Community of Practice

Question: Consider the concept of a “community of practice.” How can such a community offer opportunities for learning?

The concept of "community of practice" can offer opportunities for learning through chat rooms and the ability to leave comments on others pictures, blogs, MySpaces. Shirky uses the example of Flickr as a way to illustrate this concept. He states that each webpage is a community and each page has the opportunity to collect attention from people interested in its contents, and then those people might be interested in conversing with others. For example, the comments section on Flickr allow these people who want to activate the community can by asking a basic question such as "How did you do that?" This may seem like a simple request, but when this takes place out in the public web, it also forms a community of communication. In addition, this offers an opportunity for learning because a member of the community can respond and walk the person through in a step by step tutrial. Other examples may include youtube and facebook. You can search "how to..." whatever in youtube and someone out in cyber space has created a video tutorial on how to do that particular task.