Sims Learning Connections

This is a continuation of Fortress, Gated Community, and Free-range Learning. Part-1 skipped over defining community or network within the learning context. I’ll now attempt to fill that gap.

Learning Communities

Although I used the phrase “learning community,” when it comes to an actual definition I mostly fall back to established definitions for Communities of Practice and Online (virtual) Communities and claim that both these are also always, but not exclusively, learning communities — communities that facilitate learning among their membership.

For many years at my day-job we have used a Community of Practice definition attributed to Gartner; however, I can no longer find the actual citation:

A group of individuals (people or organizations) with diverse viewpoints, experience, roles and other characteristics; engaged in real work (defined as having goals and stakeholders to please); over a significant period of time in which members build things, solve problems, learn, invent, create new knowledge and, generally, progress the purpose of the community

From Cultivating Communities of Practice, by Wenger, McDermott and Snyder; which is my favorite practitioner-oriented guide on the subject:

Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. (p. 4)

More recently, and more broadly, John Hagel notes that a virtual community involves:

• establishing connections on electronic networks among people with common needs
• so that they can engage in shared discussions
• that persist and accumulate over time
• leading to complex webs of personal relationships and an increasing sense of identification with the overall community

The key elements of virtual community, therefore, are shared discussions, shared relationships and shared identity…[which]…contribute to building shared meaning, shared trust and shared motivation in ways that are distinctive and responsive to the growing needs among participants.

I bring in Hagel’s definition as it is the furthest towards a “network” view, while still emphasizing the shared identity and long-term nature of a community — which are also emphasized in the earlier definitions.

Side note: The distinction between Community of Practice and Community of Interest is not something that I have found to be useful and have resisted drawing in my work. To extent there is a distinction, likely this is more about scale and professional application than the form of interaction and learning that occurs within the community. A vintage car enthusiast club might be considered a community of interest; whereas, a commercial drivers association might be a community of practice. Again, not a distinction I put to use.

Learning Networks

Starting with motivation and moving into definition…

Last week, George Siemens wrote:

It’s great to see the network learning theme spread. When I reflect on how rapidly knowledge is growing, society is changing, disciplines are blending and blurring, and our activities are “complexifying”, I can’t think of any model other than networks that is capable of adjusting and reacting at the required pace and manner. But the real problem is not identifying the solution to our current challenges. The real problem rests in implementation. When we move to networks, we need to change pretty much everything else.

and pointed to Terry Anderson’s Learning with Networks, which closed with:

Networks allow cost effective ways for us to move learning out beyond the campus or virtual classroom. Networks are not communities of practice in which all members are struggling to develop common solutions to common problems. Rather, networks are diverse, free form and free-flowing resources.

Setting up my own simplistic definition that learning networks are connections between people (nodes) that facilitate an increase in knowledge or skill for one or both of the connected nodes.

Communities contain networks, companies and universities contain networks; however, networks are not communities.

The nodes in a network are autonomous. I control my own network, I am free at anytime to reconfigure my network by attenuating some connections and amplifying others. This doesn’t have a parallel within a community or the formal organization where I am more or less “stuck” for better or worse with whomever else chooses to be in the community or whomever I’m working with and for.

Unlike the community, in a network there is no physical or virtual place where the value created by network exists (e.g. mailing lists artifacts or collaborative work product within a wiki.) Rather as close as we get are descriptive artifacts such as LinkedIn or ‘my network’ within del.icio.us that describe the nodes (in case of LinkedIn) and the connections between them (a shared interest in particular content, presumably, in the case of del.icio.us networks.)

The recent Ning conversations (for example Tony Karrer’s Too Many Social Networks? post and the comments), like Ning itself, muddles the distinctions between community and network. I see Ning as a collaboration platform for a particular community, not a “social network,” as a given Ning instance is not fully open to the rest of the network, rather it is a ‘gated community’ that does leverage network concepts.

For further thinking:

• Connectivism: Learning as Network-Creation, by George Siemens (online article)
• The 2005 whiteboard photo in Groups and Networks, by Stephen Downes. This prompted me to start my own three column comparison chart between formal organizations, communities, and networks. Something for me to share later when I make the moment to export from spreadsheet into HTML or image file.
• Will Richardson’s YouNiversity
• Terrains, communities and secured platforms, where Tom Haskins builds on Part-1. I need to think some more relative to metaphors for ‘place’ (landscape) and metaphors for method (process.) For me, community has aspects of both place (virtual or real) and method.
• 4 April 2007 update: Konrad Glogowski’s Autobiographical Practices is a well written piece and comments regarding experience with community and network in the education blogosphere.

Closing Note: Wikipedia articles in this subject area leave much to be desired. See for example Communities of Practice and its associated Discussion page and Networks of Practice (a term that hasn’t gained adoption.)