Workshop Details: Communities of Practice in Highly Computerized Settings
Communities of Practice in Highly Computerized Settings
Organizers
Aditya Johri, Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA
Volker Wulf, University of Siegen and Fraunhofer FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany
Description/Objectives of Workshop
The term Communities of Practice (CoP) (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) has attracted strong attention during the last decade, even though the concept itself is quite old (Wenger, 1998). Wenger defines the term as, “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” It has been cited extensively and hundreds of papers have been written based on the idea of a community of practice. The term and concept of CoP has especially been successful in organization science literature and has been used to look at learning, knowledge sharing, and innovation.
In the past decade the information and communication terrain has changed considerably with new technologies being introduced in the workplace, educational settings, and life in general. The current environment for organizations is characterized by high uncertainty and reliance on technology. Localized work arrangements are giving way to geographically distributed work and these arrangements rely increasingly on technology. In addition, even within a particular setting the use of technologies is increasing giving way to new ways of working. Such structures require increased knowledge sharing and expertise sharing, and rely on continuous innovation. In this scenario, what are the lessons from CoP on how workers should relate to one another and what happens to “community?” How do workers manage the changing practices? We believe this is an apt time to re-examine the concept of CoP in light of current changes in the nature of interaction within organizational settings. Although it is now becoming clear that information and communication technologies (ICT) have considerably changed how people work and learn, there is limited research that specifically examines the role of ICTs in a CoP.
In this workshop we want to focus on “highly computerized” settings, broadly conceived. We want to examine settings that are engaged in “knowledge work” as well as settings that use technology for purely social and communicative aspects. By computerization we mean settings that use any or all kinds of devices for different purposes. This workshop serves the dual purpose of reassessing the work on CoP in light of the recent technological changes as well as looking at the role of the concept of CoP on how we can design better technologies. Through this workshop we hope to identify fruitful areas for future work on CoP. We also want to explore new conceptions that are emerging such as “network of practices.” We are especially interested in technology structures, and often re-structures, practices within a community.
We welcome and encourage contribution from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives and strongly encourage submissions form underrepresented theoretical or methodological viewpoints. We invite participation from researchers working on “social software” and related topics with application towards facilitating communities of practice. We welcome participation from researchers as well as practitioners and are open to both conceptual/theory-building as well as empirical papers. Given the format of the workshop participants are encouraged to bring position papers and work-in-progress, especially if they have data, to go over with other participants in the workshop. Although our focus here is on work, we welcome contributions from participants whose work is in the area of educational settings. We define work broadly to include both profit and non-profit settings. The workshop will have a maximum of 25 participants.
Organization
Full day workshop
Short introduction: objectives of the workshop
Sessions: case studies, comparison of case studies, implications for technical support
Conclusive section: wrap up
Submission details
Position papers should contain a brief overview (max. 5000 words) of key ideas of the presentation and some information on the background of the submitter. Position papers should be sent to: ajohri@stanford.edu. Position paper submission: April 30th, 2007. Notification of acceptance: May 18th, 2007.
Publication of results
We plan to publish selected contributions to the workshop in a special issue of a reputed international journal or as an edited book.
Background of Organizers
Aditya Johri is a doctoral candidate in Learning Sciences and Technology Design at the School of Education, Stanford University. His current work examines worker participation within technology pervasive organizations. In his dissertation he examined how coworkers working across geographic locations form impressions of each other and how this influences knowledge and expertise sharing among them. His research interests lie in the area of Learning Sciences, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Learning, Human-Computer Interaction and Distributed Work. He holds an M.S. from Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.E. from the Delhi College of Engineering.
Volker Wulf is Professor of Information Systems at the University of Siegen and a senior researcher at Fraunhofer Institute of Applied Information Technology (FhG-FIT). In addition, he heads the International Institute for Socio-Informatics (IISI), Bonn. He studied computer science and business administration at the RWTH Aachen and the University of Paris VI, got a PhD at the University of Dortmund and a Habilitation Degree in computer science at the University of Hamburg. Currently, he is on sabbatical at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Stanford University, Palo Alto. He has published more than 170 papers and 9 books. His research interests lie primarily in the areas of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Information Systems, Human Computer Interaction, Participatory Design, Computer Supported Cooperative Learning, Knowledge Management, and Organizational Computing.
