The image is the graphical representation of my understandings on Wenger’s chapter 6. I couldn’t represent the ‘peripherality’ and ‘marginality’ because I coudn't figure out 'how', not 'what'.

As a student who studies education, this week’s reading reminded me again of the missions I have to accomplish; making the world a better place by providing “good” education. Many scholars have discussed about the kinds of “good” education that helps students develop their identities, which consequently lead them to be more self-actualized persons, from several different perspectives according to their domains.

I believe Wenger’s approach to the issues of identity development can be understood in relation with what the education policy researchers think.

Modern liberal societies contain not only groups with different cultures and different views about a good life but also groups with different ideas of how this is achieved. The plurality in a community permits the development of autonomy (coherent identity in Wenger's term) in three ways - 1) it enables individuals to question any particular value without a damage of identity, 2) it provides a non-idiosyncratic standpoint from which to critique one’s values and desires, and 3) we can understand the criticisms that others make of us with the plurality (Levinson, 1999). In this respect, plurality is a good because it contributes to the good, autonomy, by requiring individuals to defend their chosen conceptions of the good against a range of others available to them (this is exactly what Wenger says).

Levinson (1999) argues that to reap the benefits of social diversity, children must be exposed to ways of life different from their parents and – in the course of their exposure – must embrace certain values, such as mutual respect among persons, that make social diversity both possible and desirable.

So, the aim of liberal education is to teach children the skills, habits, knowledge, and dispositions for them to be thoughtful, mature, self-assured individuals who map their path in the world with care and confidence, take responsibility for their actions, fulfill their duties as citizens, question themselves and others when appropriate, listen to and learn from others, and ultimately lead their lives with dignity, integrity, and self-respect (Levinson, 1999).
 
Levinson also argues that the ideal liberal school should be common, with mutual language, common civic history, and some shared values. Schools should be a place where the private-public distinction of political liberalism is blurred (though not relinquished) through the minimally discriminatory incorporation of private commitments into the public identity cultivated in the school. Pluralism is the source of the energy for the social development and the policies should ensure the pluralistic culture in schools. This gives indications to the kinds of policies that a community (including an e-community) should facilitate for the members.

"An identity is a layering of events of participation and reification by which our experience and its social interpretation inform each other"

This adds an additional layer of complexity to Wegner's conception of identity. Information about who we are is not only provided by us and by a community (by virtue of belonging to it) but identity is also interpreted by both ourselves and the community as a whole. In turn these, interpretations probably influence the kind of information provided about identity in a kind of feed back loop

Self-provided info   <-----------       Self-Perception

                               \                          /

                                    ---Identity---

                              /                           \

Community info <-------------------- Community Perception

"Our membership constitutes our identity not just through reified markers of membership but more fundamentally through the forms of competence it entails."

Thus, being able to say we belong to a group is only one way that a group can form out identity. A second way it can form members identity is by influencing what they are good at and how they perform specific tasks.

These include - how we relate to others, what we do to fulfill the communities superordinate goals, how a personal history of the various forms the shared repertoire has taken in the past is represented.

Wegner also claims that identities can be thought of as trajectories, which is essentially considering not how a person is at a specific moment but how they change over time within a community. He suggests that trajectories can influence identity independent of other outside forces, which seems to suggest a kind of "psychic inertia". Trajectories include:

peripheral (parallel to the trajectory of the community as a whole but distant to the center of the community)

insider (parallel and close to the center of the community)  

inbound (moving towards the center of the community)

outbound (leaving the center of a community)

boundary (can be thought of a perpendicular to the community).

Although a trajectory can only be identified with certainty after the fact, potential or possible trajectories toward the future are an important part of community as well. Knowing that one is moving closer to the center of the group or upwards in status can be a powerful incentive both to remain in the group and to work for the good of the group (I think this is the inertia that Wegner referred to earlier).

Later in the chapter Wegner points out that idenitity is formed by membership to multiple communities. I think this is the kind of observation that matters most if you care about describing the effects of communitiesin general upon an individual (rather than how a specific community functions or the influence of a specific community on its members). However, it is worth noting that this kind of intersection can function as an important bridge for new practices to enter a community and that the influences of other communities can moderate the influence of a community on its members.

