Vance's 'ESL_Home' CALL resources page | ESL_Home Index | Vance's papers and presentations
Webheads in Action portal | Communities of practice online session portal | Electronic Village (EV) Online portal page
Translate this page - http://world.altavista.com/ | Gloss this page - http://www.voycabulary.com/

------------ CoP Home | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 << Week 4 >> Week 5 | Week 6 ------------

Communities of practice online: Reflection through experience and experiment with the Webheads community of language learners and practitioners

Week at a Glance | Discussion Topics | Live Chat Schedule | Bibliography | Follow-up Summary
Week at a glance: Chris's schematic and bibliographic representations

Christopher Johnson has created this interesting interactive illustration of CoP theory with links to mind maps: comparing CoP organization with other organizational types showing overlap between distributed CoPs and other types of virtual communities Click on the pic or the link above to explore the original.

Christopher also made a recent update of his communties of practice bibliography at http://sites.inka.de/manzanita/dissertation/biblio_COP.htm "It is annotated, and you can peruse through approx. 50 articles and books on communities of practice, as well as related literature with respect to online communication. You can click through the articles by keyword, which are listed at the top." Also, at the top of the page, there is a link that says "Webheads Reading List" and it goes through the 15 books/articles in the order I think is logical.

Teresa placed Glossary of terms used in the 4 CoPs diagrams by Chris Johnson here.

Week at a Glance | Discussion Topics | Live Chat Schedule | Bibliography | Follow-up Summary
Topics for discussion

• How CoP theory relates to Webheads.
• How it differs from traditional education (traditional edu: same level, same knowledge, implicit knowledge not valued or tested) - What paradigm shifts are necessary to accommodate learning-based (process) goals in educational systems as opposed to Task-based (product) oriented goals?
• Based on the issues that Nigel brought up with CoPs: Is a CoP efficient? Not for producing a Broadway production, perhaps. But is it more efficient for experimenting, trying new things out, and for people to learn and gain experience in play production? Comments and disagreements are welcome.
• Some latest developments (e.g., Schlager and company have just written a paper – not to be cited yet – at the TI papers page).
• Dafne's posting #3039 poses the following questions:
  1. What makes a CoP a learning space?
  2. What theories of learning are behind CoP's that makes them learning communities?
  3. Are CoP's suitable for all learning styles?
  4. Is everybody prepared for the social scaffolding that takes place within a CoP?
  5. What kind of reflection does this scaffolding convey (in/on action, both)?
  6. Are CoP's the way to become a "learning society"?
  7. Could we say that our explorations, and later reports on findings, are a kind of non-formal collaborative research? or even collaborative action research?
  8.Could school structures be adapted to function as CoP's?
  Susanne's response: Theoretical underpinnings of CoPs / relationship to pedagogy Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003

Week at a Glance | Discussion Topics | Live Chat Schedule | Bibliography | Follow-up Summary
Live: Your invitation to chat

Venues: Chris has in mind http://www.alado.net/chicago or TI, using his overview page as a background.

Week at a Glance | Discussion Topics | Live Chat Schedule | Bibliography | Follow-up Summary
Bibliography

More readings on Communities of Practice and community formation and development online

• Learning in Context: Computerized Work Groups as Communities-of-Practice http://www.slis.indiana.edu/kling/pubs/amit95d.htm
• Tara Brabazon. 2001. How imagined are virtual communities? http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1801tb2.html
• Online Communities: Networks that nurture long-distance relationships and local ties http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=47
• A good article about the contribution of boundary members: Nonnecke, B. & Preece, J.(2000). Lurker Demographics: counting the silent. CHI 2000 Conference Proceedings, ACM SIGCHI, Apil 1-6, 2000; The Hague, Netherlands. http://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/paper/13%20Nonnecke&Pre;eceCHIpaper_ACMnotice.PDF
• Ekeblad, Eva (1998): Contact, Community and Multilogue. Electronic Communication in the Practice of Scholarship http://hem.fyristorg.com/evaek/writings/iscrat98/cocomu.html
• The address of all relevant TI papers is here http://www.tappedin.sri.com/info/papers/
• Schager& Fusco: http://www.tappedin.sri.com/info/papers/SchlagerFuscoTPDBarab.pdf
• An article from the Harvard Business School that may help explain why working in a group/team is a great way to construct knowledge: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=4318&t=leadership

Vance is very curious to find out what Susanne is talking about here: "I begin to see it as a result of a cultural difference found in the Scadinavian tradition, and coined in the Danish-Norwegian Author Aksel Sandemose, describing the modesty pitfalls in his hometown, called Jante (in his book En flygtning krydser sit spor), Jante's Law. I just googled it and found many references, a good one is here. Some day, I might like to twine some more threads on this topic in w4w http://www.waste.org/~xtal/red/jante.html

I wish to dig back in the history of learning theories, leading up to the understanding of language-mediated interaction as a socio-cultural activity, computer-mediated or not. From the first part of the nineteenth century Russian psychologist and linguist, Vygotsky there is a direct line leading to todays' understanding of the importance of establishing an everyday learning in the Community of practice, (for example as described in 1991 by the anthropologist Jean Lave and the psychologist Etienne Wenger together in their ground breaking book, Situated learning), often referred to in the development of computer-supported collaborative learning anrd related work, with an exemplary case of the Webheads EFL/ESL online community. The interesting point is : how can we change the traditional , habitus of thinking and acting in a scholastic paradigm, to move from the task-oriented, curriculum-based education, to an inclusive community where boundary members, newcomers, peer learners and experts can get together and develop shared practices, meaningful contexts and trust?

Week at a Glance | Discussion Topics | Live Chat Schedule | Bibliography | Follow-up Summary
Follow-up: Vance starts to cobble together some sense of this for the archives

What follows is purely a working document, placed here for the benefit of those developing this part of the 7 week EVOnline session being planned for January-March 2003. No part of this document may be quoted or referenced until this notice is removed. Thanks, Vance (Ed.)

I've created a document pointing to emails organized according to questions raised, still a work in progress