Online Communities of Practice and Web 2.0

In contemporary Knowledge Management, communication and collaboration play very significant role. Knowledge exists within the stakeholders of an organization. Such knowledge, when extracted and harnessed effectively, can become an extremely valuable asset to achieve organizational goals and objectives. This knowledge, embedded in the people, must be properly released through an appropriate channel to make it usable. Through dialogue and discussions, using online tools, this release and reuses of knowledge can be made possible. The Community of Practice (CoP) is a useful organizing concept for enhancing collaboration, sharing knowledge, and disseminating best practices among researchers and practitioners. This chapter explores the concept of Communities of Practice and how Web 2.0 technologies can facilitate the transformation from a conventional community of practice to online community of practice for better and effective online communities of practices.

Electronic Research Collaboration via Access Grid

Recent technological advances are providing new and exciting opportunities for researchers to work together across the conventional boundaries of time, distance, and discipline. These advances have formed new networks of research, both in electronic mediums and in face-to-face environments, different from traditional networks in terms of their changing nature and scope. This paper reports some of the preliminary findings from a qualitative case study of the establishment of the ‘EMT project'. It attempts to illustrate how the EMT project as a connected network formulates positive academic interactions and consequently facilitates professional learning immersed in research activities. In parallel, the study examines the benefits and problems arising from the sense of being together across time and space supported by advanced networked technologies in collaborative research, and further identifies the gap between the academic and the technical perspective in research.

E-Collaborative Learning (e-CL)

This chapter investigates the highly researched and debated key issue of electronic collaboration (e-collaboration) in the learning process, onwards called e-collaborative learning (e-CL), in a holistic overview. The structure of the chapter is as follows. First of all, it clarifies the meaning and context of e-CL, and compares it with analysed relevant notions. Second, the human elements of e-CL and their roles are explored, classified into functional categories. Third, the supportive elements technology, pedagogy, and methodology are extensively visited. Fourth, the framework elements time, space, and society are presented. Fifth, the e-CL process is analysed, following the ADDIE model and analysing its phases. Sixth, significant affordances and challenges of e-CL are identified, and seventh, future directions are considered. Finally, conclusions are reached. Throughout the chapter new approaches, methods, and terms are proposed in the interests of the enrichment or the effectiveness of e-CL.

Integration of Web 2.0 Tools for Non-Formal Learning Practices

This research tries to explore the specific benefits of online collaboration tools, and finds out how their use has been appropriated by employee volunteers for their practice of volunteering and how they influenced the process of their meaning-making. By doing so, it raised an awareness of the digital tools that provide collections of traits through which individuals can get involved in non-formal learning practices by having digital interactions with others.

Role Negotiation in Collaborative Projects

The nature of the traditional approaches to collaborative group projects can often be characterized by hierarchy, clarity of roles, and assignment of tasks to participants. Digital-age collaborative projects are often characterized by impromptu and ill-defined organization, spontaneity, democratic decision-making, and continual morphing of roles. These two approaches are grounded in fundamentally different cultural frameworks. This chapter describes and analyzes an innovative collaborative process of role description, negotiation, adoption, and ongoing evolution through routine metacognitive processes which provides a structure by which to integrate positive aspects of traditional hierarchical approaches to collaborative projects and positive aspects of digital-age communication culture. This role negotiation process can clarify responsibilities and processes while nurturing the sense of personal agency and self-determination crucial to intrinsic motivation and engagement.

Exploring the Barriers to Electronic Collaboration

This investigation reviews research literature on electronic collaboration (e-collaboration) with a view to collate relevant information to support e-collaboration knowledgebase, further research and encourage further collaborative engagements. E-collaboration has been described with various phrases such as information sharing, information exchange, knowledge sharing, social networking and joint working. This research categorised the challenges of e-collaboration into people, process and technology because all the issues identified in e-collaboration research are rooted in one of these categories. As e-collaboration is a source of competitiveness, businesses that fail to strategically adopt the phenomenon could lose out. A notable example of e-collaboration is crowdfunding which provides funding for start-up and small businesses. However, businesses that support e-collaboration strategy have the potential to have better competitive advantage with increased firm performance.

Emerging Forms of Collaboration

The chapter will outline the implications of two projects, namely the ‘Phi Books' (2008) and the ‘Digital Dreamhacker' (2011). These novel projects serve here as case studies for investigating new and challenging ways of advancing collaborative technologies, using in particular, Communities of Practice and insights gained from both embodiment and graph theory (social network analysis) as well as design. Both projects were developed collaboratively, between a computer programmer and a designer and a wider community of practice, consisting of other artists, writers, technologists and designers. The two systems that resulted also acted as methodologies, instigated by the authors with a view to facilitate, explore and comment on the act of collaboration. Both projects are multi-disciplinary, spanning ideas and techniques from mathematics and art, design and computer programming. The projects deploy custom-made software and fiction enmeshed structures, drawing upon methodologies that are embedded with dreams and stories while at the same time being informed by cutting-edge research into human behaviour and interaction design. The chapter will investigate how the projects deployed techniques and theoretical insights from social network analysis as well as motion capture technology and the wider concept of a Community of Practice, to extend and augment existing collaborative methods. The chapter draws upon Wenger et al (2002), as well as Siemens (2014) and Borgatti et al (2009), and will explore the idea of a new form of collective social and technological collaborative grammar, deploying gesture as well as Social Network Analysis. Moreover, the featured projects provide insights into the ways in which digital technology is changing society, and in turn, the important ways in which technology is embedded with the cultural and economic prerogatives of increasingly globalized cultures.

The Impact of Social Networking Sites on the Arab Community

Social media or social networking tools are Internet-based applications that focus on building social networks or social relations among people with shared interests and/or activities. Social media sites essentially consist of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Social networking sites fuss and was impressed by the community as a result of submissions from the ease and facilitated communication between people, and widened its fame and many use became their top concern, where communicating through these sites to get to know each other, and find out news each other, and receive news and themes and all that is new in the arena. However, since these sites and programs are open, there are no controls commensurate with our religion and our values and our habits of Arab and fixed principles, which impact on the lives of people in general, whether positively or negatively.

The Scholarship of Engagement and Generative Learning Communities

The Regional English language learning (ELL) project in the American Spaces Philippines was established at the US Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) in the fiscal year 2013 as a response to a study which showed the modest state of English language teaching and learning in the country. The project, a cooperation between English as a Foreign Language (EFL) educators and administrators at partner schools, universities, and American spaces in the archipelago counterparts and funded by the US Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP), was aimed at assisting with the production of more and better-qualified English as a Foreign Language (EFL) educators and administrators.

e-Research, a way of Learning Together?

The aim of this chapter is to compare the two worlds of science and learning in the perspective to find commonalties that could be used to develop new methods and technologies to better support collaborative and on-line scientific research. In this perspective we claim the existence of a convergence of these two domains and highlight similarities in on-line tools that support such activities. At the same time, we bring attention to the fact that a largely overlooked aspect of existing on-line scientific collaborative research systems, which is instead well represented in learning systems, is communication among partners. To address this issue we build a collaborative on-line software tool that allows to make some interesting early observations. Further on, we report on the introduction of a discourse structuring facility that could be used, on one hand, to ease the use of communication tools and on the other as a boundary object: an artifact that allows to bridge different paradigms and backgrounds.