Expanding Communities of Practice. A community of practice refers to a network of individuals joined by a common domain of interest. Members typically engage in joint activities, face similar challenges, and share similar tools and resources. It makes a lot of sense to organize learning management systems to address the needs of communities of practice in order to share the resources and knowledge developed by individual members of such a community. Keeping the best and fighting the worst traits of communities Communities can be vibrant, committed, and open to new ideas. They also can be insular, unreasonably wedded to traditional approaches, and mired in bureaucracy. Consider the typical entities in a business. However, this same common language and understanding can also act to exclude the most efficient interactions between groups that need to work together.
Connecting communities This isn’t to say that communities of practice aren’t essential and very worthwhile structures to organize learning systems around. Social networks for cancer patients and their families offer hope, inspiration, even treatment | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Family | Health. The first thing you notice about the baby is her eyes. Bright and sparkling, they stare at you from every wall in Jenny Scott's office. But the most captivating picture of Allie Scott is tucked inside a silver charm around her mother's neck. The charm arrived in Scott's mailbox five years ago, wrapped in plain brown paper. The sender: unknown.
Scott received many gifts from strangers after Allie was found to have leukemia in 2004. Depressed and angry, Scott began blogging on her family's website. Within weeks, her posts received about 40,000 hits a day. "I am a bit panic-stricken," Scott wrote in August 2004 when Allie's white blood cell count plummeted. Back then, Scott was in the vanguard of social media. These people agree that social media made their lives easier, the battle less stressful. And all have found that the connections formed can be more enduring than the illnesses they've faced.
When Allie's two-week fever didn't fade, Jenny Scott took her to the doctor. And she writes. Google’s Acquisition Appetite: An Infographic. Social media is just fine. You’re the one screwing up. Surely, by now, you’ve heard about the Leo Laporte rant over his missing Google Buzz activity. It’s just the latest in a long line of similar stories, but it brings up some deeper issues that I can’t seem to find addressed elsewhere. That said, I’ll be today’s soapbox star and we’ll see how this turns out. You see, there seem to be a few major complaints about social media outlets, but they all boil down to a simple fact: Social media is the tofu of the Internet.
It is whatever you want it to be. It’s Not A Megaphone Sure it is. I wrote on my personal site (which I won’t link, but you can find easily via Google) about the transactional nature of Twitter versus the relationship nature of Facebook. While some companies (Groupon immediately comes to mind) manage to walk the fine line between relationships and transactions very well, many more seem to believe that social media simply shouldn’t be ever used as an announcement platform.
It Keeps Changing Yes. “I didn’t see any geeks. Miio. Creating A Facebook Business Page - Forbes.com.