What do you understand by the term ‘communities of practice’? From
what you have learned so far, how useful do you think this concept is for
understanding learning and teaching in distributed learning environments?
Hilary Haworth
Commonality,
infrastructure and interdependence
The
CoP and Knowledge Management
If it is when ideas are put to work that real meanings are negotiated, then the meanings of communities of practice (CoPs) and distributed learning are still under construction.
“Distributed learning” can simply mean “the use of technology to
enhance learning in the traditional instructor-led courses and to enable
learning at a distance” (Sun microsystems;2002). It may not have the objective
or effect of creating communities, but simply “creating content for a distributed audience”; the (virtual) teacher still
at the hub of the wheel in two-way interaction with individual students
(Thorpe;2002;136).
But where learners and teachers
combine collaborative efforts to ‘make use of’ CoPs, in practice, in
distributed learning contexts in higher education institutions, corporate
universities, workplaces and associations, meanings are (re)constructed. It
is essential therefore to analyse ‘meaning’, ‘use’ and ‘usefulness’ together.
Definitions of CoPs and legitimate peripheral participation in Situated learning are not held out to be complete. Analysis of unequal power relations is admitted to be missing, and the concept is left as an ‘intuitive notion’ (Lave and Wenger;1991).
Neither, at that point, were concepts of CoPs offered as ‘useful’ in the instrumentalist sense, as, say, a technique for teachers. However, the concept was intended as more than a “counterfactual idealization” in Habermas’ phrase: the objective was to drive a stake into the ground so that the various accounts of ‘situated’ and ‘authentic’ learning, and their own statement that “agent, activity and the world mutually constitute each other”, could be moved forward into “a specific analytic approach”.
Since Lave and Wenger’s original analysis there has been no shortage of volunteers for this work.
It could be said that deployment of their theories in the worlds of business and elite higher education in itself moves their meanings away from their start point.
Lave and Wenger originally looked at small-scale, localised learning activities of marginalized apprenticeships in Vai and Gola (Contu and Willmott;2000;272). They are linked - through Vygotsky - with traditions in Marxist analysis. Now, organisations such as IBM, Shell and SRI International champion CoPs, and Wenger is bracketed with business gurus such as Senge and Schön (Smith;2001).
For Lave and Wenger much learning was seen as unintentional, rather than directly taught. Now CoPs are being identified in education institutions where direct, active teaching is the norm (Crook,2002).
In Situated Learning, CoPs were unobtrusively observed in their effects, whereas instructional designers and tutors talk of their ‘creation’ or ‘design’ (Wegerif,1998; Mentis et al,2001).
The dimensions of CoPs that most recur are from the model by Hung and
Chen: the situatedness of the learning; a commonality
of efforts, signs and tools; an infrastructure
of frameworks for practice; and peer interdependency
(Mentis et al,2001).
The first three could be seen as the more ‘useful’ features of Lave and Wenger’s analysis, those that promise good possibilities for designing into distributed learning systems. With work and by involving learners in the design processes, rich situations can be provided; common discourses can be demystified and modeled; and activity frameworks can be used to scaffold knowledge-sharing.
Interdependence is more
troublesome – resistant to design, hard to assess and its perceived value
contested by learners (
Situated Learning introduced the idea of communities with several legitimate ‘ways of belonging’ (Lave and Wenger;1991). Since then, themes of non-hierarchical, interdependent, egalitarian structures have been prevalent, for example in contrasting CoPs with ‘teams’ (Hildreth et al,2000; Thackray, ‘Re:(8)Block2Activity 1;H805gek2Block2; 26.04.02)
Using the CoP model to evaluate CMC infrastructures, Wegerif (1998) suggests they can offer naturally consensual, interdependent, egalitarian environments, even likening their discursive practices to approach Habermas’ ‘ideal speech’.[1]
Interdependence is also a key feature of the “intellectual collective” for Mentis et al, who describe distributed learning programs linking university and professional life for postgraduate psychology students as collective zones of proximal development (cZPDs):
Interaction and observation of other novices provides challenge, support, collaborative problem solving and models of learning in progress
Mentis, Ryba and Annan;2001
But as Escadon noted, a ‘community’ is not necessarily egalitarian (Re:(3)Requestfor conference;H805Plenary02;22.04.02). Strictly speaking, CoPs were not originally claimed to be so. This is not just in the fact that experts and old-timers are the primary scaffolders of novices – that learners need teachers more than the other way round. Lave and Wenger are clear that in the real world, unequal access to CoPs is a fact of life:
Hegemony over resources for learning and alienation from full participation are inherent in the shaping of the legitimacy and peripherality of participation in its historical realisations:
Lave and Wenger;1991
It was the CoP of CMC developers which helped to construct new emphasis on self-regulating interdependence. This occurred “at the articulation of related communities” - internet newsgroups and organizational change managers.
