week-1 communities of practice

Communities of practice:
The term "community of practice" is of relatively recent coinage, even though the phenomenon it refers to is too-old. This turned to provide a useful perspective on knowing and learning. A growing number of people and organizations in various sectors are now focusing on communities of practice as a key to improving their performance (Etienne Wenger ,2002). Unless you are able to involve practitioners actively in the process, your ability to truly manage knowledge assets is going to remain seriously limited and to see it unlimited the knowledge of practitioners is not merely the knowledge of an individual. They need to interact with colleagues because they benefit from the stimulation and because knowledge of any field is too complex for any individual to cover. This is where the notion of community of practice comes to play a critical role.

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly(Etienne Wenger ,1998).

This will tend to think in a way that the role of managers is not to manage the knowledge directly , but to enable practitioners to do things in an expertised manner.This gives relief as well as challenge , relief because the responsibility for managing knowledge is one that can be shared. It is a challenge because it is not easy to create an environment that is conducive to and enabling of practitioners acting as knowledgemanagers.There are three elements of community of practice namely domain, community, practice.

Domain: It is the area of the knowledge that brings community together, gives it its identity, and defines the key issues that members need to address. As it would be for a team, but by an "area" of knowledge that should to be explored and developed.
Community: The group of people for whom the domain is relevant, the quality of the relationships among members, involves people who interact and who develop relationships that enable them to address problems and share knowledge.
Practice: The body of knowledge, methods, tools, stories,cases, documents, which members share and develop together to gain practical knowledge in their domain, which makes a difference to their ability to act individually and collectively.

The combination of domain,community and practice is what enables communities of practice to manage knowledge. Domain provides a common focus;Community builds relationships that enable collective learning and Practice anchors the learning in what people do.

What do communities of practice look like: They look like Problem solving, Developing new capabilities, Leveraging best practices, Standardizing practices, Time savings, Increase in talent, Avoiding mistakes.


Where does this communities of practice come from: For this the answer is so simple that it came from learning theory(Jean Lave&wenger .E,2000). The term community of practice was coined to refer to the community that acts as a living curriculum for the apprentice. Once the concept was articulated,and started to see these communities everywhere, even when no formal apprenticeship system existed. And of course, learning in a community of practice is not limited to novices. The practice of a community is dynamic and involves learning on the part of everyone.

My own view on communities of practice is what we do regularly in our organizations of knowledge management.Suppose lets consider an example of educational system to apply COP that is very familiar to us.Does community of practice exist here?Yes. Schools and colleges are organizations in their own right, and they too face increasing knowledge challenges. The first applications of communities of practice have been in teacher training and in providing isolated administrators with access to colleagues. There is a wave of interest in these peer-to-peer professional-development activities. But in the education sector, learning is not only a means to an end: it the end product. The perspective of communities of practice is therefore also relevant at this level.The communities of practice affects in three dimensions:

1) Internally: How to organize educational experiences that ground school learning in practice through participation in communities around subject matters?

2) Externally: How to connect the experience of students to actual practice through peripheral forms of participation in broader communities beyond the walls of the school?

3) Over the lifetime of students: How to serve the lifelong learning needs of students by organizing communities of practice focused on topics of continuing interest to students beyond the initial schooling period?

From this view, the school is not the privileged locus of learning. It is not a self-contained, closed world in which students acquire knowledge to be applied outside, but a part of a broader learning system. The class is not the primary learning event. It is life itself that is the main learning event. Schools, classrooms, and training sessions still have a role to play in this vision.This gives a brief understanding of communities of practice.

REFERENCES:
1) Wenger.E,(2004) Knowledge management is a doughnut: shaping your knowledge strategy with communities of practice, Ivey business journal, London N6A 3K7.
2) Wenger.E,(1998) communities of practice a brief introduction:learning,meaningand identity, Cambridge university press,London.
3) Lave.J&Wenger.E(2002)communities of practice a brief introduction:learning,meaning and identity,cambridge university press,London.