[David J Skyrme]'s piece on Knowledge Flows (Knowledge Management) includes a section called "Communities Don't Practice", a play on the term Community Of Practice. There's been some linkage/discussion. I don't think either scope is right: the Team Is The Focus.

Team vs. community? --2003/09/27 21:03 [GMT]
I wasn't sure where to comment :) I use "team" to address a group of people set to accomplish something (MissIon). With "communities of practice" it's more difficult: it's used to address a variety of things between goal-focused teams and loose networks. In fact, most of the discussion you linked to is about social vs. individual perspective for learning. From this point it doesn't really matter if we talk about a team or about a community :) --Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/

• Yes, the discussions treated it as an "individual vs group/social" choice. But my point is that it does matter whether we talk about team or community in that latter choice because the 2 are very different. The outcomes-focus of a TelIc team creates a shared ConText which makes learning much stronger, in my opinion. --Bill Seitz

Learning in team vs. community --2003/09/29 07:24 [GMT]
Agree that distinguishing between team and community is important. Not sure if learning in teams is stronger:

• People in teams have a natural drive to learn - they learn in order to get things done. But after "things are done" (e.g. a project is over) the motivation to learn from past experiences is much lower, because "new things" call for "new learning".

• Shared understanding (ConText) is stronger in teams, but it may also lead to "Group Think", while a community provides more diversity (and I believe that learning comes from recognising differences )

• "Doing" focus of teams creates another problem for learning - lack of time to stop, look back and reflect (more )

Summarising I would say that teams create better conditions for "learning while doing" (implicit learning) and learning directly related to the task, but they don't provide enough time and motivation for reflection and "learning beyond task focus" (e.g. learning more about a field to prepare for a future job). --Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/

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