The model of internet newsgroups holds out the promise of peer-to-peer (P2P) knowledge-sharing without teaching or management. But even there, with participants highly motivated by a shared interest, and the very purpose of the group being to advance collective knowledge, participants end up admitting that they need moderators, facilitators and management (Beinhauer;2000). Communications in egalitarian, interdependent communities of peers do not always produce accessible information.
In the same way, distributed learning systems ‘keep the teacher’ by building tutorial groups into CMCs, rather than letting P2P communication run itself. Tutor inputs on H805 are often enough ‘traditional’ ones, summarizing main threads and providing ‘readings’. Similarly, a good deal of H805Plenary02 attention was paid to ‘ground rules’ for engagement.
Interdependence is also championed by communities of organisational change management practice, for whom CoPs act as an antidote to functional ‘silo’s and results-oriented teams.
Using a weaving metaphor, McDermott (1999) describes CoPs as threading laterally through teams and divisions, across the longitudinal strands of processes, to produce a ‘double knit’ organization that is both flexible and strong.
For this to function, CoPs have to be seen – and left to operate - as self-regulating, interdependent groups, unencumbered by milestones, deliverables and timelines (Wenger;1998).
Despite this common recommendation, in practice organizations continue to hire consultants and buy in processes to facilitate (and control) Knowledge Management (KM) projects, rather than leaving ‘lateral’ CoPs of photocopy engineers or claims processors to continue constructing their own knowledge-generation systems.
In distributed education frameworks, one effect of the (mis)construction that CoPs could or should be naturally self-regulating was that some teachers saw the primary challenge of on-line communities as one of design:
The most difficult area will be the facilitation of participation
Hilfreth et al;2000
Several distributed learning tutors have since noted the need for stronger structuring and scaffolding earlier in the course (Wegerif;1998).
If emphasis has shifted slightly towards tutoring and management, then, this is a meaning closer in some ways to Lave and Wenger’s original version. But it was negotiated through learners’ and teachers’ peripheral participations in interlocking CoPs.
It is still true that educators in distributed learning environments, both in businesses and education, can over-readily assume individuals’ expressive and interpretive competence for the elucidation of needs, issues, concerns, interests and values (Anderson;2000). In this, arguably, they take for granted an equality of access to a given CoP that is simply not there.
One cause of this might be conflicts encountered bringing Lave and Wenger’s notion of legitimate peripheral participation into effective use.
Lave and Wenger rejected notions
of the ‘centre’ and magical full participation.
They refused to “reduce the end
point of centripetal participation in a community of practice to a uniform or
univocal ‘centre’…it has no single core or centre’”
Lave and Wenger;1991
They saw the periphery as a place of power. Designing a distributed learning environment with this principle is almost unimaginable, and would probably be seen as restrictive practice: peripheral positions do not feel powerful (Gamvrelli, ‘Key Practices’;H805gek2B;24.04.02).
In practice, ethnographic case studies show that teachers and learners persistently see the goal of participation as ‘becoming full’ - full participation, central positioning or ‘mastery’ is seen as a mark of success for tutors and students alike (Wegerif,1998; Thackray, “TutorGroupActivity1Part2”;H805gek2B;26.04.02).
Reflecting this practice, Wenger (2000) now defines peripheral participation as one of three participative ‘options’ (effectively ‘orbital’, making no commitment to full membership, moving neither ‘inward’ nor ‘outward’).
