Biography

With over 15 years community college teaching experience - designing and teaching in multiple disciplines and modalities - Joanne Munroe is an interdisciplinary scholar who loves blended learning design. Building upon 4 years of leadership in emerging technologies and online education, Jo thrives in creative, collaborative environments and uses her training as an anthropologist to bring techniques of ethnographic interviewing, participant observation and mixed method evaluation to forward organizational change. With 10 years of formal faculty and staff development experience and seven years administrative experience, Jo is a program builder and a passionate educator,who contributes a globally relevant view and a grassroots approach to professional development, inspiring, guiding and encouraging collaborative interdependence through communities of practice. In community, she is an intellectual catalyst and an enthusiastic and creative team-builder who responds to and encourages innovative practices.

Currently, Jo is the Community of Practice Coordinator at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (IT). In supporting an ERP implementation across 34 community and technical colleges, Jo designs and co- facilitates Communities of Practice (CoP)  to break down silos and minimize information bottlenecks during knowledge transfer. Campus practitioners (specialists who perform the same job and/ or specialists who collaborate around shared tasks) interact regularly to exchange stories, problems, challenges and solutions to build and leverage relationships to learn together as they deal with the same challenges in diverse contexts. Through providing cross-team communication and safe, experimental contexts in which knowledge is created and shared, the CoP brings a range of perspectives to bear on a problem. In ERP implementation and post GOLIVE knowledge transfer, Communities of Practice provide a mechanism and a strategy for: 1) responding to "just-in time" knowledge inquiries ;2) Supporting knowledge sharing/knowledge transfer needs of the project; 3) identifying, capturing, preserving and effectively leveraging collective organizational knowledge and expertise.