- Author:
- Noriko Hara
The book offers two themes: one is about Communities of Practice (CoPs) and learning, the other is about social informatics approaches. First, in order to facilitate designing effective learning environments both online and offline, this book calls attention to the importance of CoPs to facilitate informal learning as part of professional development. Communities of Practice are informal networks that support a group of practitioners to develop a shared meaning and engage in knowledge building among the members. The concept of CoPs is rooted in situated cognition (Brown, Collins, and Duguid, 1989; Lave, 1988) and the socio-cultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978). The book examines how people share and construct their knowledge by using case studies of public defenders offices. Despite strong interests among practitioners and scholars, empirical studies of CoPs are sparse. Drawing on theories from situated cognition and social informatics, this book investigates what constitutes a community of practice and how members of the community create a shared meaning in workplaces with and without IT.
Cited By
- Murillo E (2012). "I've Got a Situation and Would Appreciate Your Experience", International Journal of Virtual Communities and Social Networking, 4:4, (52-80), Online publication date: 1-Oct-2012.
- Bowen J and Reeves S From a community of practice to a body of knowledge Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Formal methods, (308-322)
- Hara N, Alsarhan H, Kilburn J, Ynalvez M, Ynalvez R and Chen K Learning tacit knowledge in life science graduate programs in Taiwan Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting on Navigating Streams in an Information Ecosystem - Volume 47, (1-5)
Index Terms
- Communities of Practice: Fostering Peer-to-Peer Learning and Informal Knowledge Sharing in the Work Place
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