9.1- Wenger and Prenksy

1) How might Wenger's notions on practice communities relate to Prensky's on education?

Wenger (2001) came up with the idea of Communities of Practice, referring to the notion that learning benefits from experiencing a sense of community with those around you whom you learn with.

I believe that this related to Prensy’s ideas about education in that it implies that students can benefit by taking advantage of their ability to connect digitally, and so by doing so can form an online Community of Practice which will aid the process of education.

So for example, for digital natives, learning online through online lectures or computer games as Prensky suggests, and having the ability to discuss their thoughts and ideas with peers and tutors remotely through perhaps forums or instant messages, means that they will be able to create an educational community of practice, which according to Wenger, will help them to learn.

Therefore by combining Prenksy’s ideas about digital natives and how to most effectively teach them, and Wenger’s ideas about communities of practice and education, we should, in theory, create an environment which is conjunctive to their learning.

9.1- Wenger and Prenksy Cont.

However, a problem of such a strategy would be plagiarism. Whilst this method would encourage the sharing and discussing of ideas, as the Internet is very much an open resource based on the idea of gift economy and digitality, in that nothing is fixed and is open to be edited and re-edited an infinite number of times with no “owner” as it were.

It does however create problems with grading or marking. If a student were to be graded on their specific contributions to a discussion, would their individual work be being assessed, or would it be more accurate to say that it is their ability to find information on the Internet which was being examined?

6.1 Communities of Practice

6.1 Think of a CofP to which you belong (or have belonged) explain in your seminar forum how your example fits into Wenger's model:

One Community of Practice which I believed I was a member of was whilst I was working as a receptionist for a company called Codian based in Langely which made video conferencing software.

This company was divided into different sections based on function, however also being a fairly modern company you were encouraged to feel like a valued member of the team through various social functions and a “common room” with a pool table and a Wii in allowed people to socialize more freely.

The CofP I believe I was a member of involved me as the receptionist, the Office Manager Emma, the ex-receptionist who’d got a promotion, Anita and Jake, I’m not quite sure how he came to fit into it, possibly because he worked in accounts and his desk was next to Emma and Anita’s…

A reason that I believe it was a CofP is that as Jake wasn’t really involved by his official job description, he was still undoubtedly a member. This therefore follows that “The membership involves whoever participates in and contributes to the practice.” (p. 4, Wenger). Also, it was “defined by knowledge rather than by task” (p. 4, Wenger) in that rather us working together on one task only, it would be more ongoing and we would gain knowledge about each other and the different ways in which we’d go about getting things done.

The joint enterprise of the CofP I believe was organizing the smooth running of the office on a daily basis. For example, we tended to do tasks together, like collecting the food delivery on a Thursday morning and office related other tasks of a similar nature.

We had mutual engagement in that we were all responsible for the same thing, and if something were to have gone wrong we would be jointly responsible (excluding Jake as he tended to help out off his own back, his official role being in accounts).

The shared repertoire of communal resources would have been the things we tended to do, almost unwritten rules of how we “did things”. For example, we would normally help ourselves to left over food we’d order in for conferences, and we’d usually have a game of Mario Kart on the Wii after a particularly taxing task.

I would suggest that our relationship to the official organisation was “Unrecognised” in that we did not have an official role, rather relationships were created as I would spend lots of time with Anita, in that she helped me take over from her and knew a lot about my job, and Emma was my superior. Jake had a good relationship with both Emma and Anita and this is how we came to work together for a lot of tasks. I think a challenge of this type of relationship was that as we all had different official responsibilities, sometimes there would be a mis-match between tasks which “officially” were our responsibility, and those we would do together. Therefore we’d have to individually prioritise and this could mean that sometimes tasks which were part of our job description had to be pushed back.