My apologies.

I apologize for acting like a brat today in class. I suffered a saturation of information, wherein my brain imploded, and I lost the ability to comprehend speech. If you're reading this in Pligg or a reader, I suggest you take a moment to relocate to my blog, because I used formatting with the intent of stressing key points.

Since we often discuss definitions, allow my take for a moment; again, I apologize if this was already said during discussion, as I completely zoned out:

Someone (I believe Brett?) posited that "shared value(s)" separates a community from a community of practice. There seemed to be some agreement here. I think, though, any community must inherently share some values. People mentioned things like proximity, repeated interactions, and communication as some things that make a community a community; while this is all true, I would argue that "living in an area with which we're all familiar," "interacting with others" and "communicating with others" are all shared values that define such a community. Of course, there are other values, such as "surviving cancer" or "appreciation of World of Warcraft," etc., which could define a community. One could also argue that words like "living," "interacting," "communicating," "surviving," or "appreciating" are examples of practices, but herein lies my difference between a community and a community of practice: I would argue that a community of practice has a shared goal (yes, this was said in class), which is different than a value. I think Wenger calls this "joint enterprise." A goal implies purpose and action, and it is this last bit that I think really differentiates the two. A community of practice is active, not passive (as an ordinary community can or may be). Of course, how you define "active" is another matter altogether.

Secondly, I voiced my frustrations after what seemed like an eternity of trying to figure out and define "boundary object." I think what happened is that the term and the idea got separated from the context; this is how the words "boundary object" began to take a concrete and physical nature. I don't want to define "boundary object" here, because this is not my intention. When I said that "I don't understand 'boundary object' outside the context of 'community,'" I meant just that. How can you have a "boundary object" without a community? What else does a "boundary object" create boundaries for/around? (Obviously, no one explicitly said that boundary objects could exist without communities, but when the arguments go around in circles multiple times, this is the meaning I start to get from the conversation.) When I said "context," I didn't mean that I need concrete examples. Examples can help sometimes, but I think they muddle the definitions when the definitions haven't been set yet. (Wenger is an excellent example of this.) By "context," I mean that a term like "boundary object" has no meaning when it is not applied to "community." Wenger writes (and I agree) that "meaning exists neither in us, nor in the world, but in the dynamic relation of living in the world" (p. 54); I could cite other scholars and such who also argue that meaning--or knowledge, information, whatever--is in the connections and therefore does not exist on its own. In fact, I think this is what we discussed two weeks ago in class when Betsy proclaimed that her head hurt.

Although I heard some kind of stifled, collective moan at the time, I for one was grateful to Becci for bringing up how one's identity could define/shape/influence/affect what "boundary objects" or "reification objects" are/could be/mean. I'm pretty sure that most people were talking about boundary objects in relation to the design aspect of technologies like Twitter. For me, it would make the most sense to talk about boundary objects in relation to communities. It's only in the relations between these concepts that an idea as abstract as "boundary object"--whether it is inherently abstract or whether we made it abstract--could take any real meaning.

There's always talk about the disconnect between theory and practice. I think, in the future, we really need to focus our discussions on the three themes of Community, Identity, and Design, with an Educational Flair. Otherwise, I'm going to walk away from this class without any real benefit and with absolutely no idea of the practical applications of the theories, not to mention the technologies, we learn.