The Institutional Thermostat | Mike’s Blog
Throwback Thursday: The New Student Affairs Professional #4
Throwback Thursday: The New Student Affairs Professional #4| Mike’s Blog
So way back in 2007-2008 I used to write a blog for a website that will go unnamed about my experiences as a new professional in student affairs. I’m posting selections here on Thursday so 1- they’re archived somewhere and 2- they’re useful for…
Throwback Thursday: The New Student Affairs Professional #3
So way back in 2007-2008 I used to write a blog for a website that will go unnamed about my experiences as a new professional in student affairs. I’m posting selections here on Thursday so 1- they’re archived somewhere and 2- they’re useful for…
Throwback Thursday: The New Student Affairs Professional #1
Throwback Thursday: The New Student Affairs Professional #1|Mike’s Blog #sachat
So way back in 2007-2008 I used to write a blog for a website that will go unnamed about my experiences as a new professional in student affairs. I’m posting selections here on Thursday so 1- they’re archived somewhere and 2- they’re useful for…
A Model of Information Seeking Behavior for (Student Services) Professionals | Mike’s Blog #sachat #sadoc #highered
Social Network Analysis and Students as an Information Ground
This is a reflection on research in process. So take everything with a grain of salt, caveats, and…
Towards a CQE #2: Communities of Practice, Legitimate Peripheral Participation, and Situated Learning
Ugh, I love Etitienne Wenger. Even though he seems to have abandoned research for consulting ‘Communities of Practice’ is a fascinating book, and I’m a little surprised I haven’t been in a position to read it before. Wenger pulls a lot of strings together that I’m interested in: information need, search, and flow in organizations, organizing around shared histories of learning, and how identity affects/influences organizational participation.
As I’m reading his book (and as I breezed through the pre-cursor ‘Situated Learning’) I’m struck by how directly applicable what he’s describing was to my previous work as a student services pro. I think of communities like the #sachat group, or my own professional networks, as well as the current research project I’m doing and I’m able to draw a direct connection to Wenger’s work. Having the ideas illustrated for me has helped me see nuanced connections in my research project, and has helped me develop a direction for the eventual interpretation of results.
Community of practice is an intentional term. Wenger describes three dimensions of practice as the property of a community: 1-joint enterprise, 2-mutual engagement, and 3-shared repertoire. I could write for far too long about how he defines these terms and how they relate to the loose organization of student affairs as a field of practice, but that’s another post. Currently I’m wrestling with how to define the themes that keep emerging in my research about information sharing. In particular, the constant need to seek, maintain, and share information about students is difficult to place in an information behavior. It’s not really an active or passive search process. The need is poorly defined, especially by the organization, but it’s constant and it runs throughout my interviews as an expectation related to professional’s information seeking behavior in Higher Ed. When you place the need to ‘know’ about students at the crux of the interactions between joint enterprise (in this case student life), the mutual engagement of practitioners (where individuals in an organization and within a sub-field of practice, like say conduct share information to improve practice), and the development of shared repertoires (which potentially includes the stories, discourses, and actions we associate with ‘knowing’ about our students) the behavior is easier to make sense of. I’m still collecting data and a lot of these ideas are embryonic, but reading Wegner helped give them considerably more shape than they had previously.
How this becomes a CQE question I don’t know. One of the things I want to explore this summer is disciplinary analytics and see how the literature in that area compares to the lit on communities of practice.
Towards a CQE #1: Initial Thoughts
So I promised myself I’d start to write reflections about my research interests to help 1-keep track of what I’m doing, 2-help narrow down a topic, 3- identify works that I want to revisit when I have time.