Chapter 6 presents an introduction of identity as how we see the world in ways that are shaped by our involvement in a community of practice. We interweave various aspects of the community of practice to form our identity:

• Negotiated experience
• Community membership
• Learning trajectory
• Nexus of multimembership
• A relationship between the global and local

Others have already blogged about (or drawn!) what these mean in the author's view, so I am going to apply them to one of the communities I have been studying, Geocaching.com.

Negotiated experience
Geocachers indicate their identity with the geocaching movement by participating in the practice of geocaching. They identify with a particular way of treasure hunting using specific artifacts and sense of adventure. This differs from those who wander aimlessly through the woods and happen to find a treasure or interesting place they haven't seen before. By being a geocacher, one identifies as someone who is on a hunt for interesting locations, for history, for nature using artifacts such as GPS data and written hints. These artifacts reify what it means to geocache, and represent the contributions that members have made as they define their identity in the community.

Community membership
Being a member of the geocaching community means having some level of competence and accountability. One is able to understand what makes geocaching different from serendipitous treasure-finding. One understands what makes a location interesting enough to contribute or search for. Further, one is able to make meaningful contributions because of the understanding of the former aspects of the community. To be able to participate in the community means to be able to understand what is important about the community-- each member understands that the value of geocaching will only grow if they all give as much as they take.

Learning trajectory
Identifying as a geocacher never has an end point. Identity is constantly reinvented: as one transforms from an occasional geocacher to an avid geocacher; as one becomes an expert in geocaches of one town in which they've lived for years to a novice in geocaches of another town to which they just moved; as one forms relationships with those who are more experienced and able to impart history and knowledge.

Nexus of multimembership
Geocachers identify as members of other communities of practice as well. They may be  parents, students, historians, outdoors enthusiasts, travelers, or more. Their identification as a Geocacher is not mutually exclusive of their identification as a parent or as a traveler or as a student; instead, their identity interweaves experiences from their multimembership. Perhaps membership in one drove them to membership to the other-- for instance, a parent suddenly becomes interested in geocaching when her son becomes interested in exploring the town and finding neat places. An avid geocacher may find her love of the land leads her to pursue a graduate degree in geology. There is no beginning or end to membership in these categories. They shape each other and can increase members' passion for geocaching.

Relation between the global and local
Identifying as a geocacher means being able to understand how geocaching fits into a broader experience of life. Identifying as a geocacher means defining an interest in the geography of one's neighborhood, of foreign lands, of places seen and yet to be seen. It implies a passion for travel and learning and increased exposure to new things and places and experiences. For some, it means learning how to care for the land or learning the history of a particular part of town. It's about far more than just GPS coordinates and buried boxes filled with treasure.

OK, Yong mi lit a fire in my heart to draw graphics.

I thought this was what Wenger was explaining in chapter 6. Each thread represents an individual's trajectory of his/her identity, and the top pipe is the side view of a community trajectory. The bottom circle one is the x-z facet of the community, where you cut the pipe.

"The future are not in a simple straight line, but embodied in interlocked trajectories. It is a social form of temporality, where the past and the future interact as the history of a community unfolds across generations."

Through the negotiated experience (by interweaving with other threads) we become a thread, but still an individual thread is part of a big social thread.

Each individual has their own trajectory, but when they first come, they learn where to go through the living example of the old-timers' trajectories.

We all have different identities, and we reconcile them as a nexus of multimembership. That's why each thread has different colors, but as a whole it is one thread that has multi color.

"They are, at the same time, one and multiple."

"Through the creation of the person, it is constantly creating bridges -- or at least potential bridges -- across the landscape of practice."

Q: Do you think the graphic explains the local -global interplay? In another words, what does it exactly mean to have local-global interplay? (explain using above graph if possible)

I just wanted to draw attention the parallels between "paradigmatic trajectory" and "group prototype" from the  Hogg reading last week. In both cases, they are idealized notions, not necessarily matching any individual, but things that many individuals may aspire to. They may be reified as individual people ("be like Mike"), but don't have to.

I feel that a lot of
the concepts that Wenger bring up lack concrete examples (at least for me).

To help clarify the abstract
concept of trajectories, a concrete example can be formed around studying
through an academic major while at a university.

As we progress and take
more classes, we start to refine our identity (focus of concentration).
We also take peripheral trajectories (attending seminars) which we do
not fully participate in the area of study but our benefit of ignorance allows
us to give fresh views to the presenter's topic. People who take intro classes
to test the waters are on the inbound trajectories to becoming full
members. After becoming a full member, insider trajectories in the form
of specialized workshops / clubs become available. A student can also work on interdisciplinary
projects traveling down boundary trajectories. Students studying at the School of Information can is a great example of
following a boundary trajectory.

If anybody can think of more concrete examples (or illustrations) to help clarify the abstract goop of ideas presented by Wenger please do!

This chapter discusses what identity is over the concepts introduced in Part I of the book, drawing parallels between practice and identity. This analogy is refined in the following chapters of the book.     

Identity as negotiated experience

Identity shouldn’t be equated with reifications like social categories, or self-images. It is defined socially also because it is produced as a live experience of participation in specific communities. Our identity is a complex interweaving of participative experience and reificative projections (151). Our experience and its social interpretation inform each other in the process of negotiation of what it means to be a human and ourselves.

Identity as community membership

Our membership constitutes our identity through the forms of competence. Different levels of memberships imply different level of competence. Dimensions of practice introduced in Chapter 2 is used as dimensions of identity:
•    Mutuality of engagement – individuality is defined differently depending on how members interact in that community
•    Accountability to an enterprise – gained perspectives resulting from investment in the enterprise
•    Negotiability of a repertoire – our personal history of participation enable us to interpret and make use of the repertoire.
 
Identity as learning trajectory

Identity is not a stable object, but a constant becoming (154). Identity is temporal, ongoing, constructed in social contexts (hence its temporality is non-linear), and defined with respect to interacting trajectories. There can be various types of trajectories:

Peripheral trajectories: never leads to full participation
Inbound trajectories: for newcomers
Insider trajectories: formation of identity doesn't end with full membership, there are always occasions for renegotiation of identity
Boundary trajectories: spanning boundaries and linking to other CoP’s
Outbound trajectories: leaving a CoP, also involves learning.
     
Learning as identity

As trajectories, our identities incorporate the past and the future in the very process of negotiating the present (155). They contribute to our learning by providing a context that helps determine what is potentially significant.

Paradigmatic trajectories 

Old-timers represent the history of the practice as a way of life. As such, identities are the containers for the history of the community. A CoP in this sense is a "field of possible trajectories and thus the proposal of an identity". Old-timers provide narratives and participation, practice itself gives life to these stories, and newcomers provide models for different ways of participation. Since members are forming new paradigmatic trajectories while changing or rejecting the current one, identities are being "negotiated and renegotiated" (156).

Generational encounters

Individual trajectories incorporate indifferent ways the history of a practice (157). Different generations bring different perspectives since they are invested in different moments of the history of CoP. Newcomers must gain some access to the history while bringing in new ways of participating in the CoP, and old-timers must seek a similar balance between continuity and welcoming new potentials. 

To sum up, the temporality of identity in practice is neither merely individual nor simply linear (158). Identity is a work in progress, and it is shaped by the individual and collective efforts to create coherence across time that threads together layers of participation in the individual.

I'm leaving the summary of the rest of the chapter to someone else. 

Wenger makes the following statements about identity:

• "[identity in practice] is not equivalent to a self-image" (p. 151)
• "An identity ... is a layering of events of participation and reification by which our experience and its social interpretation inform each other." (p. 151)

It appears to me that Wenger is not talking about identity in general, but is carving out a specific notion of identity, calling it identity in practice, that is a type of identity that emerges from being part of a community of practice. The individual reconciles the events from the various communities that he or she belongs to, putting the various pieces together to form one identity.

