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This work provides first person accounts of creating and implementing communities of practice as well as research about communities of practice. The goal of the work, according to the author, is to guide and promote other educators in the creation of communities of practice. Communities of Practice are explored in this work through the lens of higher education, professional development, secondary education, and primary education with the varying chapters all presenting a different type of community of practice.

In this video, the audience sees first-hand a CoP in action. What seems small, a group of principals across 27 schools are working to meet, collaborate and share. Emphasis is placed on the idea of sharing because that is how individuals and schools will grow. Sharing practice and knowledge plays the most critical part in a CoP.

In this article Jong-Ae Kim, a librarian from South Korea, discusses the benefits of establishing communities of practice within the field of librarianship. Through her discussion, Kim not only defines a CoP, she also describes the levels of participation of its members and presents a possible timeline that relevant CoPs go through to establish their value within the profession. Kim then goes on to lay out the potential uses of CoPs within each specific type of library such as academic, public, school, and special libraries. I think it is important to note that while she sees the importance for CoPs among librarians serving similar populations, she ends the article with a discussion on the professional benefits of creating CoPs among librarians from all different types of organizations.

I appreciated this article. Not only did it help to continue to clarify my learning about COPs, it also provided a great context in tying it to the changing landscapes of libraries. Library education is certainly evolving and can now be seem on the forefront of some innovative educational movements, such as design thinking and the maker movement. It was also enlightening to see them as vehicles to drive communities of practice in many different settings.

In this article three academic librarians seek to find ways to remain relevant and improve their role among the faculty as technology expands people's access to information. In order to foster this growth, however, the authors quickly realize that they must first establish a strong community of practice for librarians before they can really integrate themselves into the academic community. The most interesting part of this article is that the authors stumbled upon this realization by accident. Through the process of providing a service they thought their faculty needed, they ended up discovering what their faculty wanted the most from the library staff. They established a CoP among campus librarians that was focused around the real needs of the academic community. This experience triggered a significant increase in faculty/librarian collaboration. The authors conclude the article by talking about some of the ways in which CoPs can help improve the status of librarians in academia.

The authors springboard from a Cornell University study of the difficulties that humanities doctoral students have in finishing their degree to discuss the ways libraries can help improve student success. They show that the establishment of communities of practice are a necessary component of the success of doctoral students in the humanities. They then advocate for libraries to create and support these communities through providing designated space for doctoral students to collaborate and share information in the library and by offering discipline-specific research skills workshops.

After reviewing articles on the basics of Communities of Practice, I was seeking an example of COPs in Action. In an article, I saw a reference to the iEARN educational project that operates as a global educational COP for teachers and students in 100's of countries. iEARN is one of the largest online primary and secondary educational network. While the community operates through technology, the technology is not the focus but rather the just a means to connect educators. The core components of iEARN are "mission driven" (how to make the world a better place), decentralized structure (no true president our central figure), honoring teachers not technology, and a "sense of community". The article helped me contextualize what a real life community of practice looks like which gives me ideas on how to look for COPs in my own professional development.

Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg highlights the ways in which we are all connected in society and the various communities we are linked with. Mark emphasizes the need to continue to network and stay connected. Our history is based on connections in society and we have continued to grow. Although only one platform to grow from, Mark's Facebook Community has offered our society and people countless opportunities to connect and grow personally and professionally.

This video is a concise overview of what communities of practice are in K-12 education the form of a PowToon. Brought to you by the Institute of Excellence in Early Care and Education.

Introductory video on what Communities of Practice are. It lists benefits of CoPs and where to find more information. Audio is just music, basically, a slideshow turned into a video.

This source is a chapter in a book by several librarians from the IUPUI library system. The librarians set out to find ways in which they could collaborate with faculty to promote a more successful information literacy program on campus. The importance of this issue gave them the impetus to form a community of practice. This group consisted of both faculty and librarians who were all dedicated to discovering best practices for teaching and assessing information literacy concepts. The authors concluded the chapter with a discussion of some of the campus initiatives that came out of the CoP activities and what they may do in the future to further the growth and retention of student information literacy skills.

Thanks for sharing this article, Kelly. I appreciated the discussion of campus initiatives, including the student pre- and post-surveys, which yielded "abysmal" results. Even with those results, though, the initiative was successful in sparking the campus to start operating as a CoP.

Thie video shows teachers utilizing communities of practice. This video was a great way to see CoP in action. These teachers show how amazing CoP can be in their classroom and students. My big take away was that all the teachers, regardless of grade level, felt it was valuable to them.

This research paper discusses the underlying motivation of the utilization of communities of practice and the barriers that hinder the acceptance and utilization of sharing knowledge in a community of practice. The study looks at the benefits of a knowledge-sharing CoP for employees at a large company.

This Boise State University site outlines CoP's that are accessible to those going into and already part of education. The activity levels of each community vary and and they are always accepting new ideas for possible groups in the future.