Community of practice

Definitions

• Communities are networks, made up of individuals as well as public and private institutions. They share a certain amount of practices, common goals and common language. They do have a social organization including formal or informal hierarchies and some idea of social service (members helping each other).

• Communities can be considered as problem-solving mechanisms which contribute to establishing policy agendas and offer mechanisms to facilitate processes for negotiation between different actors. They help develop and disseminate knowledge that is crucial in addressing the challenge of educational change, the may even come up with innovative mechanisms for implementing new strategies.

• What are CoPs? Think back to National and the PLL engineers. At the simplest level, they are a small group of people (in this case, about 20) who've worked together over a period of time. Not a team, not a task force, not necessarily an authorized or identified group. People in CoPs can perform the same job (tech reps) or collaborate on a shared task (software developers) or work together on a product (engineers, marketers, and manufacturing specialists). They are peers in the execution of "real work." What holds them together is a common sense of purpose and a real need to know what each other knows. There are many communities of practice within a single company, and most people belong to more than one of them. (Brown & Gray, 1995)

Supporting virtual environments

Creating or supporting a community of practice is not an easy task.

• Virtual communities of practice are loose or tight communities of practice using the functionalities of Internet software (usually a kind of portal) that provides collaboration and information tools. A well designed portal that provides both functionality and a sense of "[social presence being there]" may help.

• Note: When groups of users interact intensively through some medium, they progressively may constitute a community. The community feeling does not automatically emerge because groups use electronic communication, it takes a lot of time, a lot of interactions. It requires sharing goals and, whatever that means, sharing experiences....

Related subjects:

• Mentoring programs may be useful to introduce new members into a community of practice
• Knowledge management refers to management techniques and information technology to capture, store and share knowledge
• Organizational learning relates to the capacity of an organization to learn and that depends on variables that also make communities of practice happen.

Communities of practice, learning and education

In formal education, issues related to community of practice are not uncommon:

• "Classroom dynamics", "class spirit", etc. refer to similar issues

• The interest for communities of practice also emerges from situated cognition that emphasizes apprenticeship, coaching, collaboration, multiple practice, articulation of learning skills, stories, and technology (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989). See situated learning and collaborative learning.

• Instructional designs like the knowledge-building community model (with its computer supported intentional learning environments) depend very much on the emergence of community practices.

• Collaborative Writing-to-learn designs that engage learners in various forms of exchange and confrontation.

• Various forms of project-oriented learning, etc. also aim to engage learners as members of a community of practice.

Communities of practice in the context of teacher education and learning

The modern teacher development literature defines existence of teacher communities as a critical variable for the success of pedagogical reform.

Here is a longer quotation from Schlager et al. (2002:2 - online draft version)

Brown and Gray (1995) define workplace CoPs as small groups of people held together by a "common sense of purpose and a real need to know what each other knows." George Por [1] describes a CoP as " more than a 'community of learners,' a community of practice is also a 'community that learns.' Not merely peers exchanging ideas around the water cooler, sharing and benefiting from each other's expertise, but colleagues committed to jointly develop better practices." In the CoP literature, learning is viewed as a social activity that occurs as newcomers and journeymen move through an established community's professional hierarchy toward expertise (Brown & Duguid, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). Learning opportunities occur primarily through informal interaction among colleagues in the context of work. Newcomers gain access to the community's professional knowledge in authentic contexts through encounters with people, tools, tasks, and social norms. New practices and technologies are adopted by the CoP through the evolution of practice over time. Thus, a CoP can be an effective hothouse in which new ideas germinate, new methods and tools are developed, and new communities are rooted. The CoP can help professionals gain access to, and facility with, ideas, methods, content, and colleagues; help novices learn about the profession through apprenticeship and peripheral participation; and enable journeymen to become valued resources and community leaders through informal mentoring and participation

in multiple work groups.

Examples of technology enhanced communities of practice

• TappedIn, a community of education professionals
• The TECFA Community Portal
• ... more needed

Links

• What is a community of practice ?

References

• Bielaczyc, K, Collins,A. (1999). "Learning Communities in Classrooms: A Reconceptualization of Educational Pratice", in Reigeluth, C. (ed) Instructional-Design Theories and Models, Vol II, London: Erlbaum

• Brown, John S. & Gray,Estee S. (1995), "The People Are the Company How to build your company around your people.", FastCompany Magazine, 1, p.78 [2]

• Lave J. (1991) Situating learning in communities of practice. In L. Resnick, J. Levine & S. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition (63 - 84). Hyattsville, MD: American Psychological Association.

• Lesser, E.L. and J. Storck, Communities of practice and organizational performance, IBM System Journal, Special issue on Knowledge Management, 40 (4), 2001.

• Schlager, M., Fusco, J. & Schank, P (2002). Evolution of an on-line education community of practice. In K. A. Renninger and W. Shumar (Eds.), Building virtual communities: Learning and change in cyberspace. NY: Cambridge University Press, 129-158. [[3]]

• Schlager, M., & Fusco, J. (2004). Teacher professional development, technology, and communities of practice: Are we putting the cart before the horse? In S. Barab, R. Kling, & J. Gray (Eds.), Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [[4]]