Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice

Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice is a collection of classical and contemporary writing associated with learning and systemic change in contexts ranging from cities, to rural development to education to nursing to water management to public policy. It is likely to be of interest to anyone trying to understand how to think systemically and to act and interact effectively in situations experienced as complex, messy and changing. While mainly concerned with professional praxis, where theory and practice inform each other, there is much here that can apply at a personal level. This book offers conceptual tools and suggestions for new ways of being and acting in the world in relation to each other, that arise from both old and new understandings of communities, learning and systems. Starting with twentieth century insights into social learning, learning systems and appreciative systems from Donald Schön and Sir Geoffrey Vickers, the book goes on to consider the contemporary traditions of critical social learning systems and communities of practice, pioneered by Richard Bawden and Etienne Wenger and their colleagues. A synthesis of the ideas raised, written by the editor, concludes this reader. The theory and practice of social learning systems and communities of practice appear to have much to offer in influencing and managing systemic change for a better world

Learning in virtual worlds : Using communities of practice to explain how people learn from play

Although there is interest in the educational potential of online multiplayer games and virtual worlds, there is still little evidence to explain specifically what and how people learn from these environments. This paper addresses this issue by exploring the experiences of couples that play World of Warcraft together. Learning outcomes were identified (involving the management of ludic, social and material resources) along with learning processes, which followed Wenger’s model of participation in Communities of Practice. Comparing this with existing literature suggests that productive comparisons can be drawn with the experiences of distance education students and the social pressures that affect their participation

A Virtual Learning Environment for Doing Business on the Internet

The power of the new Communication and Information Technologies influences human life and economy so deeply that makes all of us learners both as individuals and members of (real or virtual) learning communities and learning organisations in a learning society. Looking back at the communication and information technology history we could clearly observe that the main attention of researchers and technologists has been gradually moved from hardware to software, next - to human-computer interface, and now - to social issues related to global communication and collaboration. The Computer Mediated Communication leads to establishment of virtual communities formed on the basis of common topics of interest, collaborative work, business, or other joint activities. These communities cross the national and cultural barriers and demand for re-conceptualisation of the social life, including education and business

The Perceptions of Preservice Teachers on Time Devoted to Post-Teaching Discussion Sessions through Communities of Practice

There are numerous theories about human learning: behaviorism, cognitive, humanistic, and social theories (Learning Theories Site Map, 2013). One theory of learning involves a deepening process of participation in communities of practice, which involve a cluster of individuals who share a common interest of concern or passion and who learn from each other through the process of sharing experiences and information about how to improve such interest (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). This concept involves a discussion among group members about ways of doing and approaching things that are elaborated upon to a significant extent to facilitate learning and enhance performance (Smith, 2009). Frequent discourse and active and social engagement produce a shared construction of knowledge that continues over time (MacPhail, Patton, Parker, & Tannehill, 2014). The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of preservice teachers about time devoted to post-teaching discussion sessions through communities of practice

Thinking together: What makes Communities of Practice work?

In this article, we develop the founding elements of the concept of Communities of Practice by elaborating on the learning processes happening at the heart of such communities. In particular, we provide a consistent perspective on the notions of knowledge, knowing and knowledge sharing that is compatible with the essence of this concept – that learning entails an investment of identity and a social formation of a person. We do so by drawing richly from the work of Michael Polanyi and his conception of personal knowledge, and thereby we clarify the scope of Communities of Practice and offer a number of new insights into how to make such social structures perform well in professional settings. The conceptual discussion is substantiated by findings of a qualitative empirical study in the UK National Health Service. As a result, the process of ‘thinking together’ is conceptualized as a key part of meaningful Communities of Practice where people mutually guide each other through their understandings of the same problems in their area of mutual interest, and this way indirectly share tacit knowledge. The collaborative learning process of ‘thinking together’, we argue, is what essentially brings Communities of Practice to life and not the other way round

Review of Learning in ICT-enabled Networks and Communities

This report is part of a project launched by IPTS with DG Education and Culture to study the innovations for learning, which are emerging in the new collaborative and informal settings enabled by ICT. The report gathers and analyses evidence from learning opportunities that are emerging in ICT-enabled networks and communities. In these new virtual spaces, participation is motivated by an interest to a topic, by creative production and by search for social connection. Online networks and communities emerge both within and across organisations as well as in a completely open and bottom-up manner. Accessing, following, and contributing to the communities can lead to a range of learning outcomes. New technologies afford tools and means for people to participate in communities in a personally meaningful way. However, not all individuals are necessarily equipped with skills or knowledge to benefit from these opportunities for their lifelong learning. Major challenges relate both to the initial barriers for accessing online communities with confident and critical digital competence and skills for self-regulated learning. Finding ways to identify, assess and certify relevant learning and new skills that can be obtained and practiced in these environments is a major task. The report argues that educational institutions should find ways to connect with and learn from these new learning approaches and settings in order to bring about their own transformation for the 21st century, and to support competence building for new jobs and personal development with a learner-centred and lifelong perspective.JRC.J.4-Information Societ

