Our forum as a community of practice
I would say our new media cultures forum is a community of practice as we all our interested and want to learn about the same things and are aiming for the same goals. We all have a similar level of understanding and help one another along by giving advice and commenting on one anothers blogs when we have posted certain information and tasks each week. We are learning each week by reading books and researching and doing tasks to help us learn as we all want to achieve high grades in order to be successful. We all started as new comers and were on an equal level. We hadn't really had much experience on submitting our work on blogs before. However with in the group there would be people who had more background experience posting on blogs and forums as they may have used them before for personal interests besides work.
Like Wenger says in a community of practice there is no strict rules to follow and nobody really acts as the 'boss' its less informal unlike and organisational unit. In our community we don't have particular rules and somebody to report to. Although we do have tutors who are there to guide us and give us advice when needed. So we do have the hierarchy and a kind of power structure where the tutors who are the experts and have the knowlege are at the top and we as the pupils are lower as we are slowly learning.
We don't have srict rules for work we have to do. We are encouraged and told what things we should be learning and the kind of things that we are expected to do. It is then up to us how we but out ideas and learning experiences forward to be marked.
Now we are about six weeks into the topic there will be a bit of a power structure between us as students as some will have learnt more and completed more tasks in those weeks than others as some people have fallen behind so you could say they were even lower in the hierarchy.
What do other people think do you agree that this is why we have become a community of practice?
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3 comments:
yeah i think that looking at the blogs, it's easy to see evryone is at different levels and stages, not only with how may posts/tasks they've done, but how they're thinking about things. At the start we basically all just did the tasks but now we are all starting to think about it in our own way and asking questions to encourage discussion and debate.
I guess the hierachy between people who have posted loads and people who haven't is eviden, but some people who have posted very little have included some really good posts and have managed to create discussion so that disturbs the hierachy if their content is more useful/insightful than people with loads of posts
Helen,
Yes, I think your summary of the course, would seem to fit into this, as well as the various backgrounds/experience that students may have come to the course with.
Would you say perhaps that the 'Rules of Engagement' act as some guidelines to be adhering to?
I think Alyson's comment relates to 'quality not quantity.'
All the best
Emma
Yes I also agree with this. Some really long, wordy posts are not of the same quality as some people who are able to post short and sweet comments just getting straight to the point.
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