Community of Practice–Your Online Portal to Expanding Professional Skills and Expertise

by Steven N. Pyser, J.D.

So just call on me brother, when you need a hand
We all need somebody to lean on
I just might have a problem that you’d understand
We all need somebody to lean on…. Bill Withers – “Lean on Me”

Whatever your experience as adjunct faculty the moment will come for you to lift your hands from the keyboard, move your eyes from the monitor and contemplatively gaze upward to ask, “I just don’t know?” Modern medicine has the ability to call a “code,” and a response team arrives momentarily to save a life. A call to 911 will send the SWAT team to your front door.

Weekly, Jack Bauer of Fox TV’s “24” fame contacts CTU and solutions to avert nuclear war are uploaded to him before the next commercial break. For our adjunct faculty moments, running to the window and shouting “help” may provide comic and stress relief. Alternatively, a Community of Practice (CoP) would better serve your interests since “(s)tudies indicate that people who are more successful have faster networks of more capable experts, and they access this expertise in one-on-one interactions” (Huhns & Stephens, 1999, 89-90).

CoP Basics and Benefits

The nature of distance learning affords a place and space to share our knowledge with students. The same distance that allows contact with individuals around the world can provide an access point for inquiry and professional development.

“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002, 4). Community can be created and sustained through computer mediated communications. According to Wenger, basic elements of Communities of Practice are:

Domain: the area of shared inquiry and of the key issues.
Community: the relationship among members and the sense of belonging.
Practice: the body of knowledge, methods, stories, cases, tools, documents (Wenger, 2002).

Possibly, the first CoP was Stone Age humans who leveraged knowledge to capture dinner. The concept evolved through ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution to its present successful form at such firms as DaimlerChrysler, Shell and the World Bank.

Gray (2004) suggests “(i)n situations where individuals have few opportunities to meet face to face or few local knowledge resources on which to draw, the online environment may provide an opportunity for … shared best practice” (p. 33). This evolving spirit of sharing is a paradigm shift found in today’s successful businesses. To that end, Jonathan M. Tisch, Chairman and CEO of Loews proposes getting from me to we “ … not based on a zero-sum philosophy of scarcity, but on abundance – the economic, intellectual, and spiritual abundance that human beings can produce when their talents and energies are unleashed” (Tisch, 2004, 1).

CoP’s have moved from the boardroom to the classroom. “Community of practice foster learning and professional development by providing access to roles that encourage learning and membership in a community, cultivating and practicing leadership, and building collaborative knowledge in which individual experiences become communal, distributed expertise can be shared, and standards of practice can evolve” (Adams, Allendoerfer, Bell, Fleming, & Leifer, 2005, T2A1-T2A2). Relationships and connections are built while ideas are discussed, evaluated and expertise and best practices are shared. It is within this voluntary arrangement where people come and go, contribute and seek group guidance as much or as little as they want. Even “lurkers” – those that do not actively contribute – receive the benefit of recourses, best practices, and work product created by these interactions.

Design of CoP’s vary as synchronous chats on announced topics, asynchronous threaded conversations, blogs on specified topics or issues, member-posted resources and tools and e-mail announcements and conversations (International Center for Student Success & Institutional Accountability, 2007). You can start your own CoP free through Yahoo Groups or propose one through ICSSIA http://www.icssia.org/communities/topic.cfm. Internet search engines offers rich opportunities to find CoP’s based on your interest. Commercially available platforms such as Web Lab http://www.weblab.org/, Q2 Learning http://www.q2learning.com/cop.html and Tomoye http://www.tomoye.com/ are also offered.

Conclusion

A Community of Practice provides a convenient portal for knowledge sharing and interacting in a cooperative environment. Members build a professional identity and expertise through online contact within a domain of shared interest. Sustained conversation, dialogue, are connections that enable participants to experience a sense of community and insight that lead to breakthrough learning and CoP contributions.

Resources

REFERENCES

Adams, R., Allendoerfer, C., Bell, P., Fleming, L., & Leifer, L. (2005). Special Session – “Communities in Practice in Engineering Education: What Are We Learning.” In 35th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (pp. T2A1-T2A2). CA: IEEE.

Gray, B. (2004). “Informal Learning in an Online Community of Practice.” Journal of Distance Education, 19(1). Retrieved May 30, 2007, from Journal of Distance Education Website: http://cade.athabascau.ca/vol19.1/GRAY_article.pdf

Huhns, M., & Stephens, L. (1999). “Exploiting Expertise through Knowledge Networks.” IEEE Internet Computing, November-December, 89-90.

International Center for Student Success, & Institutional Accountability. (2007). Communities of Practice. Retrieved May 30, 2007, from International Center for Student Success and Institutional Accountability (ICSSIA) Website: http://www.icssia.org/communities/index.cfm

Wenger, E. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Quick Start-up Guide. Retrieved May 30, 2007, from ewenger.com Website: http://www.ewenger.com/theory/start-up_guide_PDF.pdf

Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: A guide to Managing Knowledge. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Tisch, J. (2004). Succeeding through Partnership. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.