Communities of Practice Are Groups of People Who Share Information, Insight, Experience

PCD in CoP 4

Running head: PERFORMANCE-CENTERED DESIGN IN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

Performance-centered Design in Educational Communities of Practice

Honorah (Noanie) Sullivan, Fawzia Rashid, Robert Vaughan, and

Nantana Wongtanasirikul

George Mason University

ABSTRACT

Situated or distributed cognition, underlying an online educational community of practice (CoP), informs the design of an appropriate portal through which participants can share and augment learning from different perspectives in a community of practice when the performance zone is taken into consideration. The portal for an online educational CoP for the instructional technology, design and development field of practice should exemplify the best practices in performance-centered design. Participants should be immersed in a design that provides a single point of entry so that the participants maintain the work context, be it discussion thread, reflections, online reading assignments, subgroup project space, and/or syllabi requirements. The navigation interface should reflect the natural flow of work and embed the artifacts with appropriate knowledge representation and consistency. A well-designed portal will decrease cognitive load and redundancy across the curricula while, concomitantly, increasing efficiency with just enough information, just in time for personae, with a diversity of preferences, interests, values, and skills, to complete a task.
Performance-centered Design in Online Communities of Practice

This paper will describe the paradigm of a community of practice, its theoretical underpinning, and the application of performance-centered design to an online educational community of practice.

Communities of Practice

Communities of practice are groups of people who share information, insight, experience, and tools about an area of common interest. A community’s focus could be on a professional discipline, a skill or a topic. Participants “interact, learn together, build relationships, and in the process develop a sense of belonging and mutual commitment” (Wenger, et. al., 2002, p. 34). There are three key elements in a community of practice: domain, community, and practice.

The domain refers to the context or field of learning. In a community of practice, participants share knowledge on topics and issues, offer leading edge discussion, and work toward the best practices in the domain. So domain in a community of practice is context specific. As an example, the GMU immersion program has as its context, instructional technology, design and development. In pursuing this field, students share knowledge of the theoretical underpinnings from learning theory to instructional strategies, the best practices in performance-centered design (PCD), and authentic experiences in the actual design and development of online instructional design and development projects. Yet, however key the domain or context may be, a community of practice requires the elements of “community” and the “practice” for its viability.

The “community” element requires roles for participants beginning with legitimate peripheral participation and leading to opportunities of expert status. Dynamically, the community meets regularly and offers activities to generate energy and develop trust. The community recognizes that “learning is a matter of belonging as well as an intellectual process” (Wenger, et. al., 2002, p. 29). The “practice” element in a community of practice speaks to a basic body of knowledge and processes that create a common foundation as the knowledge repository builds. As an example, practice is visible in the GMU immersion program through prototype products and discussion threads on best practices, as well as reified artifacts and processes related to team norms, roles and responsibilities.

To fully appreciate the elements of a community of practice, one must understand that there are three dimensions to the relationship between community and practice. Wenger (1998) defines these as mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire (p. 73). Table 1 summarizes the components of these three dimensions which are multidimensional and interactive. The interaction of two processes, participation and reification of the artifacts and processes, creates the negotiated meaning and shared history. It is an active, generative process of producing meaning that is “both dynamic and historical, contextual and unique to the community” (Wenger, 1998, p. 79). A community of practice, then, has as its theoretical underpinning, situated or distributed cognition.

Situated or Distributed Cognition Theory

“Distributed cognition treats thinking not as an action that takes place wholly inside an individual's head but rather as an activity that is distributed among the individual, other people, the physical environment, and the tools the person uses” (Winsor, 2001, p. 2). Cognitive science research on the distributed nature of cognition comes from two distinct but not independent intellectual traditions: cognitive anthropology and cognitive psychology. Figure 1 portrays the components of learning underlying distributed or situated cognition theory: practice, community, identity, and meaning. Distributed cognition, social cognition and situated cognition are all related in that knowledge is distributed across the components.

