Communities of Practice

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Contents

Reading

Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 from "Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, Identity" by Etienne Wenger, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Background

Introduction from "Communities of Practice".

Chapters 1 and 2 from "Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation" Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Cambridge U. Press 1991.

Discussions

Please post your critiques/commments on the required readings below. To do that, first login by using your user name and password, then click the "edit" tab on the top part of this page (between the "discussion" page and the "history" page), New to wikis? Read the Wiki editing guide. . Hint - Please put a whole line == ~~~~ == (literally) at the beginning of your submitted critique, so the wiki system will index, sign and date your submission automatically.

KetrinaYim 23:46, 28 March 2009 (PDT)

Learning about communities of practice has left me with a slightly better understanding of why certain things persist in the face of more logical alternatives. For instance, I always thought that Americans choose to adhere to the English system of measurement despite the fact that the rest of the world uses metric (and that metric makes more sense in most areas of measurement) simply because switching would be too costly, both in terms of time and money. But from a communities of practice standpoint, the existing artifacts' reliance upon and the practices invested in the English measurement system is what makes the measurement standard easy to learn and use, regardless of the apparent awkwardness of having such divisions as 12 inches to a foot and 4840 square yards to an acre. There simply was no need to make the switch to metric. Of course, this would create problems (or at least unsightly conversions) when interacting with people of nations using metric.

I also tried applying the notion of communities of practice to the phenomenon of different spellings for certain words in American English and English used in the United Kingdom, with less success. I thought by the time the colonies declared their independence, standardized spelling of written words was the norm. And there was no apparent reason to make the change. Why would there be "color" versus "colour" and "realize" versus "realise"?

David (Tavi) Nathanson 00:37, 30 March 2009 (PDT)

I found the introduction to Chapter 1 very relevant to a course on the Philosophy of Life and Death that I've been watching online. The professor was discussing the Physicalist view of a person as just a body, versus the Dualist view of a person as a body and a mind/soul. However, he went on to say that the concept of the "soul" or "mind" as something more than a brain does still make sense in the Physicalist perspective. He compared the mind to a smile: a smile is not a physical entity that exists anywhere, but it is still referred to as a noun. Similarly, the mind or soul is not a physical entity; rather, it is the experience of thinking and being.

Just as the Physicalist perspective focuses on the experience of thinking and being over specific bodily motions, the reading describes the focus on "practice" rather than on just the motions of bodies (where "practice" gives *meaning* to bodily motions and workings in the same way that a mind/soul gives meaning). Also relevant was a discussion on what it means for a person to die, in the light of the fact that the body still *exists* when someone is dead. The professor made an analogy to a stereo: if a stereo breaks, it still exists, but it can no longer perform stereo functions. Similarly, if a person dies, he/she still exists, but can no longer perform person functions (or "p-functions" for short). I thought that this was also related to the focus on "practice," as stressing high-level p-functions seems to be the same thing as stressing practice.

Priyanka Reddy 04:46, 30 March 2009 (PDT)

I thought the discussion of participation and reification was really interesting. Before reading this paper, I had never head of reification before, but what Wenger mentions about the duality of participation and reification made a lot of sense. I always thought that when something is reified (for example, specifications for a project), it should be all that is necessary to understand the project, and if any participation was used to clarify anything, it meant that the reification was not good enough and could somehow be improved to eliminate participation. However, after having gone through numerous situations where participation always seemed to be required, I'm inclined to believe in the duality of participation and reification. This idea is echoed by Wenger when he says that "putting everything in writing does not seem to solve all our problems" and that adding "more reification to reification may not help much".

This is an interesting issue for efficiency. When most organizations try to make themselves more efficient, they tend to reify as many processes as they can. However, the idea that there is a limit to how much efficiency they can achieve poses some interesting problems.

Brian Tran 05:08, 30 March 2009 (PDT)

@Priyanka Many popular software applications today are based on automation. In other words, people want as little participation as possible to receive the most results. It's only natural. However, I agree that in many other scenarios, both participation and and reification are needed. Otherwise, it would be impossible to meet all user needs.

The reading has placed emphasis on practice as a way to act in a meaningful manner. I wonder what the influences of play are though. Play is not an interaction for children with the real world, but it is directly influenced by impressions from the world. As children grow older, they realize that their play was fantasy and shed many of the imaginative play stories. Perhaps, it is the influence of the community of practice that actually makes the aging children shed some of their childish imaginations because other people expect it.

Nicholas Kong 06:58, 30 March 2009 (PDT)

@Katrina On the subject of the differences between spelling British and American English, my grasp of American history is weak at best, but I believe that was a result of Noah Webster and his dictionary. Webster rejected the "pedantry" of British spelling (if Wikipedia is to be believed) and decided he would create an American spelling. Hence: colour, theatre, and the (British) distinction between practise and practice were all discarded.

I thought the statement that communities of practice produce their practice particularly interesting. Perhaps I am over-extrapolating, but I found myself wondering whether participants in social networking sites could be considered a (loose) community of practice. It is certainly interesting to see how certain customs evolve within these applications as the community negotiates meaning, so to speak, and how these customs differ across different social networking sites. For example, many people on MySpace leave a "thanks for the add" note on the page of a friend who accepted their friend request; however, this behavior is non-existent on Facebook.

Kenrick Kin 09:54, 30 March 2009 (PDT)

Like Priyanka, I hadn't heard of the term reification before. I think the dangers of reification is an interesting one -- that we do take shortcuts by materializing the abstract idea, and through its overuse can lead to the loss of the meaning of the original idea. I'm actually struggling to think of examples, but slogans definitely seem like a case where the meaning behind the slogan becomes lost as it becomes repeated over and over again. Even concepts like "Blind Justice" where I've heard time and time again, I now need to remind myself what that really means, because it has become such an ordinary term.

Seth Horrigan 13:29, 9 April 2009 (PDT)

Communities of practice are definitely interesting. The author at one point suggests there is a prevailing view of "community" as something cohesive, wholesome, and pleasant. While certain vernacular usages of the word may indeed have some such connotation, others within sociology have studied exactly what defines a community, and do not paint any such rosy picture. While communities of practice are a special case of a community, it is in the sense that they are one subset of the whole of communities, not that they are a type of "community" that is distinct from all others. The same rules apply to such communities of practice. There are still boundary conditions to identify who is within and who is outside the community. There are still linguistic markers to identify members who belong to the community. There are still cohesive forces associated with seniority or other status within the group. The members of the community of practice identify themselves as a part of the whole just the same. In this specific type of community a common vocation or task unifies the members and likely determines the extent of immersion and the heirarchical structure, but this just makes it easier to identify to actual boundaries of the community.

Simon Tan 02:03, 22 April 2009 (PDT)

I'm interested in how communities of practice treat those outside of their boundaries. There clearly has been a lot of discussion on boundary conditions and how people break into these communities, but what about perceptions of those outside? I bring this up as inspired by the open source communities, since there is this prevailing notion that people new to the community must go through a rigorous self-training process in order to be worthy of participating at a higher level. That is, there is oftentimes an intense disdain for 'newbies' or users unfamiliar with the world of FOSS, so much so that many are turned off from even trying to engage.

A lot of times, this is just due to the more experienced members of the community simply not having time to deal with beginners, but there are enough instances of crass behavior that the existence of this attitude is widely known.

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