Knowledge Brokers in Overlapping Online Communities of Practice

2010 ◽  
pp. 77-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Cranefield ◽  
Pak Yoong
Keyword(s):  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Knowledge Flows ◽  
Knowledge Broker ◽  
System Level ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Knowledge Brokers ◽  
Online Communities Of Practice ◽  
Professional Learners

This chapter argues that leaders need to better understand the roles played by informal knowledge brokers in connecting overlapping online communities of practice (CoPs). It illustrates how distributed individuals playing a key knowledge broker role – the Connector-leader – helped to drive transformative professional change. The research context was a professional development programme for New Zealand schools that promoted a new, student-centric teaching approach. The research project explored how online CoPs facilitate professional knowledge transfer, focusing on how new knowledge is embedded in interpretive frameworks and practices. Connector-leaders spanned boundaries in the online community realm and had a strong online presence. As professional learners, they were strongly outward facing, identifying primarily as members of a distributed online CoP. As leaders, they were inward facing, focusing largely on the knowledge needs of local organisations and CoPs. This study extends previous research into the boundary spanner and knowledge broker, introduces new ideas about the nature of boundaries in CoPs, and promotes a system-level view of knowledge flows, emphasising the importance of both visible and invisible dimensions of online knowledge brokering.

Online Communities of Practice and Web 2.0

2016 ◽  
pp. 265-292
Author(s):  
Amir Manzoor
Keyword(s):  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Management Communication ◽  
Organizational Goals ◽  
The People ◽  
Online Tools ◽  
Online Communities Of Practice

In contemporary Knowledge Management, communication and collaboration play very significant role. Knowledge exists within the stakeholders of an organization. Such knowledge, when extracted and harnessed effectively, can become an extremely valuable asset to achieve organizational goals and objectives. This knowledge, embedded in the people, must be properly released through an appropriate channel to make it usable. Through dialogue and discussions, using online tools, this release and reuses of knowledge can be made possible. The Community of Practice (CoP) is a useful organizing concept for enhancing collaboration, sharing knowledge, and disseminating best practices among researchers and practitioners. This chapter explores the concept of Communities of Practice and how Web 2.0 technologies can facilitate the transformation from a conventional community of practice to online community of practice for better and effective online communities of practices.

Live Virtual Technologies to Support Extended Events in Online Communities of Practice

2010 ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Eleftheria Tomadaki ◽  
Peter J. Scott ◽  
Kevin A. Quick
Keyword(s):  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Instant Messaging ◽  
Synchronous Communication ◽  
Phone Calls ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Similar Range ◽  
Online Communities Of Practice ◽  
Insight Into

Online communities of practice often require support for collaboration over extended periods of time, in what are effectively very long meetings. While there are a wide range of support systems for ‘foreground’ interactions, such as phone calls and video meetings, and a similar range of tools for ‘background’ interactions, such as email and instant messaging, there is a lack in tools that exclusively cater for extended events without switching to different platforms. The current study presents qualitative and quantitative data from a naturalistic insight into the use of two online synchronous communication tools, FM for videoconference and Hexagon for ambient awareness, to support an extended event in a working online community. A complex mix of planned and opportunistic interactions require a new set of working synchronous tools, managing the trade-off between awareness and disruption. Switching between foreground and background ‘meeting activity’ remains a very big challenge.

scholarly journals Online Communities of Practice and Professional  Change: a Three-Tier View of the Knowledge  Embedding Process

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jocelyn Cranefield
Keyword(s):  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
School Level ◽  
System Level ◽  
The Government ◽  
Online Communities Of Practice ◽  
Professional Change

<p>This interpretivist study, in the field of information Systems, investigates the process of transformative professional change using a knowledge management lens. The goal of the research was to understand how online communities of practice (CoPs) facilitate the transfer and embedding of professional knowledge. It was guided by the question: How do online CoPs facilitate the transfer and embedding of professional knowledge? This topic was of contemporary and strategic significance in New Zealand: The government had embarked on a strategy to transform teaching in NZ schools, aiming to leverage a major investment in IT infrastructure, using online CoPs to help embed a new paradigm of studentcentred, ICT-enriched learning at system level. There was, however, no research to suggest how this might occur. Despite the increasing use of online CoPs by organisations, and an expansion in the number of tools available for this purpose, there is little understanding of how online CoPs can facilitate knowledge transfer. The way in which knowledge embedding (deep transfer) occurs, and the role online CoPs may play in supporting this process, is particularly poorly understood. This is significant issue in this internet-rich era, when developing nations are aiming to cultivate knowledge economies. I conducted the research using a case research strategy, qualitative methods and an inductive process of theory generation. The research case was a national professional development programme for schools, with five CoP subunits: Four were regionally based school cluster CoPs and one was a distributed blogging community. (Membership of this community overlapped with three of the cluster CoPs.) Based on my analysis of data, and on feedback from participants, I found that three complementary mechanisms were operating simultaneously, facilitating the embedding of knowledge at meso, micro and macro levels. The result of my study is a threelevel explanatory theory. At the meso (school) level, knowledge embedding followed a six-stage cycle, with different activities and issues characterising each stage. Online CoPs played a different role at each stage. At the micro (individual) level, knowledge embedding was driven by teachers' crossings of multiple engagement spaces (communication contexts) in a polycontextual environment. Crossings drove personalisation and facilitated the linking of theory and practice, leading to deep individual understanding. At the macro level, the embedding of knowledge was driven by the brokering function of a middle layer community in a system of overlapping, tiered CoPs. Key roles were played by two kinds of knowledge brokers: connector-leaders and follower-feeders. All three embedding-facilitating mechanisms promoted five fundamental knowledge embedding processes: focusing, persuading, aligning, adapting, and owning (developing ownership).</p>

scholarly journals Online Communities of Practice and Professional  Change: a Three-Tier View of the Knowledge  Embedding Process

