Blog #6- Communities of Practice

Communities of practice (COPs) have been around since the first groups of people began to form structured societies. According to Etienne Wegner, 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." The old sewing circle and new online forums share the base of a community of people who are coming together to share their knowledge and expertise in order to improve their abilities in their chosen area of interest.

In the educational environment, communities of practice are being formed as a means of professional development. Preservice teachers are interacting to share their successes and concerns as they prepare for their teaching career. Teachers in schools across the country share their expertise and voice their frustrations in the loosely structured COPs such as Teachers.net .
In these communities, educational professionals ask questions and provide each other with practical answers based upon their day-to day experiences in the classroom.

Our students are unknowingly involved in communities of practice as they hang out and socialize on the Web. The various forums for tips and tricks for the games they play, the critiques and comments that they post in response to each others blogs, mashups and videos, and the tutorials they upload to Youtube to explain how they created their digital art are all examples of the workings of COPs. They are involved in highly situated learning with others that is extremely relevant to them. While these activities may seem unstructured, our students effectively learn the structure and rules of the groups in which they participate and earn social capital as they share the knowledge that they have acquired as they are involved in their activities of choice.

We can use the structure and idea of COPs in our classrooms. By providing students with safe, supervised areas where they can discuss and collaborate on topic of interest within our curriculum, we can create communities of practice for our learners. It will be in spaces such as www.21classes.com and Social Media Classroom that our students will share and learn in an amazing new context.