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E-learning 2.0

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E-learning 2.0 By Stephen Downes at elearn magazine. Big splash in the blogosphere about this one – ‘me too blogging this’ just for PKM purpose.

In the world of e-learning, the closest thing to a social network is a community of practice, articulated and promoted by people such as Etienne Wenger in the 1990s. According to Wenger, a community of practice is characterized by “a shared domain of interest” where “members interact and learn together” and “develop a shared repertoire of resources.”

For the most part, though, what constituted “community” in online learning were artificial and often contrived “discussions” supported by learning management systems [15]. These communities were typically limited to a given group of learners, such as a university class, had a fixed start and end-point, and while substantially better than nothing, rarely approached Wenger’s theory.

Written by anol

October 27th, 2005 at 7:33 am

Posted in Learning Strategy & Design

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  • http://aemeritus.typepad.com/knowplace/ Paul Donley

    A Community of Practice?
    The CoP concept doesn’t seem to have caught on very well.
    The term, “Community of Practice” has lost its definition, so new terms are moving into the void, like “eportfolio.”
    Both of these phrases are losing their meaning quickly. I wonder what new phrase will appear?

    The url is for a blog I set up for knowplace. knowplace is a small canadian company that has been doing wholly online training, presentations and conferences since 2003.
    knowplace patient, mentored teaching style may have been far ahead of available technology, even now.

    They presented me with an interesting challenge as a client to promote their knowTIPS conference coming up in March .
    Other than doing their presentations and conferences on Elluminate through an affiliation with LearningTimes, knowplace’ CoP would be Open Source elearning development.
    They’re doing it in Moodle, using skype and Yahoo.

    Where do you find such a CoP? There is no listing. Of the half dozen CoP’s that I’ve found, most are very loosely defined, if at all. Or the CoP set up for a class, and lately is called an ‘eportfolio’ — if not just a list of links?

    –Paul

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