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Communities of Practice, a Brief Introduction Print This Page. Author: Etienne Wenger Etienne Wenger is a globally recognized thought leader in the field of communities of practice and their application to organizations. He was featured by Training Magazine in their "A new Breed of Visionaries" series. A pioneer of the "community of practice" research, he is author and co-author of seminal articles and books on the topic, including Situated Learning (Cambridge University Press, 1991), where the term was coined, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1998), where he lays out a theory of learning based on the concept of communities of practice, and Cultivating Communities of Practice: a Guide to Managing Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), addressed to practitioners in organizations. Etienne is also a founder of CPsquare, a cross-organizational, cross-sector community of practice on communities of practice. His work is influencing a growing number of organizations in the private and public sectors. Indeed, cultivating communities of practice is increasingly recognized as the most effective way for organizations to address the knowledge challenges they face. Etienne helps organizations apply these ideas through consulting, public speaking, and workshops, both online and face-to-face. His new research project, "Learning for a small planet," is a broad, cross-sectoral investigation of the nature of learning and learning institutions at the dawn of the new millennium. Check out his website www.ewenger.com

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How can you build a successful community of practice that is integrally linked to your company's strategic vision? Learn from the first-hand experience of Hubert Saint-Onge, recognized by Fortune magazine as a leader in the field of knowledge capital, and co-author Debra Wallace, the people responsible for a recent project to establish a community of practice for independent agents at Clarica Life Insurance Company- voted one of the most admired knowledge enterprises in the world by practitioners and researchers.

Asynchronous and Synchronous E-Learning Asynchronous and Synchronous E-Learning Author(s):Stefan Hrastinski (Uppsala University) © 2008 Stefan Hrastinski EDUCAUSE Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4 (October-December 2008) Asynchronous and Synchronous E-Learning A study of asynchronous and synchronous e-learning methods discovered that each supports different purposes By Stefan Hrastinski Today's workforce is expected to be highly educated and to continually improve skills and acquire new ones by engaging in lifelong learning. E-learning, here defined as learning and teaching online through network technologies, is arguably one of the most powerful responses to the growing need for education.1 Some researchers have expressed concern about the learning outcomes for e-learners, but a review of 355 comparative studies reveals no significant difference in learning outcomes, commonly measured as grades or exam results, between traditional and e-learning modes of delivery.2

* iPED * * iPED International Conference 2009 * iPED 2009 Conference * Themes * Speakers * Virtual delegates * Author Guidance * Register for iPED 2009 * Venues * Contact us iPED 2009, 4th International Inquiring Pedagogies Conference 'Researching Beyond Boundaries', Academic Communities without Borders 14 - 15 September 2009, Coventry, UK NEWS SUBMISSION SYSTEM OPEN You are invited to join our international iPED JISCMAIL discussion list. Read how delegates from Pakistan and Thailand viewed the iPED2008 conference.

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments Posted January 7th, 2009 by Michael Wesch , Kansas State University Tags: * Essays * Teaching and Technology * anthropology * Assessment * information revolution * multimedia * participatory learning * Web 2.0 2 Comments | 9313 Page Views Knowledge-able Most university classrooms have gone through a massive transformation in the past ten years. I'm not talking about the numerous initiatives for multiple plasma screens, moveable chairs, round tables, or digital whiteboards. The change is visually more subtle, yet potentially much more transformative. As I recently wrote in a Britannica Online Forum: There is something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.1 This new media environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able.