Group items tagged

This article focuses on the similarities and differences between networks of learning and communities of practice. There is a nice section on the concept of a community of practice and its characteristics as well as their importance in actual development.

This paper considers the case of one mid-sized international company and how it built a community of practice. It looks at different strategies and their effects on communities of practice and on global distribution of knowledge and then suggest areas to look at for further study. One such area for further research is to look into seeing how to link multiple communities of practice so that sharing can be more global.

This links to an article written in Organizational Science in 1991. The authors, from the Institute for Research on Learning believe that working, learning, and innovating are three forms of human activity that are believe to conflict with one another. They seek to prove that the three are, in fact, intertwined and innovating results from the learning that takes place in a community of workers. If the three components are collective, they will thrive. If they are separate, they will fail. The authors refer to these as communities-of-communities.

KM stands for knowledge management. This article talks about CoPs in terms of the need to do away with canonical practice because the rules and procedures inhibit problem solving abilities. There is something I cannot identify that annoys me with this article. I do like the " Empowerment is key to learning" statement.

This article looks at Communities of practice and the implications to knowledge management. Communities of practice is a term originally developed by Lave and Wenger (1991). It describes a learning theory with a strong relationship to the social construction of knowledge. http://www.knowledge-management-tools.net/communities-of-practice.html

"Communities of practice is a term originally developed by Lave and Wenger (1991)." A community of practice is a group with common goals and interests. It is important to note that they are not a team. The goal is not to acquire specific information but to be part of a group to share information. It is unstructured dialog which leads to problem-solving and innovation.