The theory of situated cognition pertains to the social and physical context in which learning takes place (Imel, 2000). According to Driscoll (2000), the individual in this social setting is an integral part of a social environment in which learning takes place though it is not the focal point (p. 156). The sciences of situated cognition also suggest that knowledge accrues in the lived practice of people interacting in the community as it pertains to the physical context and, furthermore, that learning will occur with increased participation (Driscoll, 2000, p.156-167). Clancey states that, “The theory of situated cognition…claims that every human thought is adapted to the environment, it is situated, because what people perceive, how they conceive of their activity, and what they physically do develop together” (Clancey, 1997, pp 1-2; italics in original, as cited in Driscoll, 2000, p.166). Legitimate peripheral participation is applied to the community as a process in which the learner will function.

The process by which situated cognition accounts for the way the newcomer in a community of practice develops into a full participant of the community is referred to as legitimate peripheral participation. Lave and Wenger suggest that in legitimate peripheral participation there are no illegitimate peripheral participants (Lave et. al., 1991, as cited in Driscoll, 2000, p. 164). The concept of legitimate refers to the social organizational control over resources. In this context, illegitimate peripheral participation means access to resources is denied. Finally, the newcomer and the old timer are distinguished by the notion of peripheral. In this case, the old timer is the full participant and the newcomer has limited participation (Driscoll, 2000, p.164).

Legitimate peripheral participation also exposes the changing forms of participation from a newcomer to an old timer. Wenger (1998) suggests that learning as participation is conceived on three broad levels: individuals, communities, and organizations (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p.165, as cited in Driscoll, 2000).

While individual learning refers to how the learner participates as a member in a community of practice, the community itself refines the practice of the community. At the organization level, the issue is how to sustain the interconnection of community to bring value to participation. As situated cognition lends itself to the structural foundation of a community of practice, social cognition places emphasis on the interaction of newcomers and old timers within the community.

In social cognition, the emphasis is on the interaction between learners, how it influences what is learned, and how learning takes place. Social learning theory is subsumed in the components that characterize social participation as a process of learning and of knowing. Meaning, practice, community, and identity are four components that characterize this social participation process of learning and knowing as shown in Figure 1 (Wenger, 1998, p. 5).

While meaning is how one experiences life and the world in a meaningful way, it is practice that helps sustain mutual engagement in action. Community is the social configuration and the identity creates a personal history of the participant (Wenger, 1998).

Theoretically, distributive cognition, situated cognition, and social cognition are all components of a community of practice. Together, these areas of cognitive science make a major contribution to the definition of a community of practice: "cognition is distributed among individuals … knowledge is socially constructed through collaborative efforts to achieve shared objectives in a cultural surrounding … and information is processed between individuals and the tools and artifacts provided by the culture" (Salomon, 1993, p. I, italics in original). Hence, cognitive science provides the theoretical underpinning and clearer picture of how these components and dimensions of a community of practice are mutually interdependent and multidimensional.

Online Communities of Practice

Riel and Polin (2001) share that in the corporate world, “The idea of sharing enterprise knowledge arises from the need to establish intellectual property as corporate assets, but also from an increasing recognition that “just-in-time” learning can be more effective than formal training and more cost-effective than apprenticeships” (p. 7). So how would an online community of practice benefit an educational setting and what tools might be required?

“Intellectual development is a process of negotiation of meaning in everyday practice with others (Dewey, 1916; Vygotstky, 1978, as cited in Riel et. al., 2001). Learning occurs through authentic experiences involving the active manipulation and experimentation with ideas--rather than through an accumulation of static knowledge” (Bruner, 1973; Cole, 1998; Dewey, 1916, as cited in Riel et. al., 2001). The old saying, “practice what you preach,” seems applicable for graduate students in an instructional technology program. While not all design and development projects will require an online environment for the product/project, it behooves the student to participate in an environment conforming to principles of performance-centered design in order to gain perspective on projects within the practicum and for future design and development opportunities which reflect PCD best practices. To this end, one must examine what is needed to support the community of practice online. Wenger’s (2001) research in this area supports the following:

