Communities of Practice

I was reading CH 22 in Schell's book of lenses, about virtual (and real) communities. In that case, he talks about communities in game design. In my case, I want to explore how communities of learning and social networks thrive or collapse. I think that researching on-line and real communities is the topic of some of our papers for the class. It would be nice to have everybody share their ideas for the paper. I miss interacting more with other people in our class, as we did in the beginning of the semester.

Anyhow, I went to Etienne Wenger's talk at UF last semester, which I totally enjoyed. He is one of the forerunners in the theories of social learning and communities of practice. One of the ideas is that we learn much more by doing and by socializing knowledge (he said: learning is a social phenomenon). The more networks and opportunities to share knowledge, the more we learn and are able to share, like a cycle working in feedback.

Keeping a virtual community alive is a real challenge nowadays, and Wenger mentioned that people need to feel that there has to be meaning and value associated with their membership. That value might be an ethnic/religious value, or a perceived power, or a sense of belonging, or a rope you feel you're attached to, otherwise you might fall in the limbo. I believe everybody needs to feel part of some community, and the nice thing about on-line communities is that you can expand your horizon so much in terms of what is there and what you want from what is there...the limit is almost the infinite...almost overwhelming but good to know it is there...