Community of practice Community A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly".[1] The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning (Lave & Wenger 1991). Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice (Wenger 1998). A CoP can naturally evolve because of the members' common interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created deliberately with the goal of gaining knowledge related to a specific field. CoPs can exist in physical settings; for example, in a lunchroom at work, a field setting, a factory floor, or elsewhere in the environment, but members of CoPs do not have to be co-located. Overview[edit] The structural characteristics of a community of practice are again redefined to a domain of knowledge, a notion of community and a practice:
Lave and Wenger on Situated Learning at newlearningonline Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger argue that learning is necessarily situated, a process of participation in communities of practice, and that newcomers join such communities via a process of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’—or learning by immersion in the new community and absorbing its modes of action and meaning as a part of the process of becoming a community member. In the concept of situated activity we were developing, however, the situatedness of activity appeared to be anything but a simple empirical attribute of everyday activity … It implied emphasis on comprehensive understanding involving the whole person rather than ‘receiving’ a body of factual knowledge about the world; on activity in and with the world; and on the view that agent, activity, and the world mutually constitute each other … Learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral participation. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991.
John Seely Brown on Motivating Learners (Big Thinkers Series) John: Probably the most important thing for kids growing up today is the love of embracing change. I mean, the catch for preparing students for the 21st century workforce is "How do you get kids that have curiosity and a questing disposition?" We have called it in the past "the gaming disposition." If you look at the disposition of hardcore gamers such as World of Warcraft, massive multi-player games, the surprising thing that you find, contrary to what people think, is these kids, first of all, are incredibly bottom-line-oriented. They want to be measured, because they want to see how much they're improving. Coming from that gaming disposition I became very intrigued when I landed here in Maui. And it turns out that if you kind of meet these kids they have all come together very much like a guild in World of Warcraft, and what they do is they compete with each other and they collaborate with each other incredibly intensely.
The Power of Pull and PKM The Power of Pull by John Hagel. John Seely Brown & Lang Davison looks at how digital networks and the need for long-term relationships that support the flow of tacit knowledge are radically changing the nature of the enterprise as we know it. It is also an excellent reference book for understanding many facets of personal knowledge management. I have had this book on my reading list for quite some time and luckily Jay Cross gave me a copy which I read on the flight back from the west coast this week. PKM helps people stay focused on the edges of their knowledge and look for innovation and opportunity. Edge Participants also often reach out to participants in the core in an effort to build relationships and enhance knowledge flows. PKM is a process of moving knowledge from the edge (social networks) to the core (work teams) and back out to the edges. Find (Seek)Connect (Seek)Innovate (Sense)Reflect (Share) As the authors write, “Pull is not a spectator sport.”
John Seely Brown: Learning, Working & Playing in the Digital Age From Serendip The following is based on a tape transcription of a talk by John Seely Brown at the 1999 Conference on Higher Education of the American Association for Higher Education A pdf file of the tape transcription is available from the The National Teaching and Learning Forum. Text and figures of the html version provided here, with the permission of John Seely Brown, are the same as those in the available pdf version. To make it convenient for Serendip visitors, we have somewhat altered the layout of materials and added some accessing elements and links. where it appears. Thank you—but first a brief preamble about documents given what Russ just said. What I want to do this morning is to provide some evocative comments rather than give a coherent, logically argued talk. I became interested in learning ecologies because of their systemic properties. So let's look at the Web, or how it is evolving-rapidly evolving. A second example: Hewlett-Packard and the Web.
From Digital Habitats to Digital Hangouts in the Enterprise | Idea Ripples A New Culture of Learning by Doug Thomas & John Seely Brown A Tech Geek on Why We Need the Humanities | Input/Output What's the Big Idea? Have a latte with any Silicon Valley or Alley entrepreneur and you’ll be hit full force with this species’ zealous, Adam Smith–like faith in the “invisible hand” of technology. Tech itself, so goes the logic, will solve our human problems by making us exponentially more efficient and productive than we are now. This will happen almost by itself, as the market strives to produce better software and more mind-boggling gadgets. Optimism is a survival mechanism for serial entrepreneurs – part of the standard equipment. Nationwide, as a result of America’s dismal performance on global measures of math and science education, there’s a billion-dollar push for STEM education: Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. But then, I’m the choir. Watch the video here: What's the Significance? It is self evident that technology’s presence in our lives is growing, and that we need to understand the logic of machines. Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Why Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Change the World | Input/Output What's the Big Idea? What is the meaning of the viral cat phenomenon? When future historians attempt to decode this moment in history, what will they make of this? The precise impact of the watermelon cat is debatable, but the rapidity and scale with which such things “go viral” these days attests to two things: the fact that we’re in a moment of extreme flux – one in which almost anything is possible, and the web’s power to transmit ideas and galvanize action around them. From an evolutionary standpoint, which traits are most adaptive to a historical moment in which old certainties have vanished and anything is possible? Watch the video here: What's the Significance? For small businesses, taking advantage of this moment means taking an active interest in the changes that are happening – keeping informed in real-time, via social media and the web, of disruptions, miscommunications, and the opportunities that arise from both. Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Moving From Institutional Learning To Entrepreneurial Learning Outside of a handful of textbook conglomerates, entrepreneurship was not a concept connected to education until recently. In late 2012, start-ups are populating the educational landscape, and changing its tone completely. These start-ups, who often begin as a single platform, are altering the way people think about learning, and helpfully disrupting existing power sets in education in the process. In the video below, Jeff Brazil from the Digital Media and Learning discusses entrepreneurial learning, making more concrete the abstraction that has in the past been called, among other labels, “informal learning.” “How do you constantly look around you, all the time, for new ways, new resources, to learn new things? “As we move into the 21st century, we have to completely rethink the works-cape and the learning-scape. “You can now expect the half life of a skill…to have about five years.
John Seely Brown on Technological Evolution: Your iPad is Like an Arthropod | Think Tank How can we understand the dizzying rate of technological change and how can we develop the tools to best adapt to this change? Learning guru John Seely Brown finds an intriguing analogy between the disruptive technology of today and what evolutionary biologists have observed in the fossil record during a period over 500 million years ago. The Cambrian period was like evolution on steroids. After a period of long evolutionary stasis , a warming climate created marine habitats that gave birth to new complex life forms. Among the great evolutionary innovations of this period were animals with external skeletons, or arthropods. To follow Brown's analogy, if anthropologists many years from now are to look at our current "Cambrian explosion" they will see that in the early 21st century human biology did not change so much.