Half-baked thinking: Content and structure for popping the lid on #msloc430 course

Day 3 of #WOLweek.

I was walking home from campus today (I live a little over a mile from Northwestern University) after a pretty energizing day. But it is ugly cold for this time of the season and when I left the office about the only thing that I was aware of was the weather.

My walk takes me through some amazing parts of campus. The photo accompanying this post is of Deering Library. I took it in January last year. I walk past that building every day. It changes you as you walk past it.

And today – in a cold that was reminiscent of last January – I think I had an insight that started as I walked past Deering.

I have been thinking both about the pacing and the content that could be part of an open section of MSLOC 430. Half-baked thinking here but am sharing it in an attempt to define it, and to maybe elicit some feedback.

Content

The course I teach is really an exploration of enterprise social networking for graduate students who are people-change-learning geeks (and I say that with the utmost admiration). If I am successful in this course, I am providing an opportunity to develop new language (about technology) and a point-of-view of how social technology fits into a more strategic understanding of people, organizational culture and organizational performance.

Because we bridge many disciplines in the way that we teach and try to understand issues of people, culture and performance, we value the innovation that comes from boundary spanning.

Here is how that plays out in regard to enterprise social networking (in my half-baked thinking during my walk).

Assume there is a connected, networked enterprise. Or extended enterprise. If we had that, what are the variety of models we can overlay on that network to see (and perhaps facilitate) value in different ways?

• Communities of practice and networks of practice (emergent, social learning)
• Communities of inquiry (communities with an intentional learning purpose)
• Connectivist MOOCs (networked learning model that biases relationships over content)
• Personal learning networks (self-directed learners, leveraging a networked environment)
• Crowdsourcing (wisdom of the crowds innovation)
• Open design (design process leveraging wisdom of the crowds – think Open IDEO)
• Working out loud (structured serendipity)

I am beginning to think about selecting content that provides an introduction to each of these models of ways to activate the network. Some of it I already have – and much of it is already open.

Structure

I am starting by thinking about six weeks for the open section of my course. At two weeks per topic or question to consider, that gives me room for three big questions.

Wondering if I can structure the open section so that anyone participating in it takes a co-learning-inspired tour of the various models for four weeks (split into two, two-week sections). Each two-week section would include introductory content; community discussions; Twitter chats; etc. For me, this means adapting the structure of Exploring Personal Learning Networks.

In the final two-week section, we look at innovating using the models. How might we combine the models in innovative configurations to address organizational challenges? How might we apply models in different ways (i.e., connectivist MOOCs for idea generation)?

Need to sketch this out a bit more. Maybe on my walk into work tomorrow morning.

MORNING  UPDATE (Thursday, Nov. 20):

Mapped out during my walk, listening to this Ted Talk podcast: My Architectural Philosophy? Bring the Community into the Process – Alejandro Arevena.

If you participate in the open section of the course, you are presented with this as the  problem to address during the course:

By the end of the six-weeks, you must propose an innovative adaptation or combination of the models described above (e.g., community of practice, MOOC, crowdsourcing, working out loud) applied to a challenge of your choosing. An additional constraint is that the challenge (and resulting innovation) must somehow span the boundaries between internal networks and external ones.

For four weeks, we get familiar with the various models. The last two weeks are spent innovating out loud, with final proposed innovations shared openly at the very end of the course.

And yes – it is still cold. 19 F at the moment.