Etienne Wenger

Situated Learning: Frontmatter

Acknowledgements 1. Legitimate peripheral participation 2. Practice, person, social world 3. Midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, non-drinking alcoholics 4. Legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice 5. Conclusion References Index.

Situated Learning by Jean Lave

Acknowledgements 1. Legitimate peripheral participation 2. Practice, person, social world 3. Midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, non-drinking alcoholics 4. Legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice 5. Conclusion References Index.

Legitimate Peripheral Participation

Learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral participation . By this we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. “Legitimate peripheral participation” provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which new comers become part of a community of practice. A persons intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a sociocultural practice. This social process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills. In order to explain our interest in the concept of legitimate peripheral participation, we will try to convey a sense of the perspectives that it opens and the kinds of questions that it raises. A good way to start is to outline the history of the concept as it has become increasingly central to our thinking about issues of learning. Our initial intention in writing what has gradually evolved into this book was to rescue the idea of apprenticeship . In 1988, notions about apprenticeship were flying around the halls of the Institute for Research on Learning, acting as a token of solidarity and as a focus for discussions on the nature of learning.

Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems: the Career of a Concept

The concept of community of practice was not born in the systems theory tradition. It has its roots in attempts to develop accounts of the social nature of human learning inspired by anthropology and social theory (Lave, 1988; Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984; Foucault, 1980; Vygotsky, 1978). But the concept of community of practice is well aligned with the perspective of systems traditions. A community of practice itself can be viewed as a simple social system. And a complex social system can be viewed as constituted by interrelated communities of practice. In this essay I first explore the systemic nature of the concept at these two levels. Then I use this foundation to look at the applications of the concept, some of its main critiques, and its potential for developing a social discipline of learning.

Communities of Practice: The Key to Knowledge Strategy

Communities of practice are everywhere. They exist within businesses and across business units and company boundaries. Even though they are informally constituted and reside within a specific area of practice, these self-organizing systems share the capacity to create and use organizational knowledge through informal learning and mutual engagement. Wenger believes that communities of practice are key to understanding the complex knowledge challenges faced by most organizations in todays knowledge economy. To that end, Wenger sets the boundaries of what constitutes a community of practice and how it resides within different types of organizations. In this chapter, Wenger proposes a framework that motivates firms to recognize the critical knowledge generated by communities of practice to engage and identify common work practices, foster belonging, and deploy a knowledge strategy through transformation. With his framework, Wenger highlights how communities forge new connections and relationships with the greater organization—where the community is legitimized as a place for sharing and creating knowledge.

Communities and Technologies

The book contains 24 research articles related to the emerging research field of Communities and Technologies (C&T). The papers treat subjects such as online communities, communities of practice, Community support systems, Digital Cities, regional communities and the internet, knowledge sharing and communities, civil communities, communities and education and social capital. As a result of a very quality-oriented review process, the work reflects the best of current research and practice in the field of C&T.

Our World as a Learning System: a Communities-of-Practice Approach

We live in a small world, where a rural Chinese butcher who contracts a new type of deadly flu virus can infect a visiting international traveller, who later infects attendees at a conference in a Hong Kong hotel, who within weeks spread the disease to Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, and Ireland. Fortunately, the virulence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was matched by the passion and skill of a worldwide community of scientists, health care workers, and institutional leaders who stewarded a highly successful campaign to quarantine and treat those who were infected while identifying the causes of the disease and ways to prevent its spread. In such a world, we depend on expert practitioners to connect and collaborate on a global scale to solve problems like this one – and to prevent future ones.

Learning in Communities

People experience being part of a community in a wide variety of ways: communities have different styles. That is why different habitats work for different communities. This chapter organizes this diversity into nine distinct “orientations” we have observed in practice. Each orientation is associated with a set of tools that supports its patterns of activity. The optimal configuration for a community includes the complement of technologies and processes that are aligned with its key orientations. These observations may serve as design paths for community-centric learning and faculty development, especially when technology is involved.

Chapter 1 – Knowledge communication systems

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of knowledge communication systems. The notion of knowledge communication provides some interesting perspectives on the subject. From the standpoint of artificial intelligence, it implies a view of pedagogical activities as the manifestation of a more general capability of intelligent systems. From the standpoint of education, knowledge communication does not carry the social connotations that teaching does, yet the concept of communication suggests a system of symbols and conventions and a cooperative interaction whereby information is shared. Although there is a hope that eventually, the explicit encoding of domain and pedagogical knowledge will give rise to more intelligent, adaptive, and effective behavior on the part of systems, the shift from the programming of decisions to the programming of knowledge is in itself the main distinctive feature of educational systems involving artificial intelligence.

Intro I: The concept of practice

Being alive as human beings means that we are constantly engaged in the pursuit of enterprises of all kinds, from ensuring our physical survival to seeking the most lofty pleasures. As we define these enterprises and engage in their pursuit together, we interact with each other and with the world and we tune our relations with each other and with the world accordingly. In other words, we learn. Over time, this collective learning results in practices that reflect both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social relations. These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise. It makes sense, therefore, to call these kinds of communities communities of practice . Claims processors: a community of practice Ariel and her colleagues do not come to Alinsu to form a community of practice; they come to earn a living. Gathered in Alinsus office by their need for work, they want to fulfill their individual production quota. They want to make money in order to go on with their own lives, which they see taking place mostly outside of the office. They do focus on their work, but they keep glancing at the clock, waiting for the moment they are free to leave. For most of the time they spend at Alinsu, most of them would rather be somewhere else doing something else. Everyone knows this, employees and employer alike.