Building a Community of Practice: A Deck of Lenses

This nine-card deck offers a playful way to engage members of a community of practice in collaborative dialogue, reflection and strategic planning. This original deck of cards draws inspiration from The Art of Game Design. We designed our cards to help people define what makes a community of practice strong and what could make it even stronger.

Today, the learning needs of educators, both formal and informal, are shifting at alarming rates. Our Deck of Lenses is one of the many ways Convergence helps support communities of practice by offering powerful strategies for generating critical new knowledge that can help people transform their practice and accommodate ongoing changes in technologies and learner needs. 

There are a myriad of ways to use our CoP Decks of Lenses cards, both in person and virtually.  Each of the nine cards offers a simple, focused prompt to discuss, allowing folks to dive deep into important considerations without being overwhelmed by the task of improving every aspect of the work. Download the cards and test them out. And let us know how we can help build your CoP!

Passion to Purpose

Overview

Passion to Purpose (P2P) is a free open-source and delightful online tool that lets learners flex their civic imagination muscles. The purpose of P2P is to help educators lead their learners through the challenging process of generating authentic questions and project ideas based on their personal interests and civic values.

Users are guided through a series of fun prompts (eg: What are you a fan of? What do you want to learn more about?). With the aid of a built in randomizer, they land on an unexpected design challenge in the form of a “How might we question”. P2P works across informal and formal contexts and disciplines. It comes with a free educator guide with lots of helpful tips and strategies for sparking ideation with youth.I recommend Passion to Purpose to all my digital media literacy educators as a great way to ignite student inquiry around topics that matter to them.