# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

The role of communities of practice in the socialization of students into a profession

As society’s need for specialists has increased, universities have responded by providing professional education is areas such as medicine, law, engineering, management, and education. A professional education is meant to provide an intensive and specialized intellectual training to individuals seeking to gain membership to a specific profession. Professional education is typically conceived and thought of in terms of a formal curriculum, a perspective which reduces the process to a series of courses to be completed successfully by the student. While the curriculum perspective addresses the manner in which students acquire an understanding of the theoretical and practical knowledge on which professional practice depends, it does little to ensure that students develop a professional identity or become a part of the larger social and culture structures of their chosen profession.

My research will use communities of practice as more a more comprehensive, holistic perspective from which to study the process of professional education. Through a qualitative research methodology, I will investigate the professional education of software engineers with the goal of exploring and understanding the varied and shifting social contexts of learning that students participate in as they move through and try to make sense of their professional education. From this process, I will seek develop a model of professional education that brings to the fore the processes that enhance and impede the professional socialization of students.

This presentation will provide an overview of professional education, professional socialization, and the development of professional identity. It will show how communities of practice can be used to provide a useful perspective on professional education, both for the researcher as well as for the participants in the process.