“Where is the Action in Virtual Communities of Practice?”
Christopher Lueg, Institute for Information, University Zurich
http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~lueg/papers/commdcscw00.pdf
I have been intrigued by the hyped rhetoric and extraordinary claims for virtual communities of practice as a space/place in which great minds can come together and create magical new knowledge of limitless value to the “corporation” or the “university.” My own experience of them has been of a website to which I will go, IF it’s bookmarked and IF I have an assignment due. In the ordinary course of an information-packed day, I don’t just “drop-in” to the VCOP to see what’s happening.
I was intrigued by the title of Lueg’s article and will try to summarize its key points. Basically, informal learning, which occurs within an organization can be called a community of practice and is based on social participation. I am fortunate to work in a unit at a major research university where the learning is dynamic, constant, and stimulating. Lueg’s first main point is that a huge transfer problem exists when we try to transfer the characteristics of a situated learning community of practice to the virtual world, however dynamic and intuitive the “space” might be.
He then returns to the literature and identified some of the characteristics of a VCOP from Hildreth’s article in Journal of Knowledge Management:
1. Common set of interests to do something in common
2. Concerned with motivation
3. Self-generating
4. Self-selecting
5. Not necessarily co-located, but face-to-face meetings are valuable
Interestingly, he then examines a Usenet group, de.rec.bodyart. A starkly non-academic model!! But I think his concerns and his application of the Hildreth characteristics provide us with an honest way to examine VCOPs within the university context as a potentially richer way to explore a topic and to capture that knowledge in a re-usable form.
One obstacle that appears clearly before me is the problem of fragmented and divided attention. Where will I find the single hour of quiet thoughtfulness that will let me enter the VCOP space, read, ponder, and contribute? I’m working on it!!
