What is a Community of Practice?
By Rick Nigol
 I just received a letter and
brochure in the mail from the eLearning Guild extolling the virtues
of their upcoming annual conference in Boston this April. The letter
urges me to join their "community of practice" at this event, and to
experience "peer-to-peer interaction." Well, I attended last year's
conference, and certainly did not experience a great deal of
peer-to-peer interaction or feel part of a genuine community of
practice. There were many hundreds of us in attendance, and, for the
most part, we were herded from session to session where we were
talked at for an hour or so. When there was any peer-to-peer
interaction, this happened more by accident than design during
coffee breaks, lunches and receptions.
Don't get me wrong, the eLearning Guild is a
great organization, and I have been a member for some time. I make
good use of their Learning Solutions e-Magazine and their periodic
research reports about eLearning. However, with some 24,000 members,
it is a small city, and decidedly not a community of practice. And I
often feel less of a "member" and more of a demographic to be
sorted, segmented, and sold to various advertisers and
vendors.
Why not create environments where the great
interchanges that happen among peers in between formal sessions at
conferences can happen at any time, and all the time? Jay Cross got
it right in a recent blog posting when he said:
"If your learning plans don't embrace the
power of networks, go back to the drawing board for another look.
Learning occurs in conversations, collaboration, knowledge transfer,
focused news, and other network phenomena....In learning, being
authentic means admitting that we don't have all the answers. It's
hooking people up so they may learn from and with one
another."
Similarly, I was reminded in Lance Dublin's
e-newsletter this week that the real power of Web 2.0 is in the way
that it links people, not just information. The early days of the
Internet were all about the tremendous loads of information that one
could access in an instant. The new Web is about the connections
that can be made and the human knowledge and experience that can be
leveraged when and as needed. Lance linked to a wonderful little
video from Prof. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University titled "Web 2.0 The
Machine is Us/ing Us" that makes this point eloquently.
If you are interested in being part of new
eLearning community of practice that is focused on a small group of
practitioners sharing, and collaborating and learning from each
other online and in-person, join
us for a webinar on February 20th about the soon to be launched eLearn
Campus Peer Network.
The Peer Network is a limited
membership group of organizations that seek to close the gap
between the knowing of best practices in eLearning, and
applying those best practices to their current projects.
They collaborate, interact, share, and learn together through
a series of live online and in-person events. If you're
serious about taking your eLearning to the next level, we
invite you to join us!
To have a casual chat to
determine if this is something that can help your
organization, contact Jon-Anthony at 416-238-3297, or jon@elearncampus.com.
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