Greetings from snowy Truckee, California (just north of Lake Tahoe high in the Sierra Nevada).

In the spirit of providing a little context about who I am, I was pondering the strange journey that has led me to serving as a Cognitive-Edge guest blogger.

The following is in response to several comments I received about communities of practice (CoP) mentioned in an earlier blog. My perspective on CoP is no more positive than those reflected in the comments I received. I certainly agree that formal CoP have been less than successful, but failure of the method to achieve an intended goal shouldn’t undermine our efforts to foster the development of healthy learning communities. I guess I'd have to say that Etienne Wenger reminded me that CoP, whether formal or informal, are ultimately in service to learning. There’s no doubt formal CoP have become just as "debased” as KM to use a commenter’s characterization, but we have to look beyond that. What really resonated for me from Wenger’s presentation is the role of identity in the process of learning and how identity intersects with community, practice and the meaning we make of the process. He also mentioned what he sees as the undervalued role of those that serve as liaisons between CoP; they’re not appreciated by either community, but critical to cross pollination.

I was reminded of a large study we concluded in the fall of 2008 on employee attitudes about their quality of work life. The study came to mind because just this past week we were wrestling with how to best access the perspectives of a large continuing education student body. At least here in the States, it seems like our over-reliance on quantitative research methodology is alive and well, evidenced by the seemingly perpetual arguments we must make in support of purely qualitative or even mixed method approaches to surveying attitudes.

A recently published study by Nick Christakis and James Fowler, described in BMJ, a British Medical Journal claims that our own personal happiness is directly related to having happy friends. In this study of some 4700 people over two decades it appears that happiness spreads like a cold virus through a social network with up to 3 degrees of separation. According to the authors, “happiness is contagious” which certainly argues for us to see ourselves in relationship to others, as opposed to seeing ourselves as separate disconnected individuals.

Tomorrow's inauguration of Barack Obama is indisputably an incredibly momentous occasion. His election indicates that the habitual patterns of our social interaction have been seriously disrupted. Whether the disruption to the past patterns of behavior is lasting is an open question. And whether or not the Obama presidency will ultimately be seen as a paradigm shift in American and global politics also remains to be seen, but the fact that a man with his unconventional and multifaceted roots has become the U.S. president is both amazing and encouraging.

Following up on my earlier 'Choose your Friends' blog there were a few comments which speculated that the study’s conclusion might be explained by some sort of self-selection process. I think that one of the interesting points of the study is that Christakis and Fowler explained it as better understood as a network phenomenon. Fowler goes so far as to say, “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket”. I’ve attached a snippet from the abstract and conclusion.

In an earlier blog I spoke of a tongue-in-cheek desire to assemble a catalog of perceptual patterns humans are likely to get wrong. The example discussed was a visual perception issue—the trajectory of a bouncing ball. I was imagining the catalog as a humorous compendium of cognitive pattern recognition human shortcomings—a handy fallibility reference. However, as seemingly trivial as the trajectory of a bouncing might be, I was nevertheless intrigued by how we can use visual pattern recognition to expose or render visible the social patterns of human behavior.

As my first guest blog I thought it appropriate to start off with some remarks on the issue of “point of view” since whatever else blogs may be, they inescapably present the author’s point of view. To be sure, the notion of “points of view”, otherwise known under the more technically philosophical term “perspectivalism,” has been taken by the more strident post-modernists as implying a relativization of all positions. However, I’m not going in that direction by bringing up the subject here. Indeed, I think that extreme post-modern perspectivalism is ultimately self-refuting.