"Community of Practice"

Consider the concept of a "community of practice." How can such a community offer opportunities for learning?


Clay Shirky states in Chapter 4 that "communities of practice are inherently cooperative, and are beautifully supported by social tools, because that is exactly the kind of community whose members can recruit one another or allow themselves to be found by interested searchers. They can thrive and even grow to enormous size without advertising their existence in public...All these groups offer the kind of advice, feedback, and encouragement that characterizes communities of practice." With billions of people all over the world on the Internet, communities of practice easily get the attention of millions of people. With such a wide spread audience, the advice, feedback and encouragement among the communities are perfect for a learning environment. An example Clay Shirky gave in Chapter 4 is how Yahoo hosts thousands of mailing lists and many of them are devoted to advancing the practice of everything such as Gaia Online. Gaia Online "is a community for teenage fans of anima and manga, the Japanese animation and cartoon forms; their discussion groups include long threads devoted to critiquing one another's work and tutorials on the arcana of the form." This is a strong example of a learning environment. Communities of practice allow people from all over the world to learn from each other. These communities allow so much room for learning through communication and being social with other people who have the same interests. Teenage fans who aren't necessarily good at drawing anima and manga, then go to these communities of practice and learn how to correct their drawings. People can learn how to cook, assemble toys, etc. With so many people socializing and communicating about one specific thing and critiquing everyone's posts, then one person can learn so much. People aren't afraid to ask others how to learn from each other through these communities of practices, that's what they're there for. They open such a huge opportunity from everyone to learn from everyone, especially since these communities are accessible all over the Internet around the world.


Reference:

Shirky, Clay. "Here Comes Everybody."