That I initiated a English learning community and had maintained it for 2 years, which happened before I started my graduate study, gave me the illusion that I was someone with some sort of vision, initiative, and action.
Early last year I formed a virtual learning community again, for I really like the idea of community of practice, a group of people sharing the knowledge they co-construct through whatever the practice is. All the way again I encountered problems I used to be faced with so often when I managed the English learning community years ago: how to maintain the participation.
It's not my participation but all the other participants', because as a founder, I had been always participating. Plus, that's why I started it, I liked it. But not all participants shared the same passion with me. At least, not as strong as mine.
(Reviewing Alyssa's course slides.) The concept of community of practice tells us there are three elements in this concept:
- shared domain of interest / competence / commitment
- community, web of relationships and interactions
- shared practice, a repertoire of experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems
As long as the three elements are maintained, the group can be thought of as a productive CoP.
So I guess somewhere among the three elements must go wrong in the learning communities I created, though some of the logics in CoP seems no-brainer, such as...
- participation in CoP is voluntary rather than obligatory.
- everyone has their own priority, and you cannot force everyone to have same priority as you do.
- once participants leave out of some personal priority thing, the one and only solution, if not terminating the community, is to recruit members.
- so you'll see communities are in constant recruitment, every couple of months, with sometimes larger interval.
That's what always happens in my learning communities. The above logics is valid and straightforward, only if what you maintain is not a real productive CoP.
Another question that recently occurred to me is where CoP will go ultimately. From a macro-scope, a no-brainer answer is CoP either goes flourishing to its maximum or extinguishing to nothing. Such extreme dualism is discouraging, yet (it is) so true to some point. So I am trying to search for answers other than this one, or some other deeper meaning for CoP.
I don't have answers to any of the situations / problems I mentioned here, yet I hope one day everything would be clear to me.
Sooner or later, right?!
