Communities vs network of practice

At the Intersection
Image by Harold Jarche via Flickr

Been reading a lot about Communities of Practice recently and thinking I’m not quite looking at the right thing – particularly as Wenger and Lave are talking about communities within the same organisation. But one thing that has struck me in what I have been reading is this quote:

It is life itself that is the main learning event. Schools, classrooms, and training sessions still have a role to play in this vision, but they have to be in the service of the learning that happens in the world.

Etiene Wenger

Some of the most useful things I’ve picked up in my life haven’t been in the classroom, but from outside it. – from teachers, colleagues and former colleagues, friends and passing acquaintances. This kind of informal learning is vital to what we do.

So what happens when we want to learn about our job – or practice as I suppose I should be saying – but we are already tapping our in-house communities?

The answer is, obviously, turn outside. Once we’d have to go to conferences or union/local professional body meetings.

In the age of online networks we become part of an online or virtual community.

Question of semantics

But can what I’m looking at be considered a community – even in the online sense?

Community often invokes the idea of relationships – Gemeinschaft is one definition used. But some of the interactions I’m interested in happen between people who will probably never ever meet each other.

One argument is this could be a community of interest, or again community of practice – but what I’m thinking doesn’t fit in with what I’ve been reading of Wenger and Lave’s work.

Brown and Duguid, on the other hand, suggest that what is happening here is a network of practice.

In their book The Social Life of  Information they define networks of practice as:

networks that link people to others whom they may never get to know, but who work on similar practices.

Ok, now I feel I’m getting somewhere. They go on to add that networks of practice:

They further say:
Collectively such social systems don’t take action and produce little knowledge. They can, though, share information relating to the members’ common practices quite efficiently.

Brown and Duguid believe that new information technologies “are well suited to support, develop and even strengthen… networks of practice. The growing reciprocity available on the the Net, while probably underused at the moment (bearing in mind they copy I’ve got was written in 2000), is helping people separated by space maintain their dense interrelations.”

So, back to Twitter then

My Twitter network can be broken down into a number of smaller networks, two of which are practice based: journalism and e-learning.

These networks do share practice and knowledge. But we do have direct links, and the ability to talk directly to each other, and there is a significant amount of interaction among various members of the networks on a very informal basis – kind of like being in a kitchen at a party. And like the kitchen party it isn’t considered rude to join in with other people’s chats.

I’d argue that tools like Twitter allow this reciprocity that was missing under Web 1.0, which in turn allow these interrelations to develop.

It does allow sharing of knowledge and I’d argue, at least in the case of people like @paulbradshaw, the generation of knowledge. But yes, this efficient sharing of information is crucial.

Admittedly Twitter is just one part of our online environment, just one tool that allows us to share, generate, discuss and reflect on the changes happening around us. But it is an interesting tool for a community/network to use to talk in both the professional and personal domain, and can be used to notify of developments using links – before we even get onto the idea of micro-reflection on events.

And as well as being able to share what we develop from our personal news environment or personal learning environment, the definition depends on which of my networks you come from, with our wider offline communities of practice – those of us who use social tools are often keen to meet each other.

Interestingly the strength of the interaction and its immediacy does mean that it doesn’t feel awkward when we meet in World 1.0 – for example I’d never met @adders, @shanerichmond or @foodiesarah offline until recently, but what was really our first meeting was actually just another way for us to carry on our chats.

So maybe, we are in the process of building some kind of community of practice that spans the online and offline worlds, spans company and (in some cases) national borders and allows us to talk and share with those who are interested in the same fields of practice as ourselves. Maybe it gives us a social life where we can share and learn while reflecting and sharing jokes (this means you @jemimakiss) during our normal life. Try explaining that one to your boss.

Not bad in 140 characters really.

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December 17, 2008 | Filed Under Msc08, Uncategorized, elearning, social learning 

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