“The most common on-line facilities that communities of practice can use include:

§ a home page to assert their existence and describe their domain and activities

§ a conversation space for on-line discussions of a variety of topics

§ a facility for floating questions to the community or a subset of the community

§ a directory of membership with some information about their areas of expertise in the domain

§ in some cases, a shared workspace for synchronous electronic collaboration, discussion, or meeting

§ a document repository for their knowledge base

§ a search engine good enough for them to retrieve things they need from their knowledge base

§ community management tools, mostly for the coordinator but sometimes also for the community at large, including the ability to know who is participating actively, which documents are downloaded, how much traffic there is, which documents need updating, etc.

§ the ability to spawn subcommunities, subgroups, and project teams” (p. 5).

Fundamental to a community of practice is the ability to communicate and share knowledge. “The community of practice is largely about learning as the transformation of identity within the practice, e.g., novices becoming more expert. And, because it is focused on a ‘real world’ practice, the community of practice situates knowledge in the context of its use in practice.” (Riel et. al., 2001, section: The Social Context of Learning). Therefore certain tools have been found to be useful to facilitate that communication in order to build knowledge and group participation in a meaningful way. A number of the major communities of practice within the educational field, for example, PBS TeacherLine, Harvard’s Education with New Technologies, and SRI’s Tapped In, distinguish their online professional development communities of practice with features that conform to structures defined by Riel and Polin (2001) as: membership structures, outcomes of work, participation structures, and cultural mechanisms.

Membership structures include directories and participant profiles at all levels of expertise from novice to expert. Membership shares access to experts through participation in activities, discussions, and mentoring. Inherent in this membership structure is the understanding that one’s status will grow through active participation and sharing. The outcomes of work are directed toward the best practices in the field, not necessarily building a knowledge repository. Reification of the tools, processes, documents, and products results from the commitment to develop the understanding of practices in the field. The participation structure is supported through a shared history of artifacts that is understood to continually evolve in the practice as new members contribute differing perspectives in addition to the interplay of cultural mechanisms that reach outside the boundary of the community for new input from other communities either in face-to-face or online environments in forums such as webinars, synchronous discussion boards, or videoconferencing (Riel et. al., 2001).

Wenger (2001) identifies elements of a community of practice which technology can affect: time and space, participation opportunities and contexts, value creation, connections to the world, both personal and communal identity, community membership internally and externally, and community development. Furthermore, he offers a plethora of suggestions on current technology products to support the principles of these elements depending on the type of practice one is considering. Yet, specifying those tools would be a premature.

Application of Performance-centered Design

First, one must identify the elements of good performance-centered design; that is to say, matching the tasks and the diverse personae with just enough information, just in time. Rose and Meyer (2002) share, “The strategic components of everyday tasks serve to illustrate the centrality of strategy for cognition and learning, even a simple action like searching a picture involves a multi-step strategic process: Identify a goal; Design a suitable plan; Execute the plan; Self-monitor; Correct or adjust actions” (Chapter 2, section: Strategic Networks). How, then, do we apply performance-centered design to a graduate school instructional technology, design and development community of practice? In order to reach the “performance zone” to demonstrate an understanding the best practices in the field, what are the tasks of these immersion students, who are the personae, and what online tools do they need and when?

Gloria Gery (1995) delineates twenty-one elements that make a good performance-centered system. Yet not all of these elements will be present simultaneously. The designer’s goal for a performance-centered system is to integrate as much as 80% of the required performance support as intrinsic support with plus or minus 10% each in the extrinsic and external categories. Attributes that pertain to an educational community of practice include: establishes and maintains a work context; structures the work process; reflects the natural flow of work; the site contains embedded knowledge in the interface; and support resources. These attributes mentioned above will help create Wenger’s ideal model of an online educational community of practice.