Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Communities of practice: dynamics of CoPs in the Netherlands

When I met Marc Coenders on Tuesday, who has written a book about communities of practice and has extensive experiences with CoPs in the Netherlands, I decided to pilot my first interview (to be honest I had carried my camera two times before without daring to ask the interviewees for an interview..). I was interested to know more about the dynamics of CoPs within the context of the Dutch culture, as I just realized that each national culture may bring its own specific dynamics to the art of cultivating CoPs, which may be more important to realize and learn to work with than generalizing the dynamics of 'southern' CoPs.

I asked him: 'what are the specific dynamics of CoPs in the Netherlands?' The interview is roughly 3 minutes and he explains partly in Dutch and summarizes in English towards the end. He stresses that every CoP is unique due to the self-organising nature and that it's hence hard to craft general rules. According to Marc, the Netherlands culture has strong positive and negative characteristics that do influence the functioning of CoPs. First there is a drive for results, to be productive, concrete and pragmatic. But with little room for philosophying. He misses sometimes attention for reflection and some long-term perpective in thinking.

(it was easy to do and VERY easy to upload with castpost!! except that you cannot choose the coverphoto. For my next interview I have to think of how to start, with or without the question and should try to avoid laughing)

6 comments:

Nancy White said...

Joitske, I can't get the video to play in either IE or Firefox. :-(

Joitske said...

don't know about that.. I tried again and it was working for me (realplayer I think). I can try and send it by mail?

Dorine Ruter said...

Hi Joitske,
Nice video and thanks for sharing this online. Were you using a digital photocamera with video function to shoot this or did you use special video equipment?

Also (less technical) I am curious how you prepared this. Did you ask Marc your question and just started the camera? Did you give him some time to prepare a response? Or was Marc's talk a result of a chat the two of you just had on the topic?

Would be interesting to see what the results of different approaches to this are. Is spontaneity appealing or rather chaotic? I guess this also depends on the speaker.

I haven't got much experience with video interviews myself so I am looking forward to seeing more of your videos!

Sus Nyrop said...

Hallo Joitske,

This is indeed a little pearl of a spontaneous interview. It does help a lot however that you took the time to do a resumé in English, although I enjoy listening to the Dutch and try to find words that are similar to German or Danish. Marc Coenders must be a very patient interview person with all that real sound in the background - a cafeteria or restaurant I presume? Those women wearing this noisy kind of hard heels on shoes should be punished, or asked to take them off in public indoor locations :-)

Apart from that, I had no problems playing the video on my Win XP in Firefox.

Joitske said...

Hi, thanks for your comments. I used a 'normal' digital photocamera with film option. I intended to have a 3 minutes interview. I asked Marc and he said fine, then I told him my question, which made sense to him without further explanation actually. We had talked for an hour or so, but not about this question. I was also surprised that he could talk so easily without any preparation and roughly 3 minutes!! Maybe that's how you recognise a real expert :)

I did ask whether we should go outside the restaurant to do the film, but there was not much time, so we decided to shoot just where we were seated. Maybe the simple, quick shooting contributed to the spontaneity in this case? Next time, I would agree whether I repeat the question during shooting or not.

Beth Kanter said...

Great video interview! You did a great job and thank you for also summarizing it in the post.

What an accomplished vlogger!