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jocelyn Cranefield
Keyword(s):  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
School Level ◽  
System Level ◽  
The Government ◽  
Online Communities Of Practice ◽  
Professional Change

<p>This interpretivist study, in the field of information Systems, investigates the process of transformative professional change using a knowledge management lens. The goal of the research was to understand how online communities of practice (CoPs) facilitate the transfer and embedding of professional knowledge. It was guided by the question: How do online CoPs facilitate the transfer and embedding of professional knowledge? This topic was of contemporary and strategic significance in New Zealand: The government had embarked on a strategy to transform teaching in NZ schools, aiming to leverage a major investment in IT infrastructure, using online CoPs to help embed a new paradigm of studentcentred, ICT-enriched learning at system level. There was, however, no research to suggest how this might occur. Despite the increasing use of online CoPs by organisations, and an expansion in the number of tools available for this purpose, there is little understanding of how online CoPs can facilitate knowledge transfer. The way in which knowledge embedding (deep transfer) occurs, and the role online CoPs may play in supporting this process, is particularly poorly understood. This is significant issue in this internet-rich era, when developing nations are aiming to cultivate knowledge economies. I conducted the research using a case research strategy, qualitative methods and an inductive process of theory generation. The research case was a national professional development programme for schools, with five CoP subunits: Four were regionally based school cluster CoPs and one was a distributed blogging community. (Membership of this community overlapped with three of the cluster CoPs.) Based on my analysis of data, and on feedback from participants, I found that three complementary mechanisms were operating simultaneously, facilitating the embedding of knowledge at meso, micro and macro levels. The result of my study is a threelevel explanatory theory. At the meso (school) level, knowledge embedding followed a six-stage cycle, with different activities and issues characterising each stage. Online CoPs played a different role at each stage. At the micro (individual) level, knowledge embedding was driven by teachers' crossings of multiple engagement spaces (communication contexts) in a polycontextual environment. Crossings drove personalisation and facilitated the linking of theory and practice, leading to deep individual understanding. At the macro level, the embedding of knowledge was driven by the brokering function of a middle layer community in a system of overlapping, tiered CoPs. Key roles were played by two kinds of knowledge brokers: connector-leaders and follower-feeders. All three embedding-facilitating mechanisms promoted five fundamental knowledge embedding processes: focusing, persuading, aligning, adapting, and owning (developing ownership).</p>

Online Communities of Practice and Web 2.0

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-93
Author(s):  
Amir Manzoor
Keyword(s):  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Management Communication ◽  
Organizational Goals ◽  
The People ◽  
Online Tools ◽  
Online Communities Of Practice

In contemporary Knowledge Management, communication and collaboration play very significant role. Knowledge exists within the stakeholders of an organization. Such knowledge, when extracted and harnessed effectively, can become an extremely valuable asset to achieve organizational goals and objectives. This knowledge, embedded in the people, must be properly released through an appropriate channel to make it usable. Through dialogue and discussions, using online tools, this release and reuses of knowledge can be made possible. The Community of Practice (CoP) is a useful organizing concept for enhancing collaboration, sharing knowledge, and disseminating best practices among researchers and practitioners. This chapter explores the concept of Communities of Practice and how Web 2.0 technologies can facilitate the transformation from a conventional community of practice to online community of practice for better and effective online communities of practices.

scholarly journals “Facebook Me”: The Potential of Student Teachers’ Online Communities of Practice in Learning to Teach

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Belinda S. Zimmerman ◽  
Sharon D. Kruse ◽  
Tricia Niesz ◽  
William Kist ◽  
Melanie K. Kidder-Brown ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Student Teachers ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Learning To Teach ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
University Faculty ◽  
Faculty Support ◽  
Online Communities Of Practice

This study examined the ways in which early childhood pre-service student teachers (PSTs) used an online community for discussions related to teaching. Using the lenses of communities of practice, our goal was to understand what happens when the PSTs begin to share new learnings about teaching through ongoing practice in online communities. We investigated characteristics of the conversations of PSTs and their professors when using Facebook. This study was based on the postings of seven early childhood PSTs and five university faculty members. PSTs were interviewed at the conclusion of the semester to share their experiences from posting on Facebook. Two categories from the data include PSTs’ views of the viability of Facebook and the kinds of talk that surfaced within the Facebook group conversations. Findings suggested that Facebook has the potential to sustain informal dialogues. However, PSTs require strong faculty support to solve issues related to complexities of practice.

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