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A featured look at communities of practice through the lens of addressing the difficulties students with disabilities face in regards to completing school and finding employment. Communities of practice are introduced and explored by definition and example first and then specifically in regards to how they work or look in special education. Benefits and challenges are both represented in this work and a working example of Pennsylvania's IDEA Community of Practice is examined.

Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Traynor provide an introduction to communities of practice in this PDF found on their website. The introduction includes a definition, examples of what communities of practice may look like, how they began, and in what sectors of the community they are used today. Myths about communities of practice are also addressed.

By Etienne and Beverly Wegner-Trayner, this is an 8 page pdf of the basics of CoPs. I really like that there are myths debunked and demystified within the content of this paper as well.

I appreciate the scope of this resource including elements such as where the concept of communities of practice comes from, where it is applied, and myths about its usage. Moreover in regards to the myths I find it helpful that the resource includes a guide to how true the assumption listed may be such as: partially true, mostly false, false and maybe. I believe this section adds value to the theory of learning communities by acknowledging the misconceptions and limitations. Additionally I found the table with dialogue examples featuring various types of learning community tasks to be quite helpful in making sense of the dynamic ways these communities can be utilized.

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.

Upon doing my research for CoP I stumbled across this site that stresses the right way to effectively use technology for online communities of practice. It emphasizes that many CoP's can lose their purpose by metamorphosing into something entirely different than what was originally intended.

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.

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 graduate dissertation was particularly interesting to me since it focuses on K-12 Spanish teachers. The author discusses how communities of practice can be used as professional development and ongoing language training, particularly for non-native speakers. The research includes the use of technology in that the community of practice studied was conducted online.

I can see the use of CoP being very beneficial for non-native speakers. The technologies are the tools that would help to bridge the learning gaps and support learners. Non-native speakers often feel very isolated in learning environments, as having more than one learning group would be helpful. What a great dissertation topic.

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.