Steven Parker's List: Innovation@Work

"Monday, May 09, 2011






Roles in communities of practice



Does a
learning community or community of practice need roles to function well? Should
you officially assign these roles to people or is it best if people
spontaneously fullfil certain roles? What about the self-organising power of
communities? On the 29th of March we did a session (we =
Sibrenne Wagenaar
en Joitske Hulsebosch)
about roles in networked learning. We thought it would be nice to share some of
our thinking in this blogpost.





Starting with
ourselves .... we have a small, starting network of
people who all in some way use social media in learning processes and training.
Roles are not explicitly named and assigned because it is
a starting and spontaneous process. Since we have taken
the initiative to invite people we feel more responsible for the ins and outs of
this network, but others also take initiatives and propose activities.
We talk regularly with members informally, take initiative
to convene a meeting f2f, start an online brainstorming, make sure invitations
are available for online webinars. But basically anyone
can take the initiative to start operations and that
happens.
This raises the question ... can it help to formalize roles and
assign certain roles to members in a network? And
when do formal roles get in the way of spontaneous self-organisation? A more
formal roles gives you a certain focus and responsibility
that makes it clear how you (are supposed to) contribute to a network.
The art in network learning is often
this can be combined with other existing work tasks and having a formalised role
may help to ensure the learning community doesn't get 'off the
radar'. It is crucial that the
contents of the network relevant to you and in line with other work you do to
prevent the network tasks from falling off the list, but
having an explicit role can certainly also contribute.

In this blog post we talk about a learning network or community of

"Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might
yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them
autonomously to seek that completion."
- Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind"

Passive Carbon Neutral property.