UCT "ACADEMIC GREYBEARDS AND THE NET GENERATION" Derek Smith 1

Traditional Teaching Space The “Wise Guru” transfers Information and Knowledge and Wisdom 2 The Great Unwashed

The Net Generation (born after 1982) likes……  Digital, Connected, Experiential, Immediate, Social  Teams, peer-to-peer  Engagement & experience  Visual  Things that matter 3 (Oblinger,2005)

4 Is anybody actually listening (apart from the guy in the orange t-shirt?

Learning Space Information Knowledge wisdom ? 5 The Net Generation Academic 1.0 Grey-beards aka Baby Boomers - Boomers retiring soon -Taking their knowledge with them? WEB 2.0

Learning Space 6 Web 2.0 New competencies: Advisor, Facilitator, Mentor, Knowledge manager, Administrator Academic 2.0

7 Web 2.0 My Learning Space?

8 it is a community I belong to, not an list

9 I am learning about a bleeding edge topic (Radical management)

10 Discussing the subtleties of an exciting topic.

11 Connecting with alumni and professional colleagues

12 Broadening my Knowledge.

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14 Sub-communities

My Current CoP Initiatives 15 CoPs

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My Proposal to the SACLA conference Build a Community of Practice for IT academics in Southern Africa where:  courseware and research is shared, reusable and online and  where experts can give advice on problems 17

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Developing IT Project Managers 19  ~1500 “PM graduates” over 20 years for commerce and industry  Ongoing shortage of PM expertise in South Africa  How to fast track to a mastery level?

My Proposal Build a common portal for an IT project manager Community of Practice which provides connectivity, problem-solving, knowledge sharing, resources and research output

Communities of Practice are “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or passion for a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis”. (Wenger et al, 2002)

22 Connect people Provide a shared context Enable dialogue Stimulate learning Capture knowledge Provide an information exchange process Help in problem-solving Generate new knowledge and change (Cambridge et al, 2005) A CoP can....

A CoP fails because  Low facilitator involvement  Irrelevant topics for users  No organisational support (Dube et al, 2005)

What motivates CoP members? 24 (Zboralski, 2009)

CoPs Lifecycle 25 Wenger et al, 2002

So we can all belong to many CoPs but they all require a  Technical architecture that provides a platform for communication and collaboration  Social architecture of the community to enliven it. Wenger et al, 2002

PURPOSE of the CoP 27  Every community is unique  Each has distinct goals, member characteristics/needs and purpose  The Purpose can be a mixture of: Develop relationships Learn and develop practice Carry out projects Create new knowledge

UCT Academic Retirees over 10 years 28 Academic staff as at October 2009 PE and T3 only includes GOB and non-GOB funded includes clinical academics From Judith du Toit

UCT Strategic Plan  How can UCT augment its activities to better answer the pressing social, economic and developmental problems facing South Africa and the rest of Africa?  Goal 6: Expanding and Enhancing UCT’s Contribution to South Africa’s Development challenges

An Exciting Opportunity for UCT? 30  Offer a “community” service to provide a broad CoP technical architecture for communication and collaboration  Use retirees (greybeards) and alumni (net generation) to build the social architectures

31 CoPs hosted by UCT? technical architecture social architectures Greybeards supporting the net generation

Possible Way Forward? 32  Feasibility Study and Business Case for a CoP pilot  My commitment to SACLA and “project managers in Western Cape”.

Readings 33 Cambridge, D., Kaplan, S. & Suter, V. (2005). Community of Practice Guide: A Step-by-Step Guide for Designing & Cultivating Communities of Practice in Higher Education. Accessed on 8 November Debe, L., Bourhis, A. & Real, J. (2005). The Impact of Structuring Characteristics on the Launching of Virtual Communities of Practice, Journal of Organizational Change Management, 18 (2): Oblinger, D.G. (2005) Educating the Net Gen, Accessed on 7 May on 7 May 2009 Smith, D.C., Brokenshire, R., Maine, R. & Maphai, K. (2006). Using Storytelling to Assess the Competencies of a Master Project Manager, in Proceedings of PMSA Conference 2006, 30 May-1 June, Gallagher Estate, Midrand. Wenger, E. McDermott, R. & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge, Harvard Business School Press: Boston MA. Zboralski, Katja. (2009). Antecedents of knowledge sharing in communities of practice. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(3):