Happy accidents or inspired designs?

Delving through the literature about online communities, I came across an earlier survey by Johnson (2001), treating online communities of practice as a naturally occurring phenomenon within designed online communities. Johnson studied successful communities of practice, to establish what organisational factors contribute to their success, as opposed to more traditional organisational decision making.

From my worldview, this contrasts the rigid doctrines of hierarchical institutions with the distributed, decentralised approaches of emergent networks. Interesting points concern:

1. The need for organisations to adopt these ways of working to survive in the face of rapid change
2. The concept of collaborative knowledge outweighing individual knowledge - some parallels with collective intelligence perhaps?
3. The tension between the need for the community to understand process, and the need for market & product development

All of these points have particular relevance for the organisation I work for, with rapid changes in business, learning, technology and government. Moving towards this way of working is particularly desirable for transparency and continued development, but is difficult to achieve in practice. My own interest is in understanding - from a qualitative perspective - what experiences encourage people to go beyond occasional participation and into sustained discourse (Hobson, 2013). I am also interested in understanding factors that lead to attrition, a point that Johnson notes as a common problem.

Johnson also addresses issues of the medium itself, our conceptions of community, and the effect of using face-to-face communication alongside online interactions. Effective online communities adhere to adult learning principles, with a breakdown of the normal instructor - learner differentiation. I note that this supports a move from hierarchical to networked organisation principles. Real and sustainable communities will form around real problems where motivation to seek out solutions is high.

Does such collaboration come about within a company naturally? Does it need any facilitation?  What role should learning and development play in all of this? Our role should be to support the development of collective and employee knowledge, rather than to impart it, leading to the moderator role. Here I can identify where my existing efforts have either met with success or struggled. Communities need goals to achieve, objective evaluation of that success [as a group], and also peer & self-evaluation.

There is a need to draw out the concepts of community that apply to work-based problems and those for formal education courses. A key difference is that for formal education, we are all expected to learn the same thing, and are assessed against this, whereas for real workplace learning, it is the variety of individual learning outcomes that allows the group to have greater intelligence than the sum of its parts. It is perhaps this necessary diversity of outcomes that makes online learning communities such a slippery but valuable prize.

Psychology naturally seems to underpin the development (or not) of a community, with perceived intentions having impact on whether learning happens as a result of comments from other members. 'Are they criticising me? How dare they!' or 'It's really helpful to get constructive thoughts on my work' - which of these a person thinks about comments from peers will likely depend on the underlying environment and individual mentalities. It's not simply a question of technology! My next stop for reading will be works by Palloff and Pratt, as mentioned by the author.

References

• Hobson, J. (2012). The problems with educating a quadriform society. Thinking and learning in the digital age [blog] 7 August. Available at: http://jimmyhob.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-problems-with-educating-quadriform.html
• Hobson, J. (2013). Online communities - trying to walk the talk. Thinking and learning in the digital age [blog] 19 March. Available at:  http://jimmyhob.blogspot.com/2013/03/online-communities-trying-to-walk-talk.html
• Johnson, C.M. (2001). A Survey of Current Practice on Online Communities of Practice. Internet and Higher Education, Vol.4 pp.45-60.
• Malone, T. W. (2012). Collective Intelligence. Edge.org [online] 21 November. Available at: http://edge.org/conversation/collective-intelligence