5016 community
From Studyplace
[edit] In what ways might a newborn be considered a "legitimate" participant? To what set of relationships?
[edit] Can a set of cars (drivers) be considered a "community of practice"?
Lave & Wenger’s ideal typical invocation of a “community of practice” is “a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice” (98). Drivers on a road in NewYork are certainly engaged in learning practice. There are (patterned) behaviors learned by newcomers, instructed by oldtimers, as they form brief educative relations, as per Varenne’s honking example last week. The road is a space for overlapping communities of practice, although I am unsure of what would constitute the developmental cycle in this case.
This particular example concerns the possibility of technology-mediated communities of practice. In addition to Lave & Wenger’s point regarding the necessary (in)visibility of mediating technologies for their effective use (103), they suggest “understanding the technology of practice is more than learning to use tools; it is a way to connect with the history of the practice and to participate more directly in cultural life (101).” Although Lave& Wenger certainly were not referencing internet-mediated social networking in 1991 (ie via web 2.0 technologies), I wonder in what circumstances it makes sense to speak of online communities of practice. I am thinking of both those activities extending face-to-face interactions (email, classweb, StudyPlace, Facebook) and those spheres in which all interaction occurs online (i.e. multi-national corporate employees mediating ALL interaction via communication technologies). Ri Wade
Lave & Wenger's theory encompassing the concepts of "community of practice", "situated learning", and "legitimate peripheral participation" (LPP) support the assertion that a set of cars can be considered a "community of practice". The cognitive requirement of driving entails learning, production, and reproduction of a set of norms and rules. As Lave and Wenger argue, learning does not primarily take place as a result of instruction, it is rather a negotiated sphere with a situated necessity to act alongside experts who can impart the know-how. During this practice there is a verbal and non-verbal dialect which functions as communication the participants, in this case, cars. When I lived in Ecuador, I said many times that there was a distinguishable and understood vocabulary of different honks. Here in New York one can see a lesser developed vocabulary. Drivers exhibit problem solving when confronted with new stimuli, such as a traffic-jam. Furthermore, there is an element of apprenticeship as less experienced drivers learn from seasoned drivers (taxis). Lave and Wenger emphasize that their theory of LPP is an analytical paradigm best used to understand learning, and in this sense, one can analyze car behavior and driver learning according to the categories that Lave and Wenger propose.
Stephen Tippett
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