Wow, that was a lot of different topics. Lave & Wegner's Communities of Practice, Brown's table of Learning / Spaces / IT, Bransford & Schwartz's Transfer/PFL, Michalchik's Church/Family/School ways of demonstrating learning... and there were a couple others I didn't get to (yet).
Sitting here this morning I kept coming back to the L&W bit about full practitioners helping newcomers understand how things work. Although they don't see that as something going on in schools, I kept seeing it happen in class. Dan initiated those who hadn't had experiences with poster presentations into the "invisible technology" of the poster. Similarly, the "how to" of the Wiki lets us use the tool to access another community. Both of these moments seem to me to exemplify the kind of "apprenticeship" that L&W were describing.
I began to think of the various yahoo! groups I belong to, which are typically moderated to keep newbies from making too many mistakes. Still, some slip through, and other members will let them know (nicely or not, privately or publicly) that they messed up. More experienced users model good posting habits for others.
Transfer-- does this type of learning experience transfer? Probably yes, to other groups. But does it transfer to other life situations? I'll have to think about that.
Michalchik's paper was interesting in that the only environment in which all members were "accepted" was the one in which they received no feedback. I wonder if some members of the yahoo! groups (or others) give up on the experience because of the corrections they receive if they don't follow the group norms. To what extent is feedback given in various spaces? To what extent is any/all involvement allowed?
The idea of publishing your efforts in a public space was the one piece I found missing from Brown's table. I'm currently spending quite a bit of time thinking about the effects of sharing/publicity/audience on the learning process. Surely the web and wikis and desktop publishing all add an IT solution to publishing one's work? To some extent it has been said that the audience component refocusses the learning on production, as opposed to learning, valued. In apprenticeship situations, isn't this always the case? I've begun to wonder what is really meant by "learning values."
Dan Gilbert: Great insight about the Michalchik paper and the connection between accepting everyone in situations without feedback. I hadn't thought about that before. Now I'm thinking that there needs to be alittle more discussion about the double-edge of feedback, namely that feedback can promote/inspire/support/scaffold (good things) but can just as easily turn one away from learning, i.e. 'this is too hard for me'. re: learning values and effects of publishing, one challenge I've been thinking about recently is how niche targeted so many media options are. Its hard to find the aggregators who can help make sense of what's out there and also p¨t it in a context that's stimulating and motivating enough for learning to happen.