Helene Uppin

“The opposite of fragmentation is not homogenization, which is a suspicious form of unity. Who wants blending, anyway? And for what purpose? Blending, somehow, always ends up privileging the perspective of the blade.”
― Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity

“Meaningful learning in a community requires both participation and reification to be present and in interplay. Sharing artifacts without engaging in discussions and activities around them impairs the ability to negotiate the meaning of what is being shared. Interacting without producing artifacts makes learning depend on individual interpretation and memory and can limit its depth, extent, and impact. Both participation and reification are necessary. Sometimes one process may dominate the other, or the two processes may not be well integrated. The challenge of this polarity is for communities to successfully cycle between the two.”
― Etienne Wenger, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities

“Indeed, what says more: the few lines of a tightly written poem or a volume of analytical comments on it? The communicative ability of artifacts depends on how the work of negotiating meaning is distributed between reification and participation.”
― Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity

“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your own clothes.”
― Henry David Thoreau