Workshops
Communities of Practice in Highly Computerized Work Settings
Organizers
Aditya Johri, Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA (ajohri AT stanford.edu)
Volker Wulf, University of Siegen and Fraunhofer FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany (volker.wulf AT fit.fraunhofer.de)
Workshop URL: http://techcop.blogspot.com
Summary
The aim of this workshop is to re-examine the concept of 'communities of practice' keeping in light the recent advances in information and communication technologies. Through this workshop we want to discuss how the nature of work as well as the nature of communities has changed through technology and what this means for developing and sustaining communities of practice. Moreover, given the physically distributed nature of workplace, and increase in virtual teams and virtual work, how useful still is the concept of CoP?
Objectives of Workshop
The concept of Communities of Practice (CoP) (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) has attracted strong attention during the last decade. It has been cited extensively and hundreds of papers have been written based on the idea of CoP. It is an apt time to re-examine this concept especially in the light of current changes in the nature of interaction within work settings. In this workshop we want to focus on complex and highly computerized work settings.
In the past decade the information and communication terrain has changed considerably with increasingly new technologies being introduced in the workplace, educational settings, and life in general. In addition to changing the nature of communication within organizations, technology has also changed the nature of work that takes place. Although it has been asserted that ICTs have changed how people work and learn there is little work that specifically examines the role ICTs play in a CoP. 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.
Participants will be solicited through several mailing lists (such as ACM, International Society of Learning Sciences and AoM). In addition, specific researchers who publish and/or have published on this topic will be contacted to participate in the workshop. We will also encourage participation from researchers working on "social software" and related topics with application towards facilitating communities of practice. 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 AT stanford.edu. Position paper submissions: April 30, 2007. Notification of acceptance: May 18. [note: these are new dates] Please visit our workshop Web site for more information
Publication of results
We plan to publish selected contributions to the workshop in the special issue of an international journal.
Background of Organizers
Aditya Johri is a doctoral candidate in the Learning Sciences and Technology Design program at Stanford University. His current work examines newcomer participation within technology pervasive organizations. For his dissertation he looked at how co-workers 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 Learning, Human-Computer Interaction and Distributed Work.
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). Moreover, 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. Right now he spends a sabbatical at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Stanford University, Palo Alto. He 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.
References
Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York. Cambridge University Press
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.