Transcript of Online Communities of Practice | Dr. Melinda dP. Bandalaria

[Music] Hi, in this session I will be discussing online communities of practice, their role in enhancing learning and the technology tools that are useful in forming, managing and sustaining them. The term community of practice is relatively new but the phenomenon or the practice is not. Ward and Tiner defined community of practice as 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. Hence we can see community of professional photographers, group of engineers interacting regularly to discuss the latest in their profession or associations of IT professionals or IT teachers or network of medical doctors discussing latest health concerns either of local occurrence or global concern. According to Bates, the basic premise behind communities of practice is simple. We all learn in everyday life from the communities in which we find ourselves. Looking at the communities of practice from an education perspective, one sees experiential learning, social constructivism, and connectivism rolled into one. Where does the concept of community of practice come from? The community of practice as a learning phenomenon originated from from the apprentichip as a learning model. People usually think of apprentichip as a relationship between a student and a master. But studies of apprentichip reveal a more complex set of social relationships through which learning takes place mostly with journeymen and more advanced apprentices. The community in the community of practice acts as a living curriculum not only for the newbies or apprentice but also to the other members of the community as well. We look at this phenomenon as associated to lifelong learning. Communities develop their practice through a variety of activities. Some of the typical examples are requests for information like where can I buy the latest book written by this author? seeking experience like has anyone encountered a student like this? How did you address it? Or reusing assets like I have developed a lecture on this topic? You can tweak it for your use in your class. Coordination and strategy. Let's attend a conference as a group and take advantage of a group discount. Building an argument like I need to convince my school administrators to go blended learning. Are the information enough? Growing confidence. Before I present this proposal to our school administrators, I want to run it through you for your comments or suggestions. Discussing developments. What do you think about the massive open online courses or MOS? Are they really a disruption? Documenting projects. My proposal for this project was approved. Let us document the experience so we can have a follow through. Visits. Can we visit your facilities for your open high school program? We are also planning to offer the program in our school. Mapping knowledge and identifying gaps. We need information on latest trend in MOS. Do we need to connect with other professional groups? We have to take note that all groups can be considered as community of practice. As implied, it involves a shared practice or of doing things related to the profession of the members. The literature provides three characteristics that are crucial for a community to be a community of practice like first domain which means there is a common interest that connects and holds together the community, the community itself or people bound together by the shared activities they pursue. Meetings and discussions around their common domain or interest are things that bind them together. practice. Members of a community of practice are practitioners or professionals and what they do inform their participation in the community and what they learn from the community affects what they do. It is important to note that attraction for professionals to be members of a community of practice is the new or deeper knowledge which can be generated or co-created through the interaction of the members. Because of this learning as an outcome, the practice of the members is affected and in general improve. The whole process can also be seen as contributing to the overall building of knowledge in the discipline. It should also be noted that academic institutions are not fast enough to respond to the changes in the discipline, but professionals can have a way of integrating them as updates when teaching the courses. Specific to education, communities of practice are evidenced in teacher training and school administrators to facilitate their access to colleagues. Communities of practice affect educational practices in three dimensions. One, internally like how to organize educational experiences that ground school learning and practice through participation in communities around subject matters. Externally, how to connect the experience of students to actual practice or beyond the walls of the school over the lifetime of students. How to serve the lifelong learning needs of students especially with the past changing knowledge and skills requirements of workplaces. What are the technology tools to create and manage the online community of practice? The tools can be classified into two categories. Content tools and member interaction tools. For content tools, we have the content management and file repositories to facilitate storage, sharing and disseminating knowledge artifacts. Examples are blogs. Blogs are a great tool for facilitating discussions when users wish to do more than just ask and answer questions. Blogs allow one user to post a brief or extended idea or opinion and invite others to comment. There are also micro blogs which are functionally equivalent to status updates. These emerged from the desire to take the anyone can publish ethos of blogs and apply it to short thoughts quick observations as shared links with minimal explanation. Twitter is the best known example with its famous 140 character constraint or expression but it has become a place for serious community interaction. The second example are wikis which allow community members to add and edit pages as part of collaborative content development. Wikis are most useful when documenting development of concept based on practice. Third is collaborative document authoring tools like Google documents. So we have word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool where multiple users can edit documents simultaneously or a synchronously with all edits tracked to users for easy reference. Social bookmarking is another example where it involves collecting links from across the web. This recognizes the fact that there is already so much information in the web and what is needed to be done is curate them. For member interaction tools, we have the following examples. Profiles and social networking. One familiar example is Facebook where individuals of similar profession can form groups and connect with one another. In Facebook, we can see the individual profile and even go back to the post or contributions made by each member. Other tools include body press and even LinkedIn. It is also important that the platforms where members connect with one another has the facility for making comments. Blog post and social media pages usually provide for this and such can be effective tools to sustain the engagement of the members of the community. Providing platform to facilitate meaningful discussion is also encouraged like asking questions, test ideas, invite inputs and share lessons learned. Webinar services can also be considered so as to combine synchronous and asynchronous collaboration among members. Tools which can be used include Google hangout, Facebook live and Adobe connect. It should be noted that it is important to keep the members engaged and participating so the community of practice is sustained and that's the important role of the technology tools. Thank you. [Music]