Etienne Wenger, Beverly Trayner and Maarten de Laat come up with an important new document on community management. "It is a foundation paper presenting a framework for promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks," they write, "it includes a theoretical framework and toolkit for helping professionals to tell stories on the value that networks and communities create when they are used for learning and to articulate how these activities result in desired outcomes that improve teaching practice." By "community" they mean "community of practice, which [they] define as a learning partnership among people who find it useful to learn from and with each other about a particular domain."
They seem intent to respond to the recent discussion of networks. "The network aspect refers to the set of relationships, personal interactions, and connections among participants who have personal reasons to connect. It is viewed as a set of nodes and links with affordances for learning, such as information flows, helpful linkages, joint problem solving, and knowledge creation. The community aspect refers to the development of a shared identity around a topic or set of challenges." And "the danger of network is noise and diffusion.... the challenge of network is that it requires a strong sense of direction on the part of individuals." It's an interesting take on the groups-vs-networks debate (or, maybe better, communities-vs-networks) that depicts them as mutually supportive. And "accumulating evidence of the value created by a community or network can be represented as a matrix of indicators and stories."
They seem intent to respond to the recent discussion of networks. "The network aspect refers to the set of relationships, personal interactions, and connections among participants who have personal reasons to connect. It is viewed as a set of nodes and links with affordances for learning, such as information flows, helpful linkages, joint problem solving, and knowledge creation. The community aspect refers to the development of a shared identity around a topic or set of challenges." And "the danger of network is noise and diffusion.... the challenge of network is that it requires a strong sense of direction on the part of individuals." It's an interesting take on the groups-vs-networks debate (or, maybe better, communities-vs-networks) that depicts them as mutually supportive. And "accumulating evidence of the value created by a community or network can be represented as a matrix of indicators and stories."
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