Communities of Practice? Varieties of Situated Learning
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Forming Communities of Practice in Higher Education: a Theoretical Perspective
FORMING COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE Maria Jakovljevic University of South Africa, South Africa [email protected] Sheryl Buckley University of South Africa, South Africa [email protected] Melanie Bushney University of South Africa, South Africa [email protected] Abstract: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. The current problem is that there is no specific guidance to form communities of practice (CoP) in higher educational institutions to guide learners’ practical and theoretical knowledge and learning experiences. This comparative action research study will investigate, explore and describe ways of developing learning communities at institutions of higher education in South Africa and Europe, as well as determine the feasibility of doing so. In this research project entitled ‘Women in research’ the team of researchers who are predominantly women will focus on how learner learning can be stimulated through learning in communities of practice. Communities of practice recognise the diverse needs of the increasing numbers of learners entering university with different academic and cultural backgrounds and with varying social expectations and experiences. This study consists of six phases: developing a theoretical framework for communities of practice; exploring preliminary learners’ attitudes toward communities of practice; forming pilot communities of practice; evaluating pilot communities of practice groups; implementing action research to pilot communities of practice; and applying the communities of practice model to other groups. The aim of this paper is to highlight phase one of the study, that of developing a theoretical framework for communities of practice. -
The Role of Communities of Practice in Cloud Skills Executive Summary
Achieving Digital Transformation: The Role of Communities of Practice in Cloud Skills Executive Summary Digital transformation has become central to the success Successful digital transformation, however, doesn’t just happen of nearly every major industry. According to a recent IDG in the IT department. It requires all employees to buy in, as well report, 93% of surveyed enterprises have a digital-first as a commitment by the organization to cloud-skills training strategy for their business, encompassing everything from that goes beyond a single one-day class or a few online courses. enhanced data availability to the development of new Organizations need a comprehensive skills development program. revenue streams. A third of the respondents reported that This begins with identifying skill gaps throughout the workforce and digital business has already helped their organization includes creating a strong strategic communication plan to bring all achieve revenue growth.1 Digital transformation has become employees onboard. a critical trend for industry leaders, as organizations harness the power of technology to create better customer experiences and improve worker productivity. Cloud fluency has become a major component of that transformation. In a recent survey by the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, companies that move to the cloud can improve service levels, shorten times to market, and reduce IT overhead costs by up to 40%.2 © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 2 Such a program incorporates both formal teaching methods (classroom training, digital training, certification exams) and informal approaches (workshops, peer mentoring). Among these informal processes, communities of practice have garnered a great deal of attention from industry leaders. -
Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems: the Career of a Concept Etienne Wenger
Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept Etienne Wenger The concept of community of practice was not born in the systems theory tradition. It has its roots in attempts to develop accounts of the social nature of human learning inspired by anthropology and social theory (Lave, 1988; Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984; Foucault, 1980; Vygostsky, 1978). But the concept of community of practice is well aligned with the perspective of the systems tradition. A community of practice itself can be viewed as a simple social system. And a complex social system can be viewed as constituted by interrelated communities of practice. In this essay I first explore the systemic nature of the concept at these two levels. Then I use this foundation to look at the applications of the concept, some of its main critiques, and its potential for developing a social discipline of learning. The concept of community of practice does not exist by itself. It is part of a broader conceptual framework for thinking about learning in its social dimensions.1 It is a perspective that locates learning, not in the head or outside it, but in the relationship between the person and the world, which for human beings is a social person in a social world. In this relation of participation, the social and the individual constitute each other. When I refer to “the theory” in what follows, I refer to this version of social learning theory. A social systems view on learning: communities of practice as social learning systems A community of practice can be viewed as a social learning system. -
Social Media and Collective Intelligence: Ongoing and Future Research Streams
Social Media and Collective Intelligence: Ongoing and Future Research Streams Detlef Schoder, Peter A. Gloor, Panagiotis Takis Metaxas The tremendous growth in the use of Social Media has led to radical paradigm shifts in the ways we communicate, collaborate, consume, and create information. Our focus in this special issue is on the reciprocal interplay of Social Media and Collective Intelligence. We therefore discuss constituting attributes of Social Media and Collective Intelligence, and we structure the rapidly growing body of literature including adjacent research streams such as Social Network Analysis, Web Science, and Computational Social Science. We conclude by making propositions for future research where in particular the disciplines of artificial intelligence, computer science, and information systems can substantially contribute to the interdisciplinary academic discourse. Introduction Over the last few years, the use of Social Media has increased tremendously all over the world. For example, Facebook has increased the number of its subscribers worldwide from approx. 660 million in March 2011 to approx. 840 million in March 2012 (http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm). At the time of this writing, according to Twitter announcements, the number of ‘tweets’ people send is more than one billion every 3 days or more than 4,000 tweets/sec each consisting of a text message of 140 characters or less, and the number of Wikipedia articles has increased from 3.5 million in January 2011 to 3.8 million in January 2012 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia). The Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo, claims to have registered more than 300 million users in just 3 years. -
Practicing Community: Outline of a Praxeological Approach to the Feeling of We-Ness
Klückmann Practicing Community Practicing Community: Outline of a Praxeological Approach to the Feeling of We-ness Matthias Klückmann Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft University of Tübingen Germany Abstract Community, once a backbone of the social sciences as well as the study of folklore, has lost its status as a framing concept. My aim in this article is to argue for the analytical value of community for the study of expressive culture and the everyday. Based on assumptions of practice theory, especially the work of Theodore R. Schatzki, I propose to understand community as a feeling of we-ness that evolves and transpires through bundles of practices and arrangements among participants of these practices. The praxeological perspective allows comparing communities of different types in order to gain general insights into aspects of boundaries as well as spatial and temporal orders of communities. usic played in the distance. I entered the district through a leafy graveyard. It was a hot summer day and immediately I missed the shadow I had been enjoying for the last few minutes. The streets around me—with their brick Mstone buildings, their small shops, bars and cafés on the main street, the allotments, the church and the school in the near distance—make up a small neighborhood in Stuttgart, a city in the southwest of Germany. The neighborhood is part of my fieldwork; the fieldwork is part of my research on the feeling of home and diversity in multi-ethnic neighborhoods. The neighborhood is commonly called Nordbahnhofviertel—literally translated ‘North Station Quarter’.1 It was built for railroad employees toward the end of the nineteenth century, in conjunction with a newly constructed freight station. -
Motivation for Information Exchange in a Virtual Community of Practice: Evidence from a Facebook Group for Shrimp Farmers
Motivation for Information Exchange in a Virtual Community of Practice: Evidence from a Facebook Group for Shrimp Farmers Guenwoo Lee1 and Aya Suzuki2 May, 2018 PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT PERMISSION Abstract In order to reveal the motivation of information exchanges between farmers, we take a case of one Facebook group, which share a common farming crop and the majority of the members are farmers. We construct a monthly panel data to addresses a Facebook group member's motivation for information exchange between January 2015 and May 2017. Based on Poisson and negative binomial regressions, we found that: (i) members who have previously asked questions are more active in sharing information than people who have never asked; (ii) other members' positive expressions to previous information shared (such as clicking likes) promote future information sharing; (iii) the act of information sharing by one’s peer promote his/her own information sharing, and (iv) the more the member shares information in the past, the more s/he asks information today. These findings suggest that reciprocity does play a significant role in motivating information exchange even in the virtual communities of practice, similar to the communities of practice. We also confirm that professional reputation is one of the motivations for information sharing and that there is a positive effect of peer’s prosocial behavior. Keywords: Peer effect; Reciprocity; Reputation; Shrimp farming; Virtual community of practice JEL Codes: D80; O33; Q10 1 Corresponding author: Department of International Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, University of Tokyo, Environmental Studies Building #706, 5-1-5 Kashiwanoha, Kashiwa-shi, Chiba-ken 277-8563 Phone: +81 80-4726-6874 email: [email protected] 2 Department of International Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, University of Tokyo 1 1. -
Communities of Practice Approach for Knowledge Management Systems
systems Article Communities of Practice Approach for Knowledge Management Systems Sitalakshmi Venkatraman 1,* and Ramanathan Venkatraman 2 1 Department of Information Technology, Melbourne Polytechnic, Preston, Victoria 3072, Australia 2 Institute of Systems Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119615, Singapore; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +61-3-9269-1171 Received: 26 August 2018; Accepted: 24 September 2018; Published: 27 September 2018 Abstract: In this digital world, organisations are facing global competition as well as manpower pressures leading towards the knowledge economy, which heavily impacts on their local and international businesses. The trend is to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing to cope with these problems. With the advancement of technologies and social engineering that can connect people in the virtual world across time and distance, several organisations are embarking on knowledge management (KM) systems, implementing a community of practice (CoP) approach. However, virtual communities are relatively new paradigms, and there are several challenges to their successful implementation from an organisation’s point of interest. There is lack of CoP implementation framework that can cater to today’s dynamic business and sustainability requirements. To fill the gap in literature, this paper develops a practical framework for a CoP implementation with a view to align KM strategy with business strategy of an organization. It explores the different steps of building, sharing, and using tacit and explicit knowledge in CoPs by applying the Wiig KM cycle. It proposes a practical CoP implementation framework that adopts the Benefits, Tools, Organisation, People and Process (BTOPP) model in addressing the key questions surrounding each of the BTOPP elements with a structured approach. -
Teacher Participation in Online Communities of Practice: a Mixed-Methods Study of Community, Context and Practice
Teacher participation in online communities of practice: a mixed-methods study of community, context and practice Kristen Weatherby Institute of Education, University College London 2017 Submitted for the degree of PhD 1 2 Author’s Declaration I, Kristen Weatherby, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Kristen E. Weatherby 3 4 Abstract The primary objective of this doctoral research is to understand the relationship between teachers’ participation in online communities of practice and the development of their teaching practice. The online community at the centre of this research is the Computing at School (CAS) community, created to support the computing curriculum in the United Kingdom. A mixed-methods methodology was employed that included a survey of CAS member teachers as well as semi-structured interviews with a subset of surveyed teachers. A content analysis of interactions between members on the CAS online community aided in development of maps of teacher context and in understanding whether CAS exhibits characteristics of a COP. Findings indicate that some teachers report significant changes to their teaching, classroom management, lesson planning or personal understanding of computing concepts as a result of their participation in the CAS community. CAS exhibits characteristics of a COP, according to Wenger’s (1998) framework, but not all CAS teachers use CAS in this manner. Other CAS members use CAS simply as a resource bank, from which to download activities for classroom use. Findings also reveal that a computing teacher’s background characteristics, notably his or her professional experience prior to teaching computing, play an important role in their attitudes toward and preparedness for teaching computing as well as influencing the professional development resources to which they have access. -
Collective Action and Knowledge Contribution in Electronic Networks of Practice∗
Wasko et al./Electronic Networks of Practice RESEARCH ARTICLE Collective Action and Knowledge Contribution in ∗ Electronic Networks of Practice Molly McLure Wasko Department of Management Information Systems Florida State University [email protected] Samer Faraj Department of Decision and Information Technologies R. H. Smith School of Business University of Maryland [email protected] Robin Teigland Department of Marketing and Strategy Stockholm School of Economics [email protected] Abstract Although there has been a significant increase in networked communication and a growing interest in virtual organizing, to date researchers have yet to establish consistent terminology and have paid little attention to how specific characteristics of the electronic network influence social dynamics such as knowledge contribution. To address this gap, we develop a theoretical model and a set of propositions that explain knowledge contribution in voluntary, computer-mediated, very large and open networks focused on knowledge exchange around a specific practice. We base our model on theories of social networks and collective action to explain how a social network of volunteers sustains productive exchanges between individuals, such as the exchange of knowledge. We utilize the concept of a network of practice to illustrate how the macrostructural properties of the communication media, network size, access to the network, and mode of participation affect network dynamics and knowledge contribution. We then develop a model and a set of propositions to suggest that knowledge contribution within an electronic network of practice is dependent upon 1) the ∗ Robert Zmud was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Arun Rai and Manju Ahuja were reviewers for this paper. -
Learning Report: Leading Networks in Healthcare Learning About What Works – the Theory and the Practice
Learning report: Leading networks in healthcare Learning about what works – the theory and the practice January 2013 Identify Innovate Demonstrate Encourage Acknowledgements The Health Foundation would like to thank the networks that are participating in this work, and whose members have helped to guide the programme and have shared their learning and experiences so freely. Thanks are also due to Becky Malby and her team at the Centre for Innovation and Health Management (www.cihm.leeds.ac.uk), for overseeing the faculty and conducting the literature review; Selina Fox, for her support with the interviews to inform this paper; and the faculty members for their input and advice throughout. Author: Susannah Randall © 2013 The Health Foundation Learning report: Leading networks in healthcare is published by the Health Foundation, 90 Long Acre, London WC2E 9RA Contents Foreword 2 1 Introduction 3 Exploring the state of healthcare networks 3 The networks support programme 4 The diversity of network types 5 EXPERIENCE: Widening membership through consensus building 6 EXPERIENCE: Setting up a community of interest 7 2 What we know about networks 8 What are networks? 8 What are networks useful for? 9 Networks in the UK healthcare system 10 Network leadership 11 What makes networks effective? 11 What makes networks fail? 12 The impact of health networks on quality improvement 13 Views and insights from the faculty 14 EXPERIENCE: Connecting in a globalised network 16 EXPERIENCE: Achieving strong direction and shared ownership 17 EXPERIENCE: Challenges -
Knowledge Sharing in a Community of Practice
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Research Papers in Economics Technology Technology Knowledge Sharing in a Community of Practice James Hopple Troy University Emrah Orhun Troy University The aim of this study is to develop an understanding of the factors influencing participants’ knowledge-sharing in an electronic network of practice. The study builds on a theoretical framework derived from the theory of reasoned action and theories of social capital and social exchange. A model of knowledge sharing in an electronic network of practice has been developed based on this framework, which attempts to integrate factors validated through recent empirical studies (Kankanhalli et al., 2005; Wasko and Faraj, 2005; Bock et al., 2005). The model that considers the factors influencing the knowledge contributor and the knowledge seeker has been empirically tested using a survey in the Financial Management Community of Practice (COP) in the USAF Portal. Figure 1 shows the research model adopted for the study, which incorporates constructs from social exchange theory and social capital theory. Data were collected from members of the Financial Management (FM) Communities of Practice (COP) on the AF portal. Partial least squares (PLS) was chosen as the structural equation analysis method to the test the hypotheses. The study demonstrated that experience in the profession influenced the amount of contribution, but that self-rated expertise did not. The findings indicate that relational capital may not be as important to usage, but it is strongly related to the intention to share knowledge. The study also indicated that commitment to the community of practice was not a factor in knowledge contribution. -
Communities of Practice Guide
Communities of Practice Guide Creating, reinvigorating or transforming a community of practice. by Christine Lupton, Harry Webne-Behrman, Julie Hunt Johnson, Margaret Merrill, Tetyana Schneider Community of Practice (CoP) Network Communities of Practice Guide In this Guide: Overview ………….……………………………………………………………………………… 3 5 Phases of CoPs………………………………………………………………………………. 4 Worksheets for 5 phases: Define……………………………………………………………..……………………… 6 Design…………………………………………………………………………………….. 8 Grow……………………………………………………………………..………………... 10 Perform……………………………………………………………………………..…….. 12 Transform……………………………………………………………………………..…. 14 References………………………………………………………….……………………………… 16 2 Communities of Practice Guide What are Communities of Practice (CoPs)? CoPs are “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). Not everything called a “community” is a community of practice. For example, a neighborhood may be considered a community, but not necessarily a community of practice. Book club members may all enjoy reading novels, but they do not share a practice that expands the field of literature or addresses literacy. Three elements are key: COMMUNITY members “engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). DOMAIN is “shared domain of interest” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015), “a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic” (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). PRACTICE is a “shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). Why are CoPs useful? Communities of practice (CoPs) connect people with common goals and interests for the purpose of sharing resources, strategies, innovations and support. CoPs support the transmission and expansion of knowledge and expertise for leaders, learners and professionals in any field or discipline.