Similarly, Lave and Wenger(1991) only mention the boundary as a place of ‘openings’. This might be seen as a naïvely benign view of the universe, avoiding issues of closed, ‘policed’ boundaries. It is also another of the less useable ideas, since in practice, while distributed learning systems are designed to enable engaged work at the periphery, they also usually have password protocols. They develop rules on ‘lurking’ and agreements on ownership of participant contributions.
Wenger (2000) revisits the boundary and the ‘orbital’ participants there, making a virtue of boundary participants’ roles as roaming knowledge brokers, scouts at the outposts. His approach reflects his own border crossing, perhaps, from a CoP of socio-cultural theorists into one of organizational change managers. Key practices from his new CoP include lists and tables to categorise/diagnose organizational strengths and weaknesses, and instructions to identify potential ‘change agents’ or ‘knowledge champions’ at the boundary. He also offers a separate paper on the selection of KM enablers (2001).
Finally, neither do Lave and Wenger (1991) tackle non-participation. Teachers and learners in distributed learning contexts have issues of non-participation often in mind – making rules on how non-participation should be reflected in assessment, for example.
In both distributed learning institutions and on KM projects, then, the boundary is now something to be watched and effectively utilized, its interactions managed. The development of these meaning-generative practices must be attributable to situated ‘reflection-on/in-action’ as Lave and Wenger provide no ‘useful’ guidance.
Turning to look in more detail at distributed learning as it is realized in corporations, I see particular limitations for CoP theories in the KM arena.
First, KM projects are guided by
company strategists to concentrate on the externalization of knowledge and
narratives of the ‘correct’ CoPs (Lesser and Prusak;1999). For KM, the CoP is the unit
of study, not the methodology. This
undermines claims that the two approaches have a complementarity:
Together these two ideas give us a functional view of the community of practice as well as a social view
Hildreth et al;2000
Secondly, drawing on
Arguably, the theory of
distributed cognition on its own does not make an intrinsic virtue of
collaborative learning. To be sure,
knowledge is recognized as being dispersed between groups of individuals,
artifacts and tools. But case studies
focus on the painstaking extraction and codification of this distributed
knowledge by highly-skilled researchers – who are outsiders and observers
rather than participants. Processes of
knowledge sharing are observed in their effects, neutrally, and any sense of
community - any learning - left behind is ‘mental residua’ (
According to distributed cognition theory, KM processes of transforming ‘tacit’ to ‘explicit’ knowledge in themselves produce ‘changes in representational states’. KM processes are therefore not capable of capturing ‘internal’ media since these undergo changes as part of the process of being brought into ‘external’ play by individuals (Hutchings, cited in Rogers;1997).
KM projects alter the functioning of CoPs in terms of distributed cognition theory because they produce new artifacts – procedures, documents and ‘learning objects’ for distribution to desktops.
In the process of becoming useful to distributed learning environments, a layer of management has emerged, not quite the same as pure ‘teaching’ – and something more than ‘scaffolding’ for the cZPD – looking after types and levels of participation, boundaries, and artifacts. Without an awareness of CoPs, the introduction of CMC to higher education can lead to ‘technification of tasks’ (Crook;2002).
The emphasis is now on the role of CoPs as enablers of the learning organization, something for businesses and education institutions to identify, analyse, nurture and manage. A respect for the workings of CoPs can prevent companies from becoming mere ‘data warehouses’. Many distance education institutions are using their ‘first entrant’ advantage in this area to partner with businesses in the design and development of company-specific virtual campuses and rich content for distributed learning. Some, like Stanford, are a step ahead, themselves establishing CoPs that include learners to develop integrated, contextual, usable tools in an interdependent, situated way (Kruper;2002).
An awareness of distributed cognition allows professional educators to focus diagnostic attention on the elements and (net)workings of learning: teachers, courseware designers, support staff and learners know to look ‘around’ rather than simply inward. I have tried to show that since meanings are constructed in practice, attempts to capture social, relational meanings of CoPs in this way inevitably miss their target. This realisation might be the most promising way to protect CoPs from the worst excesses of the drive towards ‘commodification of knowledge’.
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[1] Habermas’ Discourse Ethics assumes a universality of will and competence to hear and understand competing needs, interests, concerns and values.