How should the knowledge and products created by the community be shared beyond the community? Figure 8: Example of exploratory questions and activities for a specific phase in the life cycle of a community of practice. Online communities of practice A common feature of the literature is the focus on social/online learning and online communities of practice. A typology of social forms for learning is shown in the example below. System Group Net Set Facebook Medium Facebook provides groups and group areas Very high This is Facebook’s raison d’etre Medium Facebook offers pages that people may set up for specific topics Twitter Very low There are third-party tools and ways to organise around sets, but Twitter does not support explicit groups High The “following” function in Twitter supports strong two-way links as well as (more commonly) links Very high Twitter’s hashtags provide a powerful means of clustering around a single topic Pinterest Low is no explicit support for groups Medium Social networking is a feature, but seldom the main means of discovery of content on the site Very high As the name implies, Pinterest’s most significant feature is that it relates to shared interests LinkedIn Medium LinkedIn offers closed interest groups that are widely used Very high This is LinkedIn’s raison d’etre High It is common to seek people based on categories of skills and interests that they supply Moodle, Blackboard and other LMS systems Very high Moodle courses are archetypal group support tools with Very low Use of blogs and profiles allow for very Low Courses, especially open ones, provide an anchor for
strong roles, controlled membership, and tools to support collaboration in teams minimal social networking, though we note these are rarely used interest, though the act of joining one makes this largely a group-support system Figure 9: Support for social in some common social software Appendix 2: Examples of effective cross-sectoral networks From Sarah Fordyce – NDS Network for Quality 2009-2010 The Network for Quality Project has three goals. The project is designed to give agencies opportunities to establish and sustain: Networks focused on leadership from experienced agencies to build capacity to implement the Quality Framework and prepare for independent monitoring. Networks that develop innovative and collaborative knowledge management strategies to support documentation of quality processes. Networks that focus on building organisational capacity in effective change management to engage staff of their agencies in implementing the Quality Framework and preparation for independent monitoring. Project outcomes are that Disability Service Providers will be: More confident about their organisation’s capacity to meet Industry and Outcome Standards More confident about their organisation’s readiness for independent monitoring. Successful in implementing the Quality Framework and meeting independent monitoring requirements Write-up is on . Examples of effective cross-sectoral forums with elements of ‘community of practice’ From Pompetti: Whittlesea Community Futures Convened by Council 30 orgs, plus metroaccess… 4 working groups/clusters and a fifth cluster - Disability Working Group (service providers only) plus Whittlesea Disability Network (cf DAC) with providers and community members