I had the opportunity to participate in a 4-day workshop led by Etienne and Bev Wenger-Trayner on being a social learning leader in growing and developing communities of practice and networks: BETreat “State of the Art” October 7-10, 2014.
http://wenger-trayner.com/betreat-canada-2014/
Sharing the Message from BETreat 2014 Penticton: Our Key Learning:
We thought a lot about being a social learning leader and how a social learning leader cares about solving the problems of the community they participate in, how they are personally invested in the solutions and how they do not know the answers themselves. There are similarities with being a teacher, especially at the surface, but there are huge differences at the deep level.
We developed skills in engaging stakeholders in our community issues, making value creation propositions regarding our communities, and became familiar with methods to determine and demonstrate the value of the community’s activities, particularly to funders.
A good social learning leader is someone who:
– can quickly bring you into her context
– engages you into her problem
– gets you thinking productively about what she should do
We worked with technology to support our journey in the 4 day workshop and used many tools, adobe connect, wikis, skype, …and it was a very positive experience using the new technologies for the 3 fully online participants as well as the 8 face-to-face participants, to ensure participation and support to bring everyone together. We also practiced supporting people in all environments to bring them into the work.
Here’s a cleaned-up version of the summary of our social learning leaders & teachers discussions:
Live learning via Twitter and Flickr during the four days: