Showing posts with label Communities of Practice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Communities of Practice. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Why "Welcome to the Next Level?"

This post may seem a bit self-indulgent. Please forgive me. As I prepare to transition to a new congregation and community after 27 years, I am finding it helpful to look a bit inward.

Full disclosure. I began this blog when I was applying for a Jim Joseph Fellowship at the Lookstein Center for Jewish Education at Bar-Ilan University. They were looking for educators who wer tech and social media savvy to engage in a two-year journey into creating online Communities of Practice. It was clear from the application that they expected applicants to be bloggers. So I became a blogger. And it has been - off and on - a process I have found meaningful. It has led to some great conversations and helped me focus my thoughts and communicate them to others.

The title started out kind of cute. One of the gaming system companies (Sega?) had an ad campaign in the 90s that used it as the tag line for their commercials. It stuck with me. When I decided to create this blog, I decided that the focus had to be on where we go next in Jewish Education. 

In 1971, Joel Grishaver's original Shema is For Real and Debbie Friedman's Sing Unto God were the cutting edge. SiFR was a one color print book bound with staples. And Debbie's album was an long playing vinyl record. We have come a long way baby.

I began this blog three days after Barack Obama was first inaugurated as president. Jewish educators had been adapting devices, web sites, apps and social media platforms to find ways to keep the learning process relevant in 2009.

I was and am not a huge gamer (I do the Wordle and play a few puzzle games). We did have a Space Invaders arcade game in my fraternity though. And just like the Sega ad, every time you completed a level, another one comes and brings new challenges.

So welcome to the next level of Jewish Education. Please join me in conversation (send me something you have written and I will post it) as we all work to create the new cutting edge. Our students deserve it!

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Virtual and Real Community

The Jim Joseph Foundation Fellows of the Lookstein Institute
for Jewish Education in the Diaspora at Bar Ilan University,
Ramat Gan, Israel. (l. to r.) Front Row: Howard Blas,
Rachel Meytin, Esther Feldman (Lookstein Center),
Ellen Dietrick, Barry Gruber,Lisa Micley, Joy Wasserman,
Lillian Howard. Back Row: Jonathan Fass, Elana Rivel,
Robyn Faintich, nammie Ichilov, Ira Wise,
Shalom Burger (Lookstein Center), Sid Singer, Eliezer Jones.
I am writing this on an Amtrak train from Boston to Bridgeport, CT. I have just spent two days learning about leadership styles, logic models and evaluation with my chevrah in the Jim Joseph Foundation Fellows (#JJFF)[1]. This was our fourth meeting in the past 13 months. The process of this fellowship has been fascinating. While the learning has varied in quality and content – and is often quite excellent – the most significant piece has been the relationships.

There are 14 fellows.
o       We live in Atlanta, the Bay Area, Boston, Connecticut, Chicago, Florida, Houston, Philadelphia, New York (City and upstate), and Washington D.C.
o       There are seven men and seven women
o       We work for and identify with institutions in the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements. Some of us work in cross-denominational settings or communal agencies. A few of us work with national institutions.
o       2 of us run synagogue religious schools, 1 runs an early childhood program. 2 of us are day school heads and one has worked as Day School psychologist. 1 of us works in a JCC and 2 are in community Jewish education agencies. 2 work for a college or university. 1 is runs a summer camp for children with special needs, and 2 of us are with national educational initiatives.
o       We range in age from late 20’s (I think) to late 50’s (I think). We are American, British and Canadian citizens. One of us may also be Israeli, but I forgot to ask.
o       Our education ranges from BA to MA to PhD. Some of us grew up in synagogue religious schools, others went to day school. We have belonged to or worked for most of the Jewish youth movements in North America.

This is diverse a group of educators I can ever remember learning and working with, in terms of educational focus, religious orientation and practice age and experience. And I cannot remember learning more from such a small group of educators since my grad school days. Surely I have had amazing experiences at CAJE and NATE conferences.

And I am hoping to have more and deeper ones with the Community of Practice my NATE colleagues and I are developing: that is one of the purposes of this fellowship – to develop CoP’s with our peers. We have been learning a lot about creating these communities using Web 2.0 technology. And we have explored many different issues: educational, technical and communal ones.

Working with this chevrah has taught us all something very important. Virtual communities need more than technological connections to be communities. They need people to have relationships. And we have concluded that F2F – face to face contact, even a little bit – is essential.

