Developing Communities of Practice in Adopting New Technologies

One of the reasons I link to Suw Charman's blog is for posts like this: "An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in Enterprise" - a clear and useful outline of the process and pitfalls of adopting social software tools like blogs and wikis in enterprise environments. In my case, recently this adoption process has taken place, more or less successfully, in the QUT Large Teaching & Learning Grant which I co-direct, and in which we are introducing blogs and wikis into the teaching environment of several undergraduate and postgraduate units across two faculties.

And yes, we've had mixed success in fostering the uptake of these technologies in the two communities of practice we're addressing (teachers and students), partly also because of the way we have introduced these technologies. Some colleagues (especially in the languages area, interestingly) have made great advances in their teaching through the introduction of wikis (which are set up to run in the language studied, and edited in collaboration with partner universities in France and Germany); some have been more reluctant to try these tools. Amongst the students, too, we've seen a mixed rate of uptake. I find my students, colleagues, and myself reflected in the different user groups Suw describes in her post, and I'm keen to discuss her observations with the project team...

(Oh, and on her private blog, Suw also links to a demo video of the upcoming Maxis game Spore. Wow.