Monday, 9 June 2008
Best Practice: Summary: Distinguishing Learning Communities and Communities of Practice (CoP)
This is a summary by Lynn Tveskov of part of the recent discussion in the Best Practice Models community on Communities of Practice. From here this post is all Lynn's summary:
In the spirit of the practice we are setting up around public blogging about our discussion, I will put names to distinct ideas and comments in the summary. Contributors to the discussion were: Sylvia Currie, Alex Hardman, Jenny Mackness, Nana Matsunaga, Alberto Ramirez, Glynn Skerratt, Bronwyn Stuckey, Jack Tseng, Lynn Tveskov, Etienne Wenger, Helen Walmsley, Carole Weale, Helen Whitehead, Bill Williams, Rowin Young
Helen Whitehead put together this wonderful side-by-side comparison and I filled it in with content from the discussion.
Learning community
Community of Practice
The essential goal is to pursue some academic objective. (Alberto Ramirez)
CoP can pursue any kind of purpose. (Alberto Ramirez)
Learning agenda may be set.
Learning "evolves" and can be "accidental" (Nana Matsunaga)
All participants join at the same time
Participants join (and leave) at different times
Clear motivation to take part - it's part of their course
Voluntary: Have to be motivated by "what's in it for me"
Participants move (and can be guided through) community-building and group-forming activities (cf Salmon's 5-stage model)
Members of the community are at different stages, though the community can move as a whole through stages (but not the same ones as Salmon's model)
Can become a community of practice. You can try to set up the conditions for a community of practice to develop
Learning takes place but is more informal than in a course-based community
Tutor-led and facilitated; easier to facilitate.
May be facilitated but members have much more ownership. More challenging to facilitate
Likely to be more hierarchical in structure, which will influence relationships (Jenny Mackness)
In a community the core group or group of leaders will probably have a less hierarchical relationship with members.
(Jenny Mackness)
Responsible for one’s own learning
You take responsibility for more than your own learning in a community.
(Bronwyn Stuckey)
Formal learning at the core
Might include formal learning but it is not the core. (Bronwyn Stuckey)
Learners may or may not take on the role of practitioners.
Learning is closely associated with what you do/practice. It is more than an interest it is about enactment. Learning is grounded in real experience but the learners are in the role of the practitioner, behaving as a member of the profession they aspire to be part of. So more than examining at an authentic task - being in an authentic roleYou are learning it in order to enact it, apply it, refine what you do - not just know it. (Bronwyn Stuckey)
“…the "social body" of a classroom or a course. In this case, it does refer to an "institutional" structure, which…may or may not become a community of practice, or any kind of community at all.”
…if by "learning community" people simply mean that a group of students have peer-to-peer learning-related interactions. In this case, the community of practice concept is more a heuristic than a goal, and it seems definitely "easier" and also usually more realistic given the life trajectories of students.
(Etienne Wenger)
Development can be more organic or spontaneous, independent of organizational structure.
“Good CoPs develop from the ground up – if prospective participants simply *want* to be part of it and contribute to it then that’s of much higher value than a top-down approach trying to create a framework that the authors think might be attractive. Once started and growing, the natural evolution of the community will take care of overall direction and critical mass.” (Glynn Skerratt)
Learners negotiate the building of shared meaning.
Members negotiate not only shared meaning, but also the structure of participation (Alberto Ramirez)
Other Points
- Not all learning communities or courses can or should be communities of practice.
- Community of practice perspectives can usefully inform the design of traditional courses and learning communities, perhaps even leading to change in a system or institutional culture.
Bronwyn Stuckey
Would we want all courses to be communities? I don't think so. I know when I worked in learning development with people preparing regulatory accounting courses - they were about learning the laws and knowing them inside out and passing the regulatory tests...the application was held until later when you were in practice - and then could join a community. This was a necessity in this particular course.
Alex Hardman
There is a time and a place for community within learning and a time and a place for hiding yourself away and reading the texts.
Jenny Mackness
[A teacher] can espouse to the values of a community of practice. Thinking of a course as a community of practice will influence the way in which the course is designed and how it will be taught.
Etienne Wenger
It is often the case that the membership from the outside that students bring to the classroom will make it difficult to create a community inside the classroom without acknowledging and honoring the conflicts in identity and practice that this creates for students.
At the same time, I think it is also useful to hold these perspectives as distinct so as to be clear that you can hold one without committing to the others. So you may use a "community heuristic" in your design without having to worry about whether students are "really" becoming a community. Or you may see that a strongly instructor-led learning event actually opens students to the realities of a target community in an experiential way. Different combinations are possible, and valid if applied for the right purpose.
Labels: communities of practice, CoPs, elearning, learning communities, online communities
posted by Helen Whitehead 8:26 AM