Last week I wrote about how social networking was not THE solution, but was an important took in our bag as Jewish educators. Today I am talking about the corollary for educational professionals. This medium offers us opportunities for connection and consultation that we could not have even imagined ten or twenty years ago. And I am eager for us to use it in better, more robust ways. But I was reminded in Boston as we hugged and said goodbye, that it is the people and the relationships between them that make a community.

If you are and educational professional, there is a good chance that sometime in the next year, you will be invited to join an online community of practice by one of us (or by someone else). I hope you will say yes.

You may be frustrated or intimidated by the technology. Don’t be. Remember that at the other end of that broadband connection is someone just like you. And they are or were put off by the virtuality of the connection. But they, like you, have dedicated themselves to making Jewish learning happen. And you two (or two hundred of you) getting to know one another, share with one another and consult with one another, will help all of our learners be more successful engaged more deeply.

It has been and promises to be a fantastic journey. I hope to see some of you (F2F and online) along the way!


[1] The Jim Joseph Foundation established this online leadership fellowship at the Lookstein Center for Jewish Education in the Diaspora at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. It was designed and is administered by Shalom Burger and Esther Feldman of the Lookstein Center.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Lessons from J. Crew


Another fantastic piece brought to us by eJewish Philanthropy. I especially love it when someone brings a lesson from the world and figures out how to use it as a lens for what we do - without telling us just to be more like business. That would be overly simplistic and fit as well as I would in jeggings. Not a pretty picture! Enjoy. 

October 4, 2010 by Gail Hyman  

I read with great interest this past Sunday, October 3, 2010, The New York Times article, “Buy My Stuff – and Theirs, Too” by Joshua Brustein, that we in the Jewish community need to consider. The gist of the article is how J. Crew, one of the most successful online and in-store space clothing retailers, has determined that “friending” other purveyors’ goods makes great business sense for them and their customers. This is befriending – no, it’s actually community-building – taken to the max. J. Crew determined that surrounding its products with those of other fashion-related businesses, would create a more potent marketing picture for its consumers to consider and ultimately purchase that if they simply went the traditional route of merchandising their own goods.
If J. Crew has determined that offering its customers a fashion statement built on their clothing as well as related items from other retailers (think J. Crew sweater, slacks, scarf with someone else’s umbrella, hat, sports gear, healthy transportation and flavored vitamin water), you can see the potential opportunity J. Crew is leveraging to connect with consumers in a much more holistic way.
If you are a JCC, a federation, a synagogue, think about how you position yourselves to be a friendly source to those you wish to engage. In this new world of social media, where word of mouth and relationships trump any outright marketing ploy, take a lesson from J. Crew and start linking your efforts to relevant community partners … a federation appeal linked to the needs of the local synagogue education program, or the home for the elderly, or how the interests of the local JCC align with those of young families who choose to purchase “green products”, participate in organic food coops, give to the needy at their local food bank …
Successful marketing today is more and more about building both a full picture of the consumer’s life as they envision it and creating a network of authentic advocates who, without prompting or artifice, will tweet or “friend” you and offer their friends a trusted reason to buy into it. What peers say to each other about the total life experience and any given commodity that supports it, be it day school education or synagogue membership, trumps any paid advertisement or direct mail pitch. If you want to be valued for your service or product to the Jewish community, you have to ask yourself, “What are you are doing to build and nurture that community and its belief in you and your product?”
Marketing is quickly moving from traditional advertising and promotion to the more personal and trusted world of the social media world where friends honestly recommend a lifestyle and the product or service that feeds it. It is a world where individual endorsement says as much about the endorser and their commitment to a specific community as it does about the product or service they recommend.
If you want to be viewed as a contributor to that community, you have to be part of its maintenance. As Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice president for emerging media and brand strategy at 360i, a digital advertising agency said in The New York Times article, “This is a conversation, not a one-night stand. If you are in this community, make sure you are contributing to the maintenance of that community.”
For those of us in the Jewish community, the J. Crew story should suggest it is time for greater collaboration; for looking at all our “product” offerings from the more holistic perspective of how our consumers experience Jewish life. It is not about “my organization versus yours”. Rather, it is about community … where we each fit and how we all fit together to create a more powerful Jewish experience for every consumer of Jewish life … a little synagogue, a little JCC, a little social activism, a little education … put them all together for a full Jewish experience and each of us may find more buyers than if we had sold our wares separately.
Gail Hyman is a marketing and communications professional who currently focuses her practice, Gail Hyman Consulting, on assisting Jewish nonprofit organizations increase their ranks of supporters and better leverage their communications in the Web 2.0 environment. Gail is a regular contributor to eJewish Philanthropy.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

In sunny California, tweeting and surfing (web, not waves)...

So I am sitting in a room at the Brandeis Bardin Institute in Simi Valley California. The weather has been in the 80's for two days. I am over the jet lag. I and 13 other Jewish educators are the Jim Joseph Foundation Fellows - Leading Educators Online at our first f2f (face to face) retreat with the staff of the Lookstein Institute for Jewish Education in the Diaspora at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan.

The program goals are to:
  • Identify, direct and empower Fellows to develop and lead online collaborative communities in their professional fields.
  • Provide leading edge professional development to outstanding Jewish educators from formal (e.g. supplementary, congregational, and day schools) and informal Jewish education settings (e.g. camps, youth groups, community centers).
  • Advance new ways of learning and working together to bring about qualitative changes in the way Jewish educators work with others as they learn.
  • Guide Jewish education to the forefront of 21st century education.
What does that mean? We have had a few months of intense, threaded conversations in a Google Group about creating a Community of Practice (CoP), and spent much of the last 36 hours exploring how to become one. We have learned from one another about how we have used various Web 2.0 applications in our work as educators. And we have told stories.

This is the early stage of what promises to be an amazing journey into the Next Level. I will share as often as seems relevant. In the right hand column of this Blog I have added a section called Next Level 2.0. It is a list of Web 2.0 applications that might help all of us take Jewish Learning and our own professional growth to the next level. Most of the apps listed were suggested by the fellows, and we all thank Barry Gruber for compiling the first iteration of the list. The current version (as of this posting - it will grow) reflects that first compilation and places I have learned about this week in California.

OMG. Twitter??!!??
I tried twitter a few months ago, noodling around trying to see what it might do. Yesterday, Esther Feldman from the Lookstein Center told us all to sign up and log in. Many already had been tweeting. My previous impression (and I said as much) of Twitter was that it was a slick way of having People Magazine open all the time. I remember Kevin Spacey Tweeting on the air while he was on Letterman. Ridiculous.

Then we all began tweeting among ourselves. During presentations. It seems a bit like passing notes. Rude even. But the content of the tweets actually enhanced the conversation once we got used to it. We were tweeting our thoughts while listening. Not everyone got a chance to speek aloud, but we all had an opportunity to express ourselves to one another about what was happening. And we were creating a record of the learning at the same time. I had twitter live on the left side of my screen and Word on the right for note taking.

We went a little viral. Lisa Colton of Darim Online follows the tweets of one of the fellows. So she began to follow our conversation. (You can do that because we were attaching a hashtag that identifies the conversation thread!) She began to comment with us and share the conversation with those who follow her. At the moment that is 561 people.

Ellen Dietrick, one of the fellows, is the director of the Synagogue Early Childhood Program at Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, Virginia. She is way ahead of the curve on all of this stuff. She has put a netbook in every classroom. Her teachers take some time everyday to post a very brief (4 -5 sentence) update about the happenings in their room and a photo (they digital cameras, too) to the schools Blog on Blogger.

Only those who are invited may see the blog (sorry, I do not issue the invites) to protect the privacy of the children and their families. But the parents (and grandparents who might live far away) can get a glimpse into their child's day and even ask their children better questions than "what did you learn/do in school today?" They can ask about the art project or the challah they baked! Every class posts each day. Wow.

And Twitter? Forget about it! Teachers will hand Ellen a note at random points in the day. A tweet can only be 140 characters, so it is very short. It says something specific about something wonderful that just happened. Ellen tweets it from a Twitter account that only the parents can follow (security again!). They might have their twitter feed tied to their phone or Blackberry. It might appear in a window on their iGoogle desktop or as an e-mail. The point is that they will get a nudge and a note moments after the event. I haven't spoken to any of the parents in Charlottesville, but I bet they love it! Did I mention she does school registration and sign ups for activities online using Google Docs? And that's only some of the work of one of the fellows.

So I have totally changed my mind about twitter. I don't think anyone wants to hear what I am ordering for lunch. Bit it is a pretty cool way to have a brief conversation, share a resource or create a backchannel for making meaning of something we are experiencing.

My twitter name is @IraJWise. What's yours?

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