> 'Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.' (Wenger, 2011) Communities of practice is a sociocultural theory of learning, originally created by [[Étienne Wenger]] - where, rather than viewing learning as an individual process of acquiring skills, here learning is seen as something that happens naturally through social engagement in daily life. You exist as part of communities, perhaps your work team, the badminton club you are part of, an online subreddit that you are particularly active in. Where the ***community*** shares a common area of interest ***(domain)***, and ***practice*** it in some sense eg. playing badminton, programming at work, or posting on the subreddit. By regularly engaging within such communities, you partake in activities, such as: having conversations, observing others, imitating behaviours, appropriating social norms or collaboratively creating something eg. you work together to make a piece of software. Your engagement within the activities leads to learning - where each of these activities can map to more granular cognitive learning processes, for example, the facial expressions and nuanced social clues that a person emits as part of their response in a conversation, is a form of reinforcement that gives feedback about your behaviour, which could push us to conform to the social norms within a given environment. Whilst you engage in communities through activities, the community contains: shared language, anecdotes, assumed prior knowledge, goals, and other tacit knowledge. In reading about communities of practice, it can feel very familiar and even obvious at times. Though, we should not underestimate the contribution of giving voice and making explicit, that information which we implicitly and unconsciously feel. Hence, whilst it may lack predictive power, it contributes through explainable and analytical power, by giving us a vocabulary through which we can analyse and make sense of these communities. --- Communities of practice have three core characteristics: * Domain * The area of interest, that the community collectively builds knowledge within. * Community * The people and their relationships, that allow them to learn from each other. * Practice * The resources that the community builds, such as stories, norms, solutions to problems and best practices. --- ### Overlooking the value of communities of practice 'Most communities of practice do not have a name and do not issue membership cards' [[@wengerCommunitiesPracticeLearning1999 | (Wenger, 1999, p. 7)]] Communities of practices are everywhere, and existed far before the name was given to it. We exist in many different communities, however they are often so natural in our lives that we may overlook its significance in our learning. A skill like being able to differentiate equations is very formal and exists within textbooks, but the random conversations I have over coffee has led to the sharing of stories and experiences, that have developed my understanding of the world in very impactful ways - however due to the lack of formalisation (in that it is hard to point to explicitly or list on a CV), we may overlook its significance within our lives. Hence, with our increasing obsession in measuring learning, knowledge that is deemed difficult to operationalise to teach through standard dissemination, but develop as a result of community interact, may be undervalued. --- ### Implications of communities of practice The implications are dependent on whom we focus on, whether the individual, the community or the organisation that aims to foster such communities. --- TODO: * Think about how the culture within bell labs, relates to communities of practice * Think about how physical space, that is the layout of the classroom itself being a technology with particular values, relates to the development of particular communities * Does this have anything to do with Papert's computer cultures?