Community-Sittin on the "Front Porch"

Well, I feel I understand community much better than the other two themes in the class. I understand it in the formal academic sense that Scott loves us to write about so much, and I understand it non-formally, almost, in a family way(not THAT family way). I will begin with the formal.

To borrow from one of my “heavy” Wenger posts of the last few weeks:

*Today, I, along with the rest of us, examine my mode of alignment with the practices recommended by the CI597 community: Facebooking, Twittering, checking our readers twice a day, sharing our personal selves in public venues, pouring heart and soul out in weekly blog posts. As we read Wenger this week we are able to put names to practices that we have been engaging in. We imagine our place in the group—we are/are not accepted, we are part of something new and bigger than ourselves, Cole and Scott love us and will have a relationship with us after the class, or we don’t relate to these practices, we don’t feel the groups are including me, we don’t see how these technologies will be useful…and any reaction in-between. We are not certain what our classmates think of us, but we can only imagine our place in the community by what we feel and the feedback we get. We imagine the possibilities of continued participation, and imagine how it will feel when this class is over. Will our identity change when we are not required to participate? Will the community still exist for continued participation? How will I be changed by all of this at the conclusion of the community? Who will I be? * ——- Well, it is now the end of the f2f CI597. There has been some noise in the Twittersphere about trying to keep the community going in virtual world. I believe the community that will continue on for a while will be the “Tweets”—Team Tweet anyway. Becky pointed out that we have a natural inclination to want to communicate. I am certain that this is true for us as well, but as people go their different ways, however, the common purpose, the affilation, the shared experience that bound the community will begin to fade. As with friendships, perhaps communities exist for a reason or a season, and that i how it is meant to be.

In another former post, “Can’t We Just All Belong” it *is the mix of modes of belonging and their related identities of participation and non-participation that makes up, and is made up of, the extent to which we identify with our ‘practice’ and are able to control and negotiate meanings within it. At the beginning of the class we all had equal opportunity to belong. As the community built, we had varied experiences and developed a sense of where we fit in all of this…(defies a descriptor, fill in your own here__)or as our fearless leaders call it, “the GRAND EXPERIMENT”.

*—-The reason for our community of practice will be over. We will scatter and strengthen our affiliations with other communities, and our practice will veer away from this class.

However, what I have learned from this experience will not fade as I veer off into old/ new territory. I learned that building shared experience- using the technology or not-helps to strengthen relationships that bind communities. I learned that reaching the right people(Paul Revere) at the right time, builds desire to affiliate. I learned that some people will always be joiners (early adopters) and some people will never be joiners and that is OK. The wonderful thing about humans is that there are so many kinds of people with so many varied interests and confidences and needs, that community-building becomes an art, and even somewhat of a science. To become a harbinger of change, one needs to read the stakeholders, assess the need, find the leaders, and then work the Wengerian magic….

How technology builds community in teaching and learning is the same way community builds in real life. Analogically, “Twitter”, let’s say, can be compared to a city block full of neighbors. A short story might suffice to put this in context.

When I was little we lived with my Grandparents in a row home. If you note on the photo, all the porches are connected. If we wanted something or someone to play with, we would lean over the railing and yell into the neighbor’s front door, “Hey, what are you doing?” Actually I would yell, “Yo, Johnnn-eee”, or whoever’s name I needed. The neighbor would either come to the door or not, or tell me what is up, or not. We had phones(I am not that old) but it was better to lean over and yell.

I guess what I am trying to say is that the technology has become analogous to the front porches, where people sat out every night and chatted about inane and unrelated things of little import. But, through those shared experiences we built community, friendships, alignment (everyone had an awning, everyone had porch furniture that got put away in November). Those were good times growing up that I had forgotten until this semester. The Twitter community that I have now is analogous to my neighborhood. We just ‘be’, and voice the daily living dramas, the joys, the frustrations. We are standing on our porches, being neighbors, building community. The neighborhood may change, but the analogy holds. Some porches may be the formal sort of the people of privilege such as a new teacher network or , and the platform(porch) may be less down home than Twitter, or Pligg, but we still put ourselves out on the porches for all to see. Much like in any community, people will think what they may when the see you and yours, and you may not even know what they think. Identity from community.

So, our office chairs become porch swings, and the computer the railing….

Yo, (insert neighbor name here)…………., Whatcha doing after class?