Cases in education

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Communities of Practice Bibliography
books and articles on theory, practice, examples, and so on

Webheads in Action is a volunteer driven, free online CoP of EFL /ESL language educators from all around the world, with an experimental and collaboration approach to web 2.0 tools.

Pharmacy Schools as Expert Communities of Practice? A Proposal to Radically Restructure Pharmacy W Duncan-Hewitt, Z Austin (2005), //American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 69//, (3) 370-380. Includes discussion on networks of CoPs (NCoPs), and an analytical "comparison of psychological and sociological variants of situated learning"

Vivian Gussin Paley, The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter; the uses of storytelling in the classroom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) is a detailed, intimate account of the life of a classroom community and its members. It sets the standard for clear description and reflection of a community's life and learning. It combines theory, personal experience, individual and collective trajectory, and passionate engagement with things that really matter. The kind of book you need to read more than once.

In Elaine Fink, and Lauren B. Resnick, "Developing Principals as Instructional Leaders" Phi Delta Kappan, April 2001, pp. 598-606, discuss how the district develops and sustains a culture of learning among its principals while maintaining a strong sense of accountability for student achievement. They describe how Community School District 2 in New York City amassed a strong record of successful school improvement in a diverse urban setting over an 11 year period.

In John Storck and Patricia A. Hill, "Knowledge diffusion through 'Strategic Communities'" Sloan Management Review, Winter 2000, 42 (2):63-74, the authors give a case study of how Xerox managers launched "the Transition Alliance" in response to a global IT infrastructure transition away from proprietary standards. The group was half way between a team and a community of practice. The article gives a lot of thought to organizational context, e.g., framing change governance as either "thick matrix," "thin matrix," or "strategic community."

More than a case study, since it offers a very complete analysis and is very explicit about a point of view regarding work and learning, Martin Ryder's description of a Collaborative Online Support System in his "From Center to Periphery: Shifting Agency in Complex Technical Learning Environments," is an excellent account of actual experience enabling a community of practice without using any of the jargon that is emerging in the field. See:

[http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/coss.html]

Ryder's web site contains a number of other useful papers on learning and technology.

In "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Eric S. Raymond discusses the community that continues to develop the LINUX operating system at [http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/]. Raymond talks about the community building principles he used in an open source project to develop a utility named fetchmail. For example, he suggests "When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise." He attributes his success to these principles:

1. I released early and often (almost never less often than every ten days; during periods of intense development, once a day). 2. I grew my beta list by adding to it everyone who contacted me about fetchmail. 3. I sent chatty announcements to the beta list whenever I released, encouraging people to participate. 4. And I listened to my beta testers, polling them about design decisions and stroking them whenever they sent in patches and feedback. "

Some of the technical details of of Raymond's project will be beyond the casual reader. Other readers will enjoy them because they provide veracity and juice. Sections 9 through 11 are particularly relevant to the subject of communities of pracitce.

As part of a series titled "Joe's Jottings," Joe Podolsky ([joe_podolsky@hp.com]) discusses HP's culture and how it supports and depends on communities of practice at http://www.keller.com/podolsky/059.htm. He concludes:

"In the end, communities of practice, and HP's culture, are based on that most fragile of all concepts, on trust."

In "Discussion DBs," Carol Anne Ogdin tells the story of a technology-oriented virtual community of practice (that uses Lotus Notes to communicate and is focused on the development of Lotus Notes as well). It is a rich story (with facts and insights that only someone who was there as a member and a leader could have provided) at:

http://www.deepwoods.com/transform/pubs/DDB.htm.

"Numerical Analysis" is a detailed analysis of the same community (demonstrates the value of very careful work to quantify growth rates, participation roles, and so forth) at: http://www.deepwoods.com/transform/pubs/Community/Stats.htm. (-JDS)

Hughes Space and Communication's use of communities of practice is described in the Oct 1999 issue of Strategic Finance in an article titled "Mining Intellectual Capital." It's on the web at:

http://www.mamag.com/strategicfinance/1999/10i.htm

The article claims that Hughes (HSC) built a factory around CPs:

"HSC addressed the problems created by these islands of knowledge by dramatically reengineering its satellite development and design process into what it called the Integrated Satellite Factory. The Integrated Satellite Factory was built around Communities of Practice (CoPs) -- an informal work group that shares a common purpose and a common set of practices, usually members of a specific profession or specialty who often work in different processes, departments, or functions."

Anil K Gupta; Vijay Govindarajan, "Knowledge management's social dimension: Lessons from Nucor steel Sloan Management Review: 42(1) , p. 71-80 (10/01/2000)

Summary: Building an effective social ecology - that is, the social environment within which people operate - is a crucial requirement for effective knowledge management. An effective knowledge machine must excel at 2 central tasks: creating and acquiring new knowledge, and sharing and mobilizing that knowledge throughout the corporate network. To sustain competitive advantage, a company must give people incentives to transfer their knowledge. A look at the innovative steel company Nucor and others suggests how to build a knowledge-sharing environment.

In David Stamps, Communities of practice; Learning and work as social activities" at http://www.steelcase.com/knowledgebase/comofprac.htm tells the story of Xerox's Integrated Customer Service (ICS) experiment with commentary from experts like Wenger, Manville, Stucky & Hillen. Has the names of lots of specific people who were involved in the project (people you'd like to call up and talk to). Has a nice vingette about a conflict between "trainers" paradigm and "CoP fraternitiy." Examples of strategic communities of practice at the World Bank in the areas of education, tax administration, land registration. and, Indigenous Knowledge are described at http://www.worldbank.org/km/html/examples.html.

See Barab & Duffy in Theories of Learning for 4 case studies in school-related settings.

A study of three successful firms in investment banking, law, and medicine proposes that they share elements such as:

1. Selecting the best. 2. Developing individual competencies over time. 3. Retaining top performers. 4. Leveraging individual expertise to solve complex problems. 5. Generating new ideas. 6. Providing superior value to clients. 7. Attaining and retaining the best clients.

Jeanne M. Liedtka, Mark E. Haskins, John W. Rosenblum, Jack Weber, "The Generative Cycle: Linking Knowledge and Relationships" Sloan Management Review, Fall 1997, Volume 39, No. 1. An abstract is at: http://mitsloan.mit.edu/smr/past/1997/smr3914.html

Palincsar, A. S., Magnusson, S. J., Marano, N., Ford, D. & Brown, N. (1998). Designing a community of practice: Principles and practices of the GIsML Community. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14, 5-19. An article titled "Learning from the ground: management and practice of safety inside a construction firm" by Silvia Gherardi, Francesca Odella, and Davide Nicolini on CPs that form in dangerous occupations and the implications for safety work states that "communities of practice are privileged instruments for the creation and the transmission of culture and can be considered as sources of knowledge and strategies for the solution of organizational problems.The article is at: http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/research/conferences/scos/papers/gherard.htm

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