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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

Etienne Wenger is one of the founding fathers of Social Learning Theory and the concept of "Practiced Communities". People are learning together - every individual deals and engage in many different communities of practice. Here people negotiate and define what competence and knowledge is. To know something or to be competent builds on the individuals experiences of being in the world - learning is a constant transformation or journey of the self.

he concept of a community of practice (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs and shared sociocultural practices that emerge and evolve when people who have common goals interact as they strive towards those goals. The term was founded on the work of a few cognitive anthropologists, namely Barbara Rogoff (1985) and Jean Lave, who attempted to explain and describe learning that occurs in apprenticeship situations. Later, Lave, in collaboration with Etienne Wenger (1991) originated the construct legitimate peripheral participation in their studies of five apprenticeship situations: midwives in the Yucatan, Vai and Gola tailors, naval quartermasters, meat cutters, and a group of alcoholics anonymous. From their development of legitimate peripheral participation, they created the term community of practice to refer to communities of practitioners into which newcomers would enter and attempt to acquire the sociocultural practices of the community.

communities of practice\nThe idea that learning involves a deepening process of participation in a community of practice has gained significant ground in recent years. Communities of practice have also become an important focus within organizational development. In this article we outline the theory and practice of such communities, and examine some of issues and questions for informal educators and those concerned with lifelong learning.

These pages seek to describe tools that are used by communities of practice, explain how each functions from a community perspective, and suggest why you might select the tool, given your community's orientation and the activities your community wants. The pages attempt to define each tool, describe relevant features, the tool's uses in a community of practice, how the polarities can show up, examples, and resources. Although not all pages conform to a standard, we have developed a Tool Description Template that suggests a standard of completeness for tools pages. A Use in Combination Template suggests how tools are used together in a community context.

Content and Community (CoPs with Nancy White) We have talked throughout this series on communities of practice about "content." Well, what the heck is content, why is it important and how do we make the most of it - especially when there is a LOT of it. First the what and why, then one idea about how to work with volume.