There were a few concepts Josh brought up in his talk last semester (). This is one of them: Communities of Practice.
The term has had a lot of play in recent years, thanks to some books by Jean Lave Etienne Wenger, but it reflects an old practice our modern sense of job specialization has forgotten: apprenticeship. People used to learn through doing, under the guidance of someone who had mastered the craft. Tacit knowledge gets shared over time through the process of working together. As Tenenberg put it, “You become something by hanging out with others doing what you want.”
A community of practice involves a mutual engagement of its members, bound together in some social identity. That identity, as well as its focus of action, is constantly renegotiated by its members. The result is a body of knowledge and resources that are developed by membership through shared experiences. What makes this concept so interesting is its overlap of a number of other interesting concepts … Bonding groups … wiki self-organization … Web 2.0 content. Communities of practice reflect Putnam’s idea of social capital, as well, since the journey from novice to expert (the peripheral to the center) is a form of bridging becoming bonding. Communities are also about a learning environment.
In Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Lave and Wenger move the discussion of learning from internal cognitive process to social interactions that create the proper environment to permit learning to take place. The claim is that some learning only happens through interaction with others, and all learning is a process of moving from the outside into the center of a community of practice. Tenenberg called this the Hall of Mirrors since the interaction between teacher and student serves to reflect their participation and understanding. An example of this Deborah Meier’s book on education, In Schools We Trust. A question about a math problem by a young student presented a problem for the teacher, who couldn’t articulate the reasons for the answer. After calling in some collegues to help work through the problem, the teacher was able to communicate an explanation the student could understand. Without being in an environment that encourages such interaction, the student still wouldn’t understand the math and the teacher still wouldn’t be able to explain the concept.
The learning environment is also embedded with existing and relevant knowledge. Michael Polanyi‘s The Tacit Dimension talks about tacit knowledge as more than just that which is commonly understood without needing to communicate. It is also the knowledge we cannot articulate, the foundations of new insights and theory that eventually does get communicated. The underlying assumption is “we can know more than we can tell.”
Josh illustrated the issues of tacit knowledge by sharing Leo Leoni’s book Fish is Fish. In trying to explain the world beyond the water, a frog tells a fish about all of the wonderful things he’s seen, like birds. For the fish — who has never experienced anything except living in water with other fish — a bird can be imagined as a fish with wings swimming in the air. In this case, the more experienced frog has tacit knowledge about the bird but lacks the insight to be able to articulate the differences to the fish. In an optimal learning environment, the interactions between the frog and fish would give the frog that insight and the fish that knowledge.
This is all relevant to me because it ties Putnam’s bridging-bonding differentiation and the need to build social capital with Wenger’s idea that communities of practice are learning opportunities. In creating online tools for local benefit, identifying the existing and potential communities of practice becomes a key to optimizing the impact of a bridging and bonding cycle.
