Growing the eLIDA CAMEL Community of Practice Case Study

Introduction

The explosive proliferation of activity within social networking sites on the internet during the first decade of the twenty-first century has, arguably, simultaneously been stimulated by and has given further impetus to the concept of ‘social learning’ in education. Accelerating global interest in social networking was recorded in recent statistics on the predicted active memberships of around 230 million people participating worldwide in social network sites by the close of 2007, although such growth was expected to flatten out by 2012 (Datamonitor, 2007). A growing educational emphasis on informal learning from and with peer group members both on-line and face-to-face has emerged during the past few decades, in addition to the continuing traditional foci of scholarly interest in individualised academic study and teacher-led classroom instruction. An unprecedented growth in electronic social interaction has occurred with the recent advent of social networking environments such as Facebook, Twitter, Del.icio.us, LinkdIn, MySpace, and around 200 others.

Increasing attention during this period has also been given to the way in which people interactively participate in situated learning experiences, working with others in informal communities in the workplace. Albert Bandura’s influential social cognitive theory of human behaviour, and the related concepts of agency and self-efficacy (1973, 1986, 2001) have provided an authoritative psychological background of evidence to inform emerging trends towards increased recognition of the power of learning in informal social networks. Bandura transcended the environmental imperatives characteristic of behavioural learning theory to place greater emphasis on the way in which humans possess proactive agency to change their lives, learning from each other through observation, imitation and the modelling of behaviours in social situations. The concept of ‘social learning’ is also linked with the ideas of Vygotsky regarding learning through social development (1962, 1978) and the situated learning theories of Lave and Wenger (1991). The ‘turn’ towards social learning theories which had commenced in the earlier twentieth century accelerated rapidly towards the end of the century with the advent of new ideas regarding the importance of the community in which learners find themselves.

Lave and Wenger developed the idea of a community of practice (CoP) in their pioneering book on situated learning (1991). They defined a CoP as a group of practitioners who, sharing a passion for a common interest, are committed to improve knowledge and skill and to solve problems by collaborating together to share understandings in this field (1991). Researchers Lave and Wenger outlined, in effect, a new relational concept of learning. They emphasised a socio-cultural interpretation of the way in which humans learn by engaging in shared, situated knowledge about improvements in practice through collaborative participation in like-minded communities, many of which always emerge naturally as informal, self-organizing entities in which spontaneous social learning in a particular practices takes place (1991). Communities of practice exist everywhere, therefore, and have multiple different kinds of interests that provide the focus within the community for the ‘practice’ that their members share, which can be anything from a desire to learn about breeding aardvarks to a passion for playing the zurna. The ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ of newcomers at the edge of such communities is gradually enfolded towards the centre, as the learning of ‘newbies’ slowly develops through continuing socio-cultural relationships with ‘old-timer’ experts who pass on their accumulated expertise.