Community of Practice

Welcome!

Meaning is a verb

Community of Practice

Communities of Practice

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are those communities which are formed to support communal, and hopefully collaborative, efforts, based around common practice. In a slightly mind-bending way, the term community of practice is also used to refer to the process of communal learning which occurs when people are involved in CoPs.

The term comes from work by Lave and Wenger (citations to follow) and Wenger, White and Smith have a blog on the subject over here. Wenger regards learning as a key part of identity, and especially learning by social participation.

The CoP is conceptualised as a stable community. Whilst this does not preclude it being dynamically stable, the stable part of that description means that it does not cover the transient ad hoc communities which emerge to meet specific needs, or purely because of common interests, in both offline and online contexts.

However, there is some degree of commonality between the two concepts, and the analysis of one can lend understanding to the analysis of the other. In both cases, for instance, individuals take on one or more roles within the community. Part of my work at the moment includes naming, and eventually modelling, some of those roles in order to facilitate better understanding and communication about the ways we can make collaborative learning more effective - and how we can support it using technology to the best of our ability.

Roles

Some of the roles I have identified (starting with two well established role types), with brief descriptions:

Lurker: Doesn't do much, but read.

Troll: Asks awkward questions. Not always a bad thing.

Explorer: Finds resources and brings them to the attention of the group.

Bookmarker: Finds reseources, but only for their own ends.

Reviewer: Looks at resources and comments on them, for the benefit of the group (or because they like expressing their opinions!)

Mentor: Helps other members of the group with etiquette, knowledge and technology.

Writer: Produces their own content.

Ambassador: Maintains links with the world outside the community.

You get the idea. The nomenclature is not fixed in stone, but it would be good to use some common set of names.

Each of the roles can be active in different domains. So, for instance, it would be possible to have an Academic Writer or a News Reviewer.

John Smith also suggested the Ethnographer and the Technology Steward. I have broken down the Technology Steward into some component roles, which I will explore further later.

Supporting collaboration

An individual can be engaging in multiple communities, taking on different roles in each. They can perform multiple roles in each community. Each role they perform forms a part of their identity. Every interaction gives the possibility of making new connections in the mind - of learning.

Learning is a part of identity. Identity is a part of learning. But Identity is your meaning in the communities you engage with. You create your identity whilst learning and helping others learn. Not just in an educational setting, but throughout your life. If we can help support that in an online environment, we can provide the leverage to make the most out of the massively parallel way our minds work and the connectivity of the internet.

Collaboration can be said to rely on 6 key support 'technologies' (from a paper - I will fill in later!)

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License