Applying this to online communities, participation in an online community creates experiences that become part of the individual's identity, especially with respect to that community ("Even though each element of the nexus may belong to a community, the nexus itself may not." p. 161). Can an online community be designed such that it encourages the creation of identities in its members as productive contributors to that community? Are there factors, and if so, what are the factors, that encourage or discourage creation of certain types of identities?

Wenger uses his three dimensions of practice (mutual engagement, joint enterprise, shared repretoire) to explain identity issues surrounding joining a new community.  The individual joining doesn't exist in a vacuum, they are members of other communities, from which they bring adjacent concepts of these three dimensions.  But, Wenger focuses on the fact that this person wont be wholely comfortable with what consitutes engagement in this new place, the nuances of the joint enterprise, etc.  This "confrontation with the unfamilar" will likewise shape the identity of the joiner. 

Online communies will minimize such unfamiliarity 

lately, ive been thinking about why people switch between these communities, particularly social networking sites.  Wenger makes no value judgements about it, but my assumption was that the unfamiliarity of entering a new community may be uncomfortable at first, but actually beneficial in the long run.  Profit motivate online communities, interested in lowering entry barriers, may strive  for "identity transfer" with existing online communities.  Something along the lines of convincing people that all three dimensions will be very much the same in the new place, so minimum growth / change will be required. 

Im thinking, specifically, of how social networking sites have to differentiate themselves from each other while still tap into the "identity" that exists within the myspace generation about what it means to be on a social networking site.  Departing too far from the norm / popular conception (a radical new way of reifying friendships) would be a stategic blunder from this angle
.

Mixi  is certainly a "copycat" of friendster, myspace, etc.  It follows in the same tradition, and ads few new features.  yet, because of the language issues, most of the users on it where entirely unaware of sns until they heard of mixi.  The (now quite strong) part of their lives that is built around daily journals and cell phone picture blogging has been entirely created from getting to know mixi.  I wonder if this can be construed as a kind of first mover advantage? 

I liked the way Nika structured her post--I think I'll try that for my community. According to the different ways that identity runs parallel to practice . . .

Identity as a BaWer (or a regular Webhead for that matter) isn't a label as it is way of doing things. The only people who explicitly identify themselves as BaWers and Webheads are those who participate in--and thus experience--community life. Someone asked me at the ExpoSItion if I was a BaWer, and I just couldn't bring myself to say that I was one because as  someone studying the community, I observe, rather than participate in, community life. Identity is lived.

What it means to be a BaWer is constantly being negotiated. When someone does something commendable, another member will recognize her by saying something like her action "captured the "spirit of what it is to be a Webhead". Yet there is no community reification (like a charter or "about us" page) of exactly how being a Webhead (or becoming a Webhead for that matter) entails one to act, and the nature of the BaWer community changes from year to year with new volumes and demographics of participants.

Identity in the BaWer community is first and foremost social. You couldn't be a BaWer unless you're around other BaWers, because interacting with others through CMCs is the mutual engagement that makes the community possible. Without it, there wouldn't be a community. There would just be a bunch of ESL/EFL teachers on the Internet.

One's identity as a BaWer will depend both on where that person's coming from and where that person's going. Members who don't come from the paradigmatic BaWer background as an EFL/ESL teacher and are not planning to become are looking for specific information on particular technology matters. New BaWers who are language teachers and who are eager to learn what lessons the community has to offer, are typically the ones who enjoy reflecting on their experiences and how they see themselves and their ideas changing throughout the learning process.

Every member of the BaWer community stands at the nexus of multiple other communities, including their places of work, their local neighborhoods and their families. Because community life is so intensive for the workshop's six weeks, members are often writing about how challenging it is to reconcile the role of being an active BaWer with their other professional and familial duties.

Being a member of the BaWer community as an EFL/ESL teacher all but entails that one is aware and concerned with how he fits in to the larger picture of the language teaching profession. Teachers put in the extra work and time to participate in this community because they identify with the language teaching profession, and seek to improve themselves, and by relation, the profession as a whole. Their local identities as BaWers are very much tied to their "global" identities as teaching professionals.

