Are Facebook, Linked-In, or Goggle+ tools for communities? Networking websites, such as Facebook, Linked-In, or Google+, offer quick, simple, and cheap ways for communities to open spaces for interaction. While the sites may not offer all the features that communities of practice need, they present the advantage of being located where people already have accounts, …
Should a community be “tweeting”? Micro-blogging, using a tool such as Twitter or Yammer, has become a very popular way for some communities to stay connected. It is used in a variety of different ways, including to: Stay connected. Micro-blogging allows members of a community to be in very close contact on an ongoing basis …
Why are analytics important for a community? Analytics, such as Google Analytics, enable community leaders to collect, analyze, and act on data they receive about how people are connecting to their website. Data is easily collected and represented in many different ways. A community leader can see which pages are being read by whom, from …
How do communities use tagging? Communities can use a set of tags as communal keywords, thus creating shared set of pointers to resources relevant to members. A “tag cloud” (the set of tags that a community uses sized according to frequency of use) can be a way to represent dynamically what a community is interested …
Click here for an updated version of the slide on this page. Communities of practice usually involve multiple levels of participation. Because involvement can produce learning in multiple ways and the domain has different levels of relevance to different people, the boundaries of a community of practice are more flexible than those of organizational units …
What use are feeds for a community? Feeds, such as RSS feeds, are used in two ways. They enable communities to: Distribute content beyond the people who visit their website. Members and non-members can subscribe to feeds through an aggregator so they are automatically updated through a web portal, news reader or email whenever new …
How do communities use blogs? Communities use blogs, such as Blogger or Wordpress, in two ways: individual blogs and collective blogs. Individual blogs give people a personal voice as contributors to a community. Some communities offer individual blogs inside the community space for specific purposes, such as telling personal stories of practice. Some communities also …
How do communities of practice use wikis? Wikis, such as MediaWiki used by Wikipedia and Wikispaces which is popular for Educators, are used by communities of practice to create and publish collective, co-authored documents, including web pages. They also use wikis as interactive workspaces for conducting projects or for creating a shared memory of events. …
Do we need to change our organizational culture first? Organizational culture can work against communities of practice, if it is individualistic, competitive, and focused on the short term. Changing organizational culture is very difficult. Change initiatives to address cultural issues have had mixed results at best. One of the problems of these change initiatives lies …
If knowledge is power, why would anyone want to share it? Knowledge is indeed a source of power; but hoarding knowledge is not necessarily the best way to benefit from its power, especially in the context of communities of practice. Generalized reciprocity. In a community of practice, sharing knowledge is neither one-way nor merely a …
