What's the recipe for a community of practice?

Last week's Friday afternoon at InnoOmnia, Espoo. Small groups of adult students wandering around the vocational institute. They had gotten keys to access almost any space to watch and observe, to ask and interview, to learn and to get a grip on the community.

These teacher trainees were on Edutech bootcamp, a part of their vocational teachers' pedagogical studies. They had been learning education technology and pedagogy for two days, and this was their concluding task.


The trainees formed groups of three, got a key and an iPad, and started by consulting the course blog about what does "community of practice" mean, how can it be used as a support in learning, and what they are exactly expected to dig out in their own task.

There were two questions the students had to find answers for:

• How do CoP principles show up in InnoOmnia? 
• How does technology support the CoP in InnoOmnia? 

By letting the students do their learning in an authentic context, by letting them decide over their task management themselves we wanted to get them engaged, and to take the ownership of their own learning. By making them to analyze and evaluate InnoOmnia's practices and to create an unconventional learning outcome, we wanted them to use also their higher-level thinking skills (as they are classified in Bloom's taxonomy).

As their just-started studies are mainly carried out as distance learning, by such a procedure we wanted to support the creation of their own common practices, and their own community of practice.

Three groups interviewed students, entrepreneurs and teachers in InnoOmnia on video (above and eg. this and this). One group took pictures and made blog entries, another a Facebook page, and yet another a comic strip.

Further reading on communities of practice in education and on using technology to support them: 

• Barab, S. A., & Duffy, T. (2012). From Practice Fields to Communities of Practice. In D. Jonassen & S. M. Land (Eds.), Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments (2nd ed., pp. 29–65). 
• Hoadley, C. (2012). What is a Community of Practice and How Can We Support It? In Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments, see above (pp. 286–299). 
• Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2011). New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning (3rd ed.). See example pp. 232-245.
• Lloyd, A. (2010). Lessons from the workplace: Understanding information literacy as practice. In Practising Information Literacy: Bringing Theories of Learning, Practice and Information Literacy Together (pp. 29–50). 

Get engaged like auntie Tabby!

Recently, I've read from many sources how 'learning to be', to become a full member or participant in the field, is so essential in one's learning. In New Literacies (3rd ed) Colin Lankshear and Michel Knobel tell a story about Tabby Lou, spelled out originally by Elizabeth Hayes & James Gee.

Tabby – game-playing grandma turned into a Sims designer

Tabby is a grandmother with a health issue that confine her to home. She then learns to play The Sims with her grandchildren. One of those said she'd like a purple potty for her Sims house, and Tabby decided she would create one.

Tabby did find tools for doing the job, but couldn't understand how to use them. Gradually she got help, learned more, got in contact with designers, and after all, became a Sims designer herself, too.

There's a genuine Tabby pot above. Not the pot, but a later production among her approx. 9,000 (!) creations.

"Yeah, I am in my 62nd year on this earth. Wow!! Didn't think I'd make it this far. AND, I hit 6 and a half million downloads on my Birthday, How Cool is that!" (from Tabby's page)

What a nice story about "learning to be", about becoming a member "in a community in which expert practices are central", like Chistopher Hoadley puts it in his article 'What is a Community of Practice and How Can We Support It?', here.

This has a lot to do with media education

Of course the community of practice can be put at work to support learning. And of course passion, engagement, community, and technology can be harnessed for this purpose.

Some tested and tried methods that Hoadley calls C4P: Linking people with others with similar practices and interests. Facebook pages. Sharing resources and information. Wikis like OpiToinenElämä. Tools for communication and discussion. BBS, chat, Skype, virtual world... you name it... Meta-level mechanisms showing twhat others are doing or what they've done. Wiki history, Amazon recommendations.