I found Wenger's point that old-timers may not necessarily be knee-jerk defenders of tradition and newcomers may not necessarily be hostile toward that  tradition to be a useful caution against making assumptions about the roles people take in a community. It makes sense that while some long-standing members of a community may become overly vested in established practice, others may challenge that practice from inside. I'm reminded of exceptional scientists like Richard Feynmann who seem to delight in seeing established traditions overthrown (provided better ones replace them), even if they themselves had a part in creating those traditions.

Trajectories also seem very useful for giving us a way to talk about levels of commitment. Making an online community truly 'sticky' is such a serious concern, a designer might be understandably prone to forget that some people may wish to participate but only to a degree that satisfices them.  But while the use of a term like 'satisfice' tends to make us think of a dynamic interaction that reaches a point at which it stops, Wenger's trajectories show how a person continues to negotiate with that community even as he or she pursues a path along its periphery.  At the same time, the community itself helps define what kinds of 'paradigmatic trajectories' are possible within its boundaries.

I found Wenger's breakdown of trajectories compelling:

• Peripheral trajectories: don't lead to full participation
• Inbound trajectories: newcomers become full participants
• Insider trajectories: members continue to evolve their practice
• Boundary trajectories: "Sustaining an identity across boundaries is one of the most delicate challenges" (Wenger 154). I like that.
• Outbound trajectories: leading out of communities, either by choice or by a process of maturation. This reminded me of graduation, and the notion that we outgrow old shoes. When it is time to leave a place, it is very much time to leave that place, because the shoes are beginning to pinch our feet. In other words, we have been on an outbound trajectory.

Wenger suggests that newcomers may "have an investment in continuity" because they want to connect with the history of the CoP, while old-timers may be excited about investing in a new, as yet unrealized future. While this might not always hold, it turns the general model of exciting newcomers and stubborn old-timers on its ear.

The Nexus of Multimembership: Our trajectories are not bounded and separate. We do not stop being students when we are at work. The concept of the nexus serves to create a space where our multiple memberships can affect each other, recognizing that we are not sometimes a mom and sometimes a claims processor, but instead are constantly negotiating the terrain of our multiple memberships. Wenger characterized this work of negotiating the self a "very private achievement," potentially, which I thought was a cool way to think about it. It ties in nicely with the Real Self from our previous readings.

WikiStat: I am imagining a corporate wiki implementing our statistics package. A workgroup regularly collaborates on documents, and a manager is encouraging these regulars to attain a certain goal. (Say, pay more attention to detail work.) The manager and the other members of the CoP would be on an Insider Trajectory (maybe?) learning new skills. WikiStats could help with that... As a tool for meeting various kinds of contribution goals, WikiStats could help in a variety of situations for Inbound, Insider and Outbound Trajectories. (Certain contribution barriers for entry or exit, where appropriate, etc.) I'm less certain how statistical information could assist Peripheral and Boundary Trajectories. Maybe a high score in your "home" CoP would give you more authority when you acted as a broker in another CoP?

I'm going to switch things up a bit since I'm late to the party and there are already several excellent summaries of Wenger that should get us started. I'll include some notes here for my own selfish paper-writing purposes, and then try to give back to the blog by adding notes from our in-class discussion.

Notes
- Identity and practice as parallel
- Identity as a social process of lived experiences of participation in specific communities
- Identities form trajectories in and across communities as we participate (154)
- The "temporal notion of trajectory characterizes identity as:" (158)
- Negotiation of identity is the process of reconciling one's multimembership
- Identity is not local to a community in the same way that practice is not local to a community
- Summary of identity characteristics on 163. Identity is lived, negotiated, social, a learning process, a nexus, and a local-global interplay.

Notes from in-class discussion
Trajectories over time, within, and across multiple communities
Paradigmatic trajectory: the "paths well worn" in the community. A set of possibilities that a newcomer can pursue; "they soon find out what counts" (156)

Is the paradigmatic trajectory something that is regarded to be the community ideal? Not necessarily -- the essence is that the trajectories occur over time (in contrast to the group prototype, which tends to polarize)

Cool Running connections
Check out the Am I a runner? topic on the Cool Running newbie wiki: http://coolrunningnewbie.pbwiki.com/AmIARunner