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Greetings,
 welcomes you to the Muse, our monthly
email newsletter! The focus of our newsletter
is learning - in all its various forms - and
we're going to do our best to keep it
informative, engaging, and motivational. We
also invite you to forward this to a friend!
Curious about the name of the newsletter?
The
Muse refers to Calliope, who is the goddess of
epic poetry, one of the 12 Greek muses who,
collectively, looked after learning and the
arts. We're hoping you find our monthly
newsletter a bit of learning ... and a bit of
art.
| Communities of Practice |
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It's been a wonderful experience working with
about 20 other learners from around the world on
the 'The Communities of Practice Foundations
Workshop'. A team of three facilitators,
including Etienne Wenger, and a group of
mentors from previous workshops, have been
coaching us through the principles of communities
of practice.
The workshop has run like a mini community of
practice and has been structured around the
three layers that define a community of
practice. DOMAIN defines the context and the
area of interest for the community. The domain
for our mini CoP has of course been CoPs
themselves. COMMUNITY defines the membership of
CoP and the roles that different people play in
the organization of the CoP. PRACTICE defines
the work of the CoP, what is it the CoP is
trying to achieve.
As I write this, we have just come to the end of
three weeks of 'practice'. We divided into teams
and worked on projects that interested us. I was
in a team that has developed a framework for
organizing a CoP start up. There'll be more
about this in next month's CoP briefing paper.
One of the other fascinating projects has been
looking at lurkers or legitimate peripheral
participants :) They found many reasons for
lurking, some good, some not so good. They also
found that lurkers could be a benefit to a busy
team, often able to view things from a different
perspective and provide links between groups.
So next time you're too busy to fully
participate, and find yourself lurking, give
yourself a break, lurking isn't necessarily a bad
thing :)
CPsquare - the community of practice on communities of practice »
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| IAF Conference Highlights |
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This was Tammy's first visit to Ottawa and to
The International Association of Facilitator's
(IAF) Annual Conference in Ottawa. She enjoyed
meeting all sorts of interesting people from
around the world, and the wonderful weather was
hard to resist!
Congrats to our Chapters $50 gift certificate
winners from the IAF Conference - Kimberley
Lawrence, Robert Henderson, and Elizabeth
Seaton. We hope you find a great summer read!
While Tammy didn't attend any of the actual
conference sessions, she did spend some time
checking out some of the other exhibitors. A
pleasant surprise was seeing Jan Johnson and Ron
Short of LearninginAction.
Dave and Tammy's attendance at one
of their learning in relationship workshops a
few years ago was powerful and insightful.
Check out "Stories ... a guided journal" on
their books link.
One of the most popular exhibits was by Neuland North
America Ltd, an Edmonton based company that
specializes in products for trainers and
facilitators. Their "cases" full of pens, multi
coloured and shaped post-it notes, and other
facilitation goodies raised more than a few oohs and
ahhs by conference goers, Tammy included. If you
don't know what to buy for the 'have it all"
facilitator in your life, check out their
website for fun, high quality products!
IAF Website »
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| Web Gem - Leadership Compass |
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One of our subscribers and a good colleague and
friend, Laurie Hillis of Megatrain in Calgary,
pens the occasional article for Leadership
Compass, a twice yearly publication by the Banff
Centre. We like her article on balance in
Issue 6 and
emotional intellegence in Issue 8.
You'll find half a dozen short articles per
issue, dealing with a wide variety of topics
written by various Banff Centre faculty.
Leadership Compass »
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| LearningEdge News |
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Remember there are limited
spaces
In order that we maximize learning during the
certification workshops, we limit the number of
participants to 20, and people are already
registering. Also, registering early allows you
to take advantage of our earlybird rates!
We now take credit
cards
You now have one more option for payment of the
workshop fees. We now take VISA and Mastercard
online through our website.
Early Bird Rates
Early bird rates are now available for
anyone booking a place on the Vancouver,
Edmonton or Toronto certification workshops. If
you register six weeks before the start of the
workshop you'll receive a two hundred dollar
discount. Click
here to register for LearningEdge.
2003 LearningEdge
Certification Dates
| 2003
Dates |
Location
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Early Bird
Cut
Off |
Registration
Deadline |
| September
8, 9, 10 |
Vancouver |
July
28 |
August
11 |
| September 15, 16, 17 |
Edmonton |
August
4 |
August
18 |
| December 8, 9, 10 |
Toronto |
October
27 |
November
24 |
Certification
Sponsorship Opportunities
Contact us if you are interested in taking the
LearningEdge Certification but need some help
financially. We've tried to come up with a
creative solution that could be especially
attractive to independent consultants.
Online Presentation Based on
feedback
from those of you who couldn't
make it to our last set of information sessions,
we've now made the presentation available
online as a powerpoint show. We've got plans
for a full multi-media version of our
presentation so stay tuned!
If you'd like to explore these online
presentations, simply click on the link below.
(NOTE: It could take a few minutes to download.
This presentation is provided
for information purposes only and should not be
reproduced in any form.)
LearningEdge Online Presentation »
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| What's New? |
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Our news ...
We are heading into one of our busiest
times of the year ... teaching at
Royal Roads
University in Victoria. We're looking
forward to a month of intense facilitation and
learning with our colleagues (from left to right
in the picture above, Thomi Glover, Guy Nasmyth,
Dave, Tammy and Elizabeth Cull) and the 50
learners registered in the Master of Arts in
Leadership and Training (MALT) program!
Dave is almost finished his online communities
of practice course, and offers you a few
tidbits of his learning in our feature article
this month. Watch for a full briefing paper soon!
Tammy has enjoyed her month of
conferences and shares some highlights of
the IAF conference in this issue.
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