the notion of research capacity vs, ability. the capacity resides in the field. It is a system, leading to a holistic view of research. since it lives in the community it becomes more elastic and less fragile.

a CoP has 3 elements:
mutual engagment: people are engaged in actions whose meanings they negotiate…so CoPs based partly in relationships.

joint enterprise: shared goal, arising out of negotiation is defined in the process of pursuing it and creates a pattern of mutual accountability. meanings of the enterprise will change over time, and so will everything else with it.

Shared repertoire…represents the content, the other two the process, or framework for the actions.

And I’ve waited nearly 23 hours since my first 805 class has ended before reflecting in this, my first weekly journal entry. Dr. OConnor suggested that we do it when we got home or early the next day so that our experience would be fresh. I listened, understood, agreed, then came home and worked till 2am on a presentation for senior staff (my first Prezi) arrived at work early and worked straight through until nearly 6. Now, at 8:34 pm, it begins. And surely the reflective state will be more difficult to achieve because of the lifetime of energy that has run through my brain during this long day. My experience of last nights learning is far from fresh. I can hear my very cool breadmaker making its occasional clicking noises as it does during the rising cycle, and part of me wonders if the smell of fresh bread might freshen my recollection of the conversation I was having with myself and the others in that classroom last night. Should I wait until I smell the baking cycle? No..I’m actually exhausted from gogogogoing the past 2 weeks and staying up late prezifying, and now that the all-important briefing to senior staff is finished I can feel how drained I am, and am reminded of how long a day can be when we have the potential of experiencing the life/death cycle several times a day or at the moment.

Like a good Buddhist I try for mindfulness, and mindfulness of lots of the moments makes for a very long day. And so I’ve wasted the half page recomended length of a reflective journal practice just babbling and trying to get into the flow. And so…I’ll stand, finish a sink load of dishes and check the bread, and return to this with the ipad open to the marked up article and the syllabus staring at me. And so 8 minutes later the bread has not started to bake and the load of dishes is done, the sink rinsed, and my chronic partial attention syndrome is inviting me to look up that miso-tahini dressing recipe so that I can make my lunch salad before I succumb to sleep.  On my syllabus there is one note. “Who are my CoP” who are my communities of practice. I need to list those and what a fantastic excersise that will be..let’s sit and refresh your memory about every potential dissertation topic based on having once felt a passion over a now-forgotted research question or five, and starting with what I actually do for a living and the communities that I feel a part of. And now that it is in writing, perhaps I can make that an ogoing thing. It would be lovely to know what questions made my hair stand on end a few years, months, days ago…and settle on answering for myself what kind of people am I.

Lave and Wenger are the people to remember, because it seems they coined the phrase and have a copyright on it, so the actual form that the concept represents may morph over the decades as new info and new days informs the thinkers. I’ll have to check out the Hidreth and Kimble 2004 article on how it has changed, because that’s one distinct feeling I got…that the idea has evolved. I do love the idea of situated learning and legitimate peripheral participation as the new kids door into a community. And of course Wenger abandoned that perfectly good concept, now that I have come to like it, and moved to another of my favorites: the tension, the duality that is actually a dynamic equilibrium with dualing logarythmic spirals of nrg flowing between two poles. Ok, I like it. participation-reification (making the abstract real), designed-emergent, identification-negotialbility, local-global.

And then the “structure of interrelated terms: Mutual Engagement (the glue, the norms and collaborative relationships), Joint Enterprise (through interactions coming to know with what we are bound..the “domain” of the community, Shared Repertoire (a product, the shared resources)

but no, Wenger evolves again, crap. The structural characteristics are Domain..the common ground that inspires, Community, the social fabric, and Practice..the specific focus.

And I’m going to come back to this; I’m obviously tired but not done.

And DAn Cohen: what learned? amazing way for history to speak…to us, the story comes from the literature brought back to life. What would Brown and Duegood think, Bransford: the explicit vs the tacit