Learning communities on the Internet

Philippo Dal Fiore an E-learning and Knowledge Economy Researcher from the Cà Foscari University of Venice roughly presented his researches on learning communities at the weekly TECFA’s Brown Bag Seminar. He stayed at a very abstract level and did not go into practical details (a bit frustrating for somebody with an applied sciences background like me). Still, he mentioned some points I found interesting enough to write down.

He showed a social visualization of online interaction schema for online discussion forum. It represents interaction based on the emotion (friendly vs. angry) or the tone (serious vs. informal). I thought if would be interesting to have some sort of automated tool that generates the schemas (it is manually done right now).

He described 2 different design of community of practices. Community vs Network. Communities are homogeneous, centralized, good to focus on one issue and conservative. Networks empower differentiation, self diciosivity, decentralization, diversification of interests and bring more innovation. Is an Internet Portal a basic community while a group of common interest weblogs are a network?

He presented the example of an international company which integrates communities as part of its organization to promote knowledge management. It has communities of interest that can be joined with no special level of expertise. Communication is done via online forums, newsletters and mailing-lists. More centralized in the company organization are communities of practices where expertise and contributions are expected. Contributions must be reusable and it the the place to share practical knowledge.

Other miscellaneous points: Communities are very cultural dependant. Most companies do not know the knowledge they posses. The Internet is a help to visualize them and make them accessible.

Irrelevant note: Narguilé is cool