POISED: Spotting Twitter Spam Off the Beaten Paths

Cybercriminals have found in online social networks a propitious medium to spread spam and malicious content. Existing techniques for detecting spam include predicting the trustworthiness of accounts and analyzing the content of these messages. However, advanced attackers can still successfully evade these defenses. Online social networks bring people who have personal connections or share common interests to form communities. In this paper, we first show that users within a networked community share some topics of interest. Moreover, content shared on these social network tend to propagate according to the interests of people. Dissemination paths may emerge where some communities post similar messages, based on the interests of those communities. Spam and other malicious content, on the other hand, follow different spreading patterns. In this paper, we follow this insight and present POISED, a system that leverages the differences in propagation between benign and malicious messages on social networks to identify spam and other unwanted content. We test our system on a dataset of 1.3M tweets collected from 64K users, and we show that our approach is effective in detecting malicious messages, reaching 91% precision and 93% recall. We also show that POISED's detection is more comprehensive than previous systems, by comparing it to three state-of-the-art spam detection systems that have been proposed by the research community in the past. POISED significantly outperforms each of these systems. Moreover, through simulations, we show how POISED is effective in the early detection of spam messages and how it is resilient against two well-known adversarial machine learning attacks

User community detection via embedding of social network structure and temporal content

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd Identifying and extracting user communities is an important step towards understanding social network dynamics from a macro perspective. For this reason, the work in this paper explores various aspects related to the identification of user communities. To date, user community detection methods employ either explicit links between users (link analysis), or users’ topics of interest in posted content (content analysis), or in tandem. Little work has considered temporal evolution when identifying user communities in a way to group together those users who share not only similar topical interests but also similar temporal behavior towards their topics of interest. In this paper, we identify user communities through multimodal feature learning (embeddings). Our core contributions can be enumerated as (a) we propose a new method for learning neural embeddings for users based on their temporal content similarity; (b) we learn user embeddings based on their social network connections (links) through neural graph embeddings; (c) we systematically interpolate temporal content-based embeddings and social link-based embeddings to capture both social network connections and temporal content evolution for representing users, and (d) we systematically evaluate the quality of each embedding type in isolation and also when interpolated together and demonstrate their performance on a Twitter dataset under two different application scenarios, namely news recommendation and user prediction. We find that (1) content-based methods produce higher quality communities compared to link-based methods; (2) methods that consider temporal evolution of content, our proposed method in particular, show better performance compared to their non-temporal counter-parts; (3) communities that are produced when time is explicitly incorporated in user vector representations have higher quality than the ones produced when time is incorporated into a generative process, and finally (4) while link-based methods are weaker than content-based methods, their interpolation with content-based methods leads to improved quality of the identified communities

The importance of ‘fitting in’: collaboration and social value creation in response to community norms and expectations

This article explores the effects of embeddedness in communities upon entrepreneurial practices. Based on the lived experiences of 10 craft entrepreneurs, this study reveals that within certain contexts, such as craft communities, entrepreneurs are expected to exhibit high levels of camaraderie and generosity, which leads them to create social value by supporting their peers and freely sharing their resources. Entrepreneurs achieve ‘fitting in’ not only by learning accepted norms, but also by performing strategic actions which allow them to temporarily adapt their conduct to meet the expectations of community members. Thus, this study exposes a largely concealed element of social entrepreneurial practice. This article also reveals that embeddedness in communities can lead entrepreneurs to collaborate with potential competitors. Craft entrepreneurs share their economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital in order to support and help revitalise their communities, to perpetuate their respective industries and to sustain a genuine interest in hand-crafted products. They consider such supportive behaviour a social responsibility that is shared among community members and a task that is passed from one generation to the next. Thus, this article reveals that collaboration and social value creation can be embraced in response to community norms and expectations

Civic Identities, Online Technologies: From Designing Civics Curriculum to Supporting Civic Experiences

Part of the Volume on Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth.Youth today are often criticized for their lack of civic participation and involvement in political life. Technology has been blamed, amongst many other causes, for fostering social isolation and youth's retreat into a private world disconnected from their communities. However, current research is beginning to indicate that these might be inaccurate perceptions. The Internet has provided new opportunities to create communities that extend beyond geographic boundaries, to engage in civic and volunteering activities across local and national frontiers, to learn about political life, and to experience the challenges of democratic participation. How do we leverage youth's interest in new technologies by developing technology-based educational programs to promote civic engagement? This chapter explores this question by proposing socio-technical design elements to be considered when developing technology-rich experiences. It presents a typology to guide the design of Internet-based interventions, taking into account both the affordances of the technology and the educational approach to the use of the technology. It also presents a pilot experience in a northeastern university that offered a pre-orientation program in which incoming freshman designed a three-dimensional virtual campus of the future and developed new policies and programs to strengthen the relationship between college campus and neighbor communities