eLearning stuff

When I first got involved with the EMERGE project I started blogging about Communties of Practice and here’s the orginal……

I Community therefore I Practice?

OK, what is it with COPs?

Why is there an assumption that just because you have a community of made up of random individuals that you have a CoP? How can anyone “set up a CoP” ? Surely they evolve from a community?

I’m not knocking this project but CoP seems to be a great bandwagon to jump on at the moment (and there’s plenty out there).  A quick trawl of the literature (yep – let’s go and check out Wenger) shows that there’s a few things we need for a CoP: the domain; the community; the practice.

Wenger 101 – The domain. A CoP has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest “Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people”. It’s about community members’ having passion about their subject and their willingness to communicate and share ideas, information and opinions.

So the CoP’s identity is defined by us, the members……is it the Emerge identity? Is the Users and Innovation programme’s identity? Or is the domain of interest getting our project funded in Round 2? Can we merge ideas….. though with a call coming out in June it’s going to get busy…..

And now the Community….so what’s worked before in successful community building is member engagement - joint activities, discussions, helping each other and sharing information. So it’s the outputs that form the CoP not the technology. It’s the discussions, conversations, knowledge and resources shared by the members that form the CoP……so once again how can anyone “set up a CoP”? Surely we need to have the conversations and create the knowledge before we have the CoP?

So, a CoP is not merely a community of interest and members of a CoP are practitioners - to be a CoP we need to develop (and agree) shared practice (resources - experiences, techniques, methodologies etc).

Wenger tells us a CoP consists of the combination of the domain, community and practice and it is the development of these three elements in parallel that cultivates a community, and CoP members share and develop knowledge by sharing information, insights, and best practices and build a knowledge base.  Lot’s to do then.

I suppose my main question should be, for us to be a CoP, rather than a C, what are the pertinent issues related to our topic?

But then I suppose I should really know what the topic is in the first place before I can even think about pertinent issues.

Well, we didn’t bid for funding from the U&I strand for the UsPaCe project as we had submitted the bid under another call but I’m still involved and it will be interesting to see if the CoP idea is working now that the U&I projects have been funded and the EMEGE community has some more members, this time with funded projects.

Tags:   Communities of Practice · CoPNo Comments