HCC class lecture 17 comments

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HCC classlecture 17 comments
John Canny3/28/05
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Administrivia
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Communities of Practice Background

• The original notion of communities of practice
  arose in Lave and Wengers study of learning
  through legitimate peripheral participation,
  which focused on crafts and apprenticeship
  learning.
• Communities of Practice address the
  socio-historical space in Vygotskys genetic
  domains. How a particular social group influences
  an individuals learning, and how that individual
  shapes the communitys growth.

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Communities of Practice Background

• The notion of practice as developed by Wenger,
  has the same linguistic roots as pragmatism,
  and much in common with that philosophy
  especially the work of James and Dewey.
• Key ideas are that knowledge is not abstract or
  sterile, but embedded in doing.
• CofP extends other social theories of behavior by
  focusing more narrowly on communities rather than
  society in general.

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Communities of Practice and AT

• CofP had a big influence on contemporary Activity
  Theory, especially Engestroms work.

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Communities of Practice

• The traditional communities of practice were
  crafts butchers, bakers, midwives etc., but Lave
  Wenger also studied non-drinking alcoholics.
• In Wengers book the idea of community is very
  general. Employees in the same industry,
  researchers in the same discipline, family
  members, religious and community groups etc.
• They are united by their participation in that
  community.

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Participation and Reification

• Or roughly the human and non-human aspects of a
  C-of-P.
• Participation is the participants actions that
  create meaning through negotiation.
• Participation inevitably leads to reification,
  where abstract ideas and behaviors become
  concrete in some way as physical artifacts, or
  processes, or recognized roles.

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Negotiation of Meaning

• Things take on meaning in the community, like the
  roles of boss, or apprentice, through
  negotiation between the participants.
• Many already-reified artifacts come into play,
  the management hierarchy, PERT charts, titles,
  but participation leads to reification of new
  concepts.
• E.g. the term reification is reified through
  Wengers book, with the participation of the
  reader.

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Communities

• Wenger defines community as comprising these
  aspects or dimensions
• Mutual engagement
• A joint enterprise
• A shared repertoire
• A community is not just a team, group or network
  (although these things can facilitate or indicate
  a community).

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Mutual Engagement

• Being included in what matters to the community
  is a requirement for engagement.
• Not homogeneity although Wengers argument that
  C-of-Ps build diversity is less than fully
  convincing
• Relations between participants are rich and
  diverse and certainly not all positive. i.e. we
  have a typed social network.

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Joint Enterprise

• Individuals develop commitment to, and often a
  distance from, the institutions to which they
  belong.
• Wengers notions of joint enterprise attempts to
  span the formal, institutional structures to
  which individuals belong, as well as their
  implicit, social relations to those institutions.
  
• This is a stretch the formal relations arise
  from a rational, purposeful design of the
  organization from economic and other scientific
  considerations.
• The individuals personally negotiated
  relations arise from a very different set of
  factors, and are usually studied in different
  disciplines sense of identity, self-worth, etc.

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Joint Enterprise

• Negotiation may be mostly one-way, as in Alinsu.
• Process and forms are designed top-down.
• Local communities develop their own practices,
  but they may not be externalized or reified to
  the rest of the company.

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Shared Repertoire

• A communitys set of shared resources (and their
  meanings).
• The repertoire is a snapshot in an evolutionary
  process it encodes the history of the
  community, but also should be soft so that
  continued negotiation is possible.
• In fact the repertoire is the main resource for
  negotiation of meaning.

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Shared Repertoire

• Shared repertoire provides good hooks for study
  of a C-of-P.
• One can look explicitly at the terms (and other
  communication tools) being used by the community,
  how they have evolved over time, who uses them
  etc.
• While their fluidity can be a source of confusion
  for members, it is a source of information for
  analysis.

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Learning

• Remembering and forgetting, the interleaving of
  participation and reification.
• Generational, with learning/training cycles.
• Includes both continuous and discontinuous
  process (c.f. the impact of tools in AT).
• Both participation and reification are subject to
  politics in organizations.

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Discussion Topics

• T1 Communities of Practice emphasizes the dual
  roles of participation and reification. Contrast
  participation and reification with
  internalization/externalization in AT. Compare
  also the production of the Object in AT with
  reification.
• T2 The learning phase of community
  participation involves dual notions of progress
  a Vygotsky-like acquisition of skill by the
  participant (ZPD), and their progress from the
  periphery of the community to the center, as
  measured by their interactions with the people
  and objects in the community. Discuss.