when connections are made, which is learning, something new is made.
