Virtual Community of Practice
Encyclopedia : V : VI : VIR : Virtual Community of Practice
To some a virtual Community of Practice is a misnomer as the original concept of a Community of Practice (CoP) was based around situated learning in a co-located setting. However, with increasing globalization and the continued growth of the Internet many new claim that virtual CoPs do exist. For example, some claim that a wiki (such as wikipedia.org) is a virtual CoP.
There is also debate on the very term VCoP as the community is real though the form of communication is mostly, if not entirely, via ICT. Some of the other terms used have been (in chronological order) on-line (Cothrel & Williams, 1999), computer-mediated (Etzioni & Etzioni, 1999), electronic (Wasko & Faraj, 2000) and distributed (Wenger et al., 2002). As the mode of communication can involve face-to-face, telephone and letter, and the defining feature is its distributed nature. For a comparison between Virtual Learning Communities (VLCs) with Distributed Communities of Practice (DCoP), see Couros & Kesten (2003)[(website)]
See also
External links
- [Communities of Practice: Going One Step Too Far?] A critical review of virtual CoPs
- [Where is the Action in Virtual Communities of Practice?] Another critical review of virtual CoPs
- [Communities of Practice: Going Virtual]
- [Distributed Design Teams as Communities of Practice]
- [Virtual Communities of Practice: Differentiated Consequences for Individuals in Two Organisational Contexts]
- [Knowledge Networking: Structure and Performance in Networks of Practice]
References
Etzioni, A., & Etzioni, O. (1999). Face-to-face and computer-mediated communities, A comparative analysis. The Information Society, 15, 241-248.Cothrel, J., & Williams, R.L. (1999). On-line communities: helping them form and grow. Journal of Knowledge Management, 3(1), 54-60.
Wasko, M.M., & Faraj, S. (2000). “It is what one does”: why people participate and help others in electronic communities of practice. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 9, 155-173.
Